Wheaties

Steve Zimmer 

1973, I’m 10 years old. And my dad works at a tool and dye company, which doesn’t pay much money, but he’s also an inventor, which pays negative money. So every night after dinner, he goes down to his basement workshop, and I never follow him. I’m very similar to my father’s father, and they really never got along. And that might be okay, except that my parents fight a lot, and I get kind of pulled over to my mother’s side, which just widens the rift between me and my father.

Now, my big new hobby is coin collecting, and mostly I read books about coins. But one night, my dad comes home with a bag of $40 of pennies, and pennies from the bank, in paper rolls. And he lays them out on the kitchen table and doesn’t say anything, just starts sorting through them. So I join him, and it’s probably a first father-son activity. Now, when you’re sorting Lincoln pennies, the first thing you do is look for Wheaties, pennies predating 1959 with Wheaters on the reverse. So now all of a sudden, every night, my dad and I are there after dinner, sorting through pennies in complete silence, except for the periodic discovery of a Wheatie, which causes the finder to say, Wheatie.

So it’s like Rain Man with two Dustin Hoffmans. So now, one night, I find a Wheatie from 1943. Now, due to wartime copper shortages, 43 pennies were made of zinc. They’re gray, but the penny I found is brown. Now, there are 25 known specimens of 1943 copper pennies. A mint employee at the time illegally snuck them out. In the vast global world of coin collecting, no one is more universally beloved than the unscrupulous mint employee. So this penny is worth triple the value of our house if it’s genuine.

Now, the easiest way to counterfeit a 43 copper penny is to copper plate the zinc version. But the zincs are lighter, so all we need is a good micro scale. And my dad decides that he’s going to build one. Since, as my mother observes, why spend $20 on a scale when you can build one for $38? So now, for the first time ever, I follow my dad down into the basement after dinner. And his workshop’s got all this array of tools, like switches and hinges and capacitors and screws, all presided over by this little plastic statue of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes and long shots.

And he goes all out on the scale, and it’s two-sided like justice, and it’s super accurate. But we don’t try it until we’re sure it’s perfect, because a false positive would be heartbreaking. So the big night comes, and we try our penny against a 1952 copper penny with similar wear, and they balance perfectly. It’s copper. And we’re like, oh, this could solve all our financial problems. I’ll probably get my picture in Numismatic News. And for my dad, this is a long-shot victory he never got from his inventions. So we set aside a day to go to coin stores, and we dress up in our part-of-blue sport coats, short-sleeved collared shirts and ties, and we visit GS Coins first. And the manager, there’s Rudy, has no interest in our coin.

So next up is Kedzie Coins, which is a huge dealer. And we actually get to sit down with the owner. He’s an expert on Lincoln pennies. And he says, well, you know, the easiest test is just to hold, if it sticks to a magnet, it’s a fake. And we’d assume that zinc pennies were zinc. They’re actually zinc-coated steel. So if our penny sticks to the magnet, it’s fake. So he holds it to the magnet, and it doesn’t stick. And the guy’s like, huh. You know, we tell him about our weight test. And so he looks at it for a long time under high magnification, and he says, this penny’s real copper. Fortunately, it’s from 1948. Someone had professionally ground off the left side of the eight.

And he showed us blow-up pictures, and you could see, like, the real three versus a cut eight. And he said, well, you know, this is actually a pretty good fake. You know, people collect these. It’s probably worth, you know, at least $10. So, you know, back in the car, you know, my dad just sits in the seat for a long time before turning the ignition. And, you know, we get home and clip our ties. And my dad goes straight to the basement, and I go up to my room and ponder why I feel like yelling at my mother. And after dinner, I start sorting through the remaining rolls of pennies. And surprisingly, my dad joins in.

And we probably aren’t going to find a penny that changes our life, and I’m probably not going to understand my dad any better than he understood his dad. But you never know.