Big news! I received a 1923-S penny in change today:
This penny is 99 years old. But why did I notice it?
Well, several years ago I embarked on an experiment: How long would it take me to fill up a 1959-2018¹ penny book using only pennies received in change? The answer remains indeterminate because I still have two empty spots left (1961 and 1968-S)² and have made no progress over the past year.³ At this point, I think that it might well take decades.
Anyway, the point of all this is that to complete the experiment I have to examine every penny I get from cashiers. That's how I noticed this one. It is, I think, the oldest penny I've ever received in change.
¹Of course, now it's a 1959-2022 penny book. But the recent pennies are obviously not a problem.
²Not counting the stupid 2009 Lincoln anniversary pennies, of which there are eight. I have five of them.
³I was so close a few weeks ago to getting the 1968 penny. But it was just my fading near vision fooling me. It was a 1968-D.
That 1968-D could be worth some money--if it's high quality...
Back in my coin collecting days circa 1970 “S” pennies were tough to find. And ones as old as 1923 even tougher.
I clearly remember getting rolled coins at the bank and searching for silver. I also remember once getting rolls of dimes that were half silver including quite a few Mercury dimes.
The oldest penny I ever found in change was 1915. Of course that was in 1966, so 1923 is far more impressive.
The oldest coin I ever found in change was an incredibly worn liberty head nickel from 1900.
Still have these all in a box somewhere.
I received a 1909 in change about 3 years ago. I checked it because it was heavily worn and had the wheat stalk reverse. That was the first year the Lincoln cent was produced. Unfortunately, it was not a 1909 S VDB, of which less than a half million were made.
I presume it was from a stolen coin collection.
Might have just been lost down in someone's sofa all this time, or laying in a park, or in a submerged shipwreck guarded by a homicidal octopus until retrieved by a guy-of-adventure who was looking for evidence of a secret Nazi moonbase that might be hidden in a lost Atlantean archive underneath the octopus, who has read it all, all of it.
We cannot imagine the things that coin has seen.
I knew a guy that collected pennies. He had rolls and rolls of them.
He'd buy rolls from the bank, open them up and examine each penny...always looking to upgrade to a better condition coin as well as fill any holes (I"m not sure he had any holes, he had at least one roll for every year.) He'd reroll them and take them back to the bank.
Finding a worthwhile penny was getting to be a rare event. A couple of times that I took a trip, I stopped at a bank and bought ten or twenty dollars worth on the off chance that the mix might be different. It wasn't. But he sure loved the effort.
Somewhere I have a roll of pennies he gave me. Maybe my great great great grandchildren will profit. Ha!
Kevin, you always need to adjust for inflation, at least you always say that. So that penny from 1923 only has six percent of its buying power now. Just thought you'd like to know that.
But it's value in copper . . .
Back in 1923 it had zero buying power for an iPhone or a heart transplant.
I grew up in Ebgland in the 60s and remember getting a very worn penny with a young Queen Victoria on it. It was hard to read the date but it was from the 1840s or 50s. Getting older Queed Victoria coin was fairly common but of course when the money was changed to decimal system in 1968 all the old coins went out of circulation. I live in Canada now and basically never use cash (possibly once a month at most) so no coins to collect.
A penny for your thoughts on the latest disclosures about Trump. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/us/politics/donald-trump-election-results-fraud-voting-machines.html
The Numismatics. I saw them at the Roxy in '87. Great band.
I once received a 1920s sliver liberty quarter in change. The clerk actually gave it to me on purpose, which was kind of cool.