The humiliations never ceased. Canada reduced the penny’s size by a quarter in 1920 due to soaring copper costs and to bring it in line with its U.S. cousin—the piece now measures 19.05 mm in diameter. In the Depression, penny production actually climbed against falling wages, making the coin a sort of spectre of ill tidings. The coin most of us grew up with—two maple leaves growing in an anatomically suspect manner from a single twig—appeared in May 1937, delayed by the abdication of Edward VIII over his marriage to the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. As climbing copper prices continued to bleed it of its original substance, the cent’s mass sank—to 2.35 grams today. It is now mainly steel or zinc, depending on which the mint can buy more cheaply, and the planchets, or blanks, are just as often sourced from Greeneville, Tenn.-based Jarden Zinc Products, which incidentally has lobbied the U.S. government aggressively to keep that country’s penny, but which has apparently left Canada’s Senate to its own devices.
Our penny has always stretched the definition of disposable cash. Officials at the mint even now must remind magazine writers that placing a one-cent coin on a railroad track for the purposes of flattening it is a criminal act. “It is illegal to deface a coin in Canada,” says Alex Reeves, the mint’s communications manager. “We’ve all heard of the pennies on railroad tracks and so on. That’s something that’s not allowed.” Which was news to Dick MacKenzie, publisher of the Sioux Lookout Bulletin, a weekly paper in the northwest Ontario railroad town of Sioux Lookout—pop. 5,000—whose kitchen door opens 10 m from the CN tracks. “I still do it sometimes as the freights pass,” he says. “It’s great to show off for little neighborhood kids who have never seen it done. Their eyes grow bigger than the processed penny.”
The one-cent coin has long delighted children, particularly when it still held the promise of candy. Roy Bolin, a 79-year-old Winnipeg resident, recalls those Saturdays in the 1930s when his parents handed him a quarter and sent him and his younger sister Shirley to the Tivoli Theatre. “It would be 10 cents admission and we’d have five cents to spend,” he says. “We would go to the drugstore and licorice was my favourite candy—you know those Twisters? They would be one cent each or two for a penny. We would kind of load up. A nickel bought you a lot of candy.”
Sometimes, you see, the penny delivers. Consider again the Winnipeg Eaton’s, this time in the early 1960s. A keen-eyed shopper finds a rare penny in the change he receives at a counter, freshly minted but with a date from the late 1930s—a small gold coin shining in his palm. On his next visit he finds another golden penny, three decades old but again as though new. Coin enthusiasts begin rushing to the store on Portage Avenue. “They were probably worth 50 cents, a dollar, per penny,” says Laing, the Winnipeg numismatist. Eaton’s management, alerted to this strange phenomenon, traces the cache of rare coins, now called the “Eaton’s hoard,” to the store vault, where tens of thousands of pennies had been deposited, buried under more recent inventory, and forgotten—a treasure of pennies.
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