As we have heard, there are many changes that are to come in the near future. Some will impact us greatly as the tide swirls around health care, social security, war, and ICE. But almost unnoticed was the decision to stop minting the American penny. The US penny was first minted in 1787. Other nations have had the penny as the lowest denomination of their currency for centuries .

In 1909 the first penny with Abraham Lincoln on it was first minted. That means he has lasted 115 years so far. Not a bad stint. But let’s go backward a bit with the word penny. It was around in England in the 15th century. In fact, one of the earliest uses of the word penny in a phrase was one by Sir Thomas More in 1522 when he first came up with the phrase “A Penny for your Thoughts.”

By today’s standards the person making the offer to you doesn’t think your thoughts are very valuable. Back then, it had some real value. The penny was compared to the British pound in another ancient phrase “Penny wise and Pound foolish.” Maybe that should apply to one’s bets at a casino.

As a young child, I had three things that I found most valuable. One was baseball cards which I have written about before. Another was electric trains. I received a Lionel electric train on my fifth Christmas. I spent hours and hours assembling the tracks with curves and straights, side rails, and stations. I hoarded those cars and tracks for years and finally shared them with two grandsons a few years back. I know the Lionel has some real value today, but I love to keep things in the family.

My third passion was collecting pennies. Somewhere along my early years, I was given two cardboard folders. Inside were slots only a penny could fit in. And printed above each slot was a year and a letter that denoted the American city where the penny was minted. The most common initials are “D” for Denver, “P” for Philadelphia, and “S” for San Francisco. But if you are a collector, you can find some minted in Carson City, Nevada, and even West Point, New York.

I had a rather unique advantage as a youngster. My grandparents ran a restaurant and bus station downtown Kankakee on North Schuyler Avenue. There were no credit cards and all the food and tickets were done in cash. On many occasions, I was allowed to look in the tills and carefully search the penny slot looking for one that was missing from the slots in my folders. It was a godsend. At the end of the day, extra change was placed into the various paper tubes for each kind of coin. The penny tube should contain 50 cents and all were taken to the bank along with the other, more valuable, tubes as well as bills. I remember rolling pennies with my grandmother but lacked the coordination to do a great job, so I was the designated counter and stacker. When the multiple rolls were done, Grandma then compared the length of each roll to make sure that the bank would not reject any for being short.

I found many duplicates over those years, and my slots were getting filled. My favorite slots were not rare ones, but those minted in 1943, the year of my birth. For many, you will remember, this was in the middle of WWII and the war efforts needed copper for artillery, the base metal of the penny. That one year, the various minting plants could only use steel for pennies. They were shiny at first but eventually rusted and became a dark metallic coin, so unlike the shiny pennies

As I have aged, with the slots full of pennies, I moved on to quarters now with one honoring every state. I got my own folder and did well in filling it. I read where a few of the state quarters were improperly minted and if you could find one, it was quite valuable in the coin market. I enjoy playing poker one Thursday night a month with some of my fellow neighbors, but the base coin to bet is the quarter with perhaps a bump or two during play. So now I have rolls of quarters that I carry to the game. Some nights I come home with empty wrappers, but some nights, I bring home loose ones and get to wrap them. My dexterity is much better than with those early pennies. Another difference is that the $.50 penny tubes are $10 in the quarter tubes.

I can see that pennies have become a bit of a pain with their minimal value and that it costs more than a penny to produce one. With the use of credit cards, the need for change is becoming much less. But if you are going to play poker, that is one place you don’t use credit cards.

Back then, there were no counting machines that would let a bank know how many coins were being deposited, be it pennies, nickels, dimes, or quarters. But now, if you go to Jewel grocery stores, they have machine that accepts all coins and gives you a receipt that can be turned into larger currency. I took a very heavy bag of pennies there last week and carefully fed them into the machine. There is a 10% charge and I walked out with $12 after a charge of $1.20. Not a lot of money, but that was 1320 pennies! Probably worth the $1.20 not having to wrap them all.

· Dennis Marek can be contacted at llamalaw23@gmail.com.