I was born on October 8, 1911, at the United States Mint in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was around ten in the morning when the die cutter slammed down onto our sheet of copper creating me and a whole bunch of brothers and sisters. We were all so brand new and shiny as we hopped and skipped along the metal conveyor. My recollection of my brothers and sisters was short, however, as we were soon separated into groups of fifty and stacked tightly into tubular cardboard containers.
The very next day, thousands of us were transported to various banks up and down the east coast. While it was sad that so many of us were being separated, never to see one another again, there was also the excitement of a new beginning - of an adventure that would span nearly a century and culminate with me ending up, of all places, here.
We were awakened again on October 12, when a bank teller in Springfield, Massachusetts, smashed our container against the side of a cash drawer. We all poured out and into the slot holding others like us - others who were more mature, yet tarnished and worn with age. Some of the older ones taunted and teased, calling us the new guys and pushing us around. But they also told us fantastic stories of their lives, the places they been and things they had seen. I was fascinated with the stories and I anxiously looked forward to beginning my own journey.
All throughout the day fingers dipped into our slot, each time removing two or three more of us. Near the end of the day, the fingers dipped again and I was lifted out and placed on the counter with two of my brothers and two larger silver coins. We were all quickly scooped off the counter and slid into the pocket of an elderly gentleman.
I spent almost two years in Springfield, constantly in transit from one pocket to another, one cash drawer to the next. I even spent sixteen days in the gutter on Main Street after having been dropped unnoticed. A young boy finally spotted me. Clutching me tightly, he ran directly to a candy store where I was traded for a piece of hard candy.
I was back in circulation again. For a little over three years, I traveled from pocket to purse, change drawer to money belt. I went to Boston for a month, then to New Haven, Connecticut for almost a year. I never knew where I was going. I was constantly in transit, moving from city to city, sometimes never leaving the pocket of my owner.
In the month of August, 1916, I made my first transatlantic sea voyage. I remember being pulled out of the green wool pocket and tossed up against a steel grey wall. Many other owners were tossing their coins also, trying to see whose coin could come closest to the wall. Now I was a game piece. Some owners whispered that such a practice aboard a U.S. Naval vessel was grounds for disciplinary action, but they played on nevertheless. I changed owners twenty-seven times in just over an hour. Later that evening, many owners gathered on deck and several of us were pulled from their pockets. There was talk of wish-making - of tossing us into the sea with wishes and hopes for a safe return. I had no idea what it meant, but I watched as several of my kind were thrown overboard and into the sea. My owner held me tightly between his thumb and forefinger. "Was this it?" I thought to myself. "Would my life, my circulation, end here in the middle of the Atlantic?" Just as I was about to be tossed overboard, someone yelled, and all the owners quickly returned below decks. I was spared. My owner had made no wish.
On a September morning in 1916, I awoke to a terrible racket. Explosions and gunfire rang out all around me. The ground shook and rumbled as thick smoke poured into my owner's pocket. I didn't know it then, but I was deep in a foxhole on a battlefield in Verdun, France, during one of the fiercest battles ever fought during World War I. The fight raged for hours on end until I smelled the gas. It didn't affect me, but my owner was not so fortunate. He choked for a minute or so, then slumped down quietly, lifeless in the bottom of the hole. I felt sad and wondered whether things might have been different had he sacrificed me to the sea and wished for a safe return home.
Three days later, I was again traversing the Atlantic Ocean, this time as a portion of the contents of a manila envelope, one of several hundred all packed neatly inside wooden crates. Three weeks passed before I arrived in San Antonio, Texas. The envelope and an American flag, folded neatly in triangular form, were handed to a sobbing woman along with a sympathetic apology. I was the only one of my kind in the envelope, and when the contents were dumped onto the kitchen table, I spun wildly around for several seconds before a hand slammed down silencing me. I didn't move from that spot for three days. Then one afternoon I was picked up and carried outside. I was placed on a newly poured concrete sidewalk and carefully pressed downward until I was thoroughly imbedded with only my face showing. I would spend the next thirty years there, a small, obscure memorial to a fallen soldier.
When the water main ruptured in 1946, they had to jackhammer the sidewalk to get to the pipe. It just so happened that I was located above the water main, and soon the ground around me began to vibrate and break into pieces. One downstroke of the jackhammer sent me flying several feet into the air. Before I could land, I was struck by a passing car which hurled me a great distance. When I finally hit the asphalt, I rolled some twenty feet and struck the shoe of a young lady who picked me up and proclaimed good luck would soon come her way.
I spent the next month in a small change tray on her dresser. Coins constantly came and went, but I stayed. Then one morning, she picked me up and placed me in her pocket book. Twenty minutes later, we boarded a Greyhound bus and began a journey eastward. I soon learned the reason for her trip. She had been accepted at a college in Indiana. I was going to school.
I had thought that I would be a good luck piece she would cherish and keep forever. I was wrong. As soon as we arrived on campus, she used me in part to purchase her lunch at the cafeteria. I sat in the penny slot for a full thirty seconds before being scooped out and handed to the university's football coach. He put me in his desk drawer where I remained for eight years. Then one day the university asked him to leave - too many losing seasons, they said. I was about to travel again, or so I thought. He cleaned out his desk on his last day. I waited for him to pick me up, but he didn't. He left me there with a crumpled sugar packet and three paper clips.
The janitor came in the following day and began cleaning out the remnants left behind. He held a trash can close to the drawer and began scooping me and the garbage out. When he did, I dropped and struck the edge of the metal trash can. This caused me to roll slowly out of the office, across a hallway and into the shower area. The curious janitor followed me, watching as I continued to roll. He seemed genuinely amused. Then, suddenly, I dropped downward again, about five inches to the bottom of the shower drain. The janitor bent down and looked through the grating. He could see me there. He attempted to remove the drain cover, but it wouldn't budge. He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, then turned and walked away.
I sat in the bottom of that shower drain for twenty-three long years. It was right about that time that the university's basketball team began doing well. The money began to pour in and I would soon be free when the dilapidated shower room was refurbished. When the renovations began in 1977, the janitor, who had aged well into his sixties, walked by and saw one of the workers prying the shower drain cover off. He walked over and asked the man if there was a penny in the bottom of the drain, to which the worker replied that there was. The janitor told the man how I had rolled in there so long ago. The man smiled and handed me to the old janitor who held me and rubbed my now smoother surface, briefly reminiscing about the many years which had passed since the day I struck the trash can and rolled out of sight.
The janitor carried me around in his pocket for several weeks, taking care not to spend me. Then, one evening before a crucial basketball game, he walked into the locker room and gave me away to one of the players - a goofy looking kid with an unkempt mop of blonde hair. The old janitor told the kid that he had a feeling I was special and that I would bring him luck. The kid accepted the gift and immediately taped me to the back wall of his locker. I really never saw much of my new owner, but before every game he would reach in and place his thumb against me and close his eyes tightly for a few seconds. He must have thought I was good luck because he always took me with him to away games. I never traveled in his pocket either - always in a small pocket inside his wallet. That team went on to receive national recognition, and even though I knew I had nothing to do with it, I was enjoying the first-class attention I was getting.
After the kid's whirlwind senior year, we left Indiana and traveled east together. From what I could understand, he got an offer to play basketball for money. Suddenly I found myself in a familiar place - a place I remembered from my youth. I was back in Boston, living right downtown in a brand new locker. There I remained for several years, still a good luck piece, until the unthinkable happened. Someone else knew about me, and thought perhaps I might be good luck for him also. On a dark October evening, long after everyone had left, the locker door opened and I was removed from the back wall and slipped into a dark pocket. I left Boston that night, never to return.
That very evening, as my new owner and I traveled west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, he lost control of his car in a heavy downpour. I remember flying out of his pocket and bouncing around inside the car as it flipped and tumbled again and again, finally coming to rest in the highway's center median strip. I was okay, but my new owner had met his end.
In December of 1996, I was a portion of the contents of a Salvation Army kettle outside a shopping mall in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The constant ringing of the bell was driving me crazy, and were it not for the over abundance of conversation inside the kettle, I might have gone insane. Others were discussing a famous basketball player who retired prematurely due to back problems he was having. I knew it was him - the kid from Indiana. His career as a player was over, and I couldn't help but wonder if my disappearance had anything to do with his forced early retirement.
I was happy when the armored truck finally came around to pick us up. I would no longer have to listen to the incessant ringing of that bell. The driver held the canvas bag open as the man with the bell dumped us into the sack and attached a seal around the top of the bag. The truck made many stops that night, picking up many more canvas sacks just like the one I was in.
The following morning we were all taken to a bank where several people worked pouring us into machines that sorted us by size and counted us. We were separated from the silver coins, and again, I was stuffed tightly into a tubular cardboard container with forty-nine others like me. There I would remain for nearly three years.
Finally, on November 22, 1999, I was rudely awakened when someone smashed us against the sharp edge of a counter top, causing us to fly in all different directions. I rolled off the counter and under a magazine stand out of sight. I stayed there for four months until a monstrous fire burned the little store down, burying me under tons of charred timbers and red bricks from the walls which had collapsed inward due to the intense heat of the blaze. Right after Christmas, men came with heavy machinery and knocked down the walls that were still standing. Other machines scooped up the charred wood and bricks and loaded them into large trucks. When they were done, and all the bricks and wood had been taken away, I was still there.
Early one morning, just a week later, I awoke to the sound of a metal detector passing back and forth over me. The sound became louder and more steady and the sand around me began to move and shift. An old man picked me up and examined me. I was jet black - my surface charred by the fire that had destroyed the store. The old man grumbled and tossed me aside. I landed on a nearby sidewalk where I stayed for three days. It rained every single one of those days, often times very hard. Slowly, the rain washed away my blackened surface until once again I sparkled in the morning sunlight. As I lay there enjoying the warmth of the sun on my face, a young boy of just six years picked me up and slipped me into his pocket.
We went into a building and climbed the 8 flights of stairs leading to the small apartment where he and his family lived. His brothers and sisters gathered around as he excitedly showed them what he had found. The younger children were fascinated, but the older ones told him I wasn't worth anything - that I was only a penny. He took me to the kitchen where his mother was cooking soup and slicing bread for supper. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and examined me closely. She smiled at him and said I was very nice and that he was lucky to have found me.
Later that evening, the young boy showed me to his uncle who was a collector of coins. He examined me more closely than anyone ever had. He told his young nephew that I was very old, but that there was also something spectacular about me. He asked the boy if he could keep me and study me some more. And as the seven small children were tucked tightly into their three beds, I left the small apartment with the uncle.
In all of my life, I had never realized it. I knew that I was different, but it never seemed to matter. I was always worth a penny even in light of the defect. You see, when I was born, way back in 1911, the die stamper that created me did not strike my surface correctly. In fact, I had always been missing a quarter of my face. The curved line from the edge of the die stamp had sliced across my surface, leaving me far more unusual than all others whom I had met throughout my life.
The last I heard, the large family that lived in the small apartment on the eighth floor of that tenement building moved out of there shortly after I was sold. They bought a brand new house with lots of rooms and beds for everyone, and when they eat soup now it's because they want to, not because they must.
As for me, I have a new and permanent home at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. They keep me in a glass case with other valuable coins and they guard me very closely. After all, if you had a penny worth a quarter of a million dollars, wouldn't you keep a close eye on it?