The worst thing I ever bought with a penny was a 1¢ plug of chewing tobacco.
I was 10 years old and shopping the candy racks at the Minit Market in Ocean City. I didn’t have the dime needed for my go-to — that trapezoid perfection of chocolate, raisins and nuts named Chunky, the object of my crewcut boy’s greed.
But there, in a box on the same shelf, was a friendly yellow cellophane square, its cheeky “1¢" circled in red, winking at me alluringly.
I could buy two and still have two cents and a nickel in my pocket, a foundation for buying a delayed chocolate chunk of bliss!
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This was the first thing I thought of Thursday after reading the sad news that the Treasury Department will finally kill America’s humblest of coins.
The department placed its final order for blank pennies this month and expects to stop putting new pennies into circulation by early 2026.
William Butler Yeats was the second thing that crossed my mind.
I whispered, ‘I am too young,’
And then, ‘I am old enough,’
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Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.’
Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.’
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
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I am looped in the loops of her hair.
Soon, the penny of poem and prose will vanish forever into the sock drawer of American history.
There is no penny candy. The penny saved on the price of gas is an illusion, a cheat code for nine-tenths of a cent more.
A penny for your thoughts will get you nothing. Penny loafers are so passé. JCPenney was never a girl named Penny anyway.
I’ve never actually heard a penny whistle, or at least no one ever turned to me and said, “Hey Rick, check out that badass penny whistle solo.”
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The explanation for this unsurprising change is cost. It now takes 3.69 cents to make a penny, an amalgam of cheap metals considered copper in color only. Stopping production will lead to immediate annual savings of $56 million.
Find a penny, pick it up, all day you’ll have good luck. No more.
Stores will round their prices to the nearest five-cent piece. Most likely up.
Sayings about nickels are less sweet. A wooden nickel is worthless. “I’d kill you for a nickel,” says you’re greedy, or maybe violent. Or both.
A dime isn’t much better; together they’ll nickel and dime us to death.
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My best pennies cost 25 cents to make.
Children are an exercise in finding new ways to spend money, and the number of penny-squashing machines in the universe peaks around the time they are 7 to 10.
“Daddy, Daddy, look!” is an invitation to empty your pockets for something meaningless and priceless at once.
A quarter plunked into a glass-front contraption that rolls Abe Lincoln through a pressing series of twists and turns, transforming his circle to an oval like so much taffy is a quarter well spent.
Where are those pennies today? Surely I didn’t throw them away?
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I asked some colleagues on Friday, “What was the best and worst thing you ever bought for a penny?”
Barney Kirby must have lived on a wilder shore of childhood than mine. “As a kid, the joy of placing a penny on a train rail to have it flattened under a passing train, then having it as a keepsake.”
Who lets their kids play with a moving train? Barney survived long enough to send me his memory, so who am I to judge?
In for a penny, in for a pound. That costs a pretty penny. Not a penny less, nor a penny more.
A penny saved is a penny earned. Penny dreadfuls. Pennies from heaven.
If it’s a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents’ worth, then someone, somewhere, just made a penny.
Oh, the penny press! Mass-printed tabloids at the dawn of the modern American news media, they gave rise to the yellow press and the mainstream media and now the long, slow demise of newspapers.
Lincoln, our greatest president and a different kind of Republican than the current breed, was the first person on an American coin.
Teddy Roosevelt made it happen in 1909, a celebration of the Great Emancipator’s birth a century earlier. A fitting tribute, a pocket reminder of the toll of greatness.
Oh, what a bright penny you are. Oh, he‘s a bad penny. Oh, penny pinching. Penny ante. The penny drops. There have been days when I didn’t have two pennies to rub together.
What do we lose with the demise of the penny? Not much and everything.
Oscar, the man behind the counter at the Minit Market, watched me buy those two penny chews without saying a word. I wonder if he saw what happened next.
I walked outside and delighted at the tiny crackle of plastic origami wrap unfolding from my square of desire.
The taste of that 1¢ plug of tobacco was fire.
It burned my lips, my tongue, my throat so deeply that I spit, spit and retched to get it out, out, out. Even now,more than half a century later, the memory brings on a vomit warning flood of saliva.
The Minit Market is still there, a convenience store that was once a grocery-sweet shop-butcher shop-supplier-of-all-manna in the deserted winters of my Ocean City youth.
Maybe that day taught me the value of a penny. Maybe it’s why I never smoked. I don’t know.
But I know that Yeats was right about how far a penny can take you.
There is nobody wise enough, to find out all that is in it.
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