A Penny for Your Thoughts About the 1951 Penny Shortage

I still save these 'wheaties' although I don't know why!

With the U. S. Mint no longer producing pennies, there's been a shortage of the often looked-down-upon coin. We've all seen the signs at various stores (such as Drug Mart and Marc's) reminding us of the problem, and asking us to try and pay using exact change.

Did you know there was also a shortage of pennies back in 1951?

It seems that there were a variety of reasons for the shortage. The government was minting less, apparently because of a raw material shortage due to the Korean War; there were more coin-operated machines and parking meters than ever; and some people just hoarded them.

Locally, this was causing a problem for the Cigarette Sales Company. The Lorain firm needed pennies to place inside cigarette packages sold in vending machines. 

For example, the price of a pack of cigarettes might be 23 cents. Thus if you inserted a quarter in the machine, your two cents change came out along with your smokes (probably looking something like these vending machine packs that somehow survived over the decades).

Anyway, the Cigarette Sales Company came up with an idea to generate some pennies: offering $102.50 in exchange for a hundred dollars in pennies. Here's the article that ran in the Lorain Journal on October 24, 1951.

Apparently it was such a novel idea that it made the national news, according to this "Log of Lorain" column from October 31, 1951.

It seems that pennies were in the news a lot that year. It was announced that the penny postcard was coming to an end; the price to mail a postcard would double as of January 1, 1952. Here's the Nov. 15, 1951 article with the story.

Then there were the small news items, like this story of a Lorain baby swallowing a penny. It sounds like the doctors were able to extract it. I wonder if the docs returned the penny to the parents as a keepsake?

May 14, 1951

Speaking of doctors and pennies, this blurb tells of a Deadwood, South Dakota grocer who paid the hospital bill for his daughter's birth using 9,070 pennies. His new daughter's name? Penny - what else?

Nov. 3, 1951

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I still pick up pennies when I see them on the pavement. You know the old saying: See a penny, pick it up and all the day you'll have good luck. See a penny, let it lay, bad luck will haunt you all the day. Yikes!

As I noted above at the top of this post, I still collect Wheat pennies. It's an odd habit, I know. I hardly ever get one as change when I pay in cash. So when I do, I have to save it. Why? Who knows!

The most incredible penny I ever received as change was an Indian Head Penny dated 1883. I had stopped at a former 7-Eleven on Madison in Cleveland to buy a bag of Cheese Doodles, and there it was in my change. I could hardly believe it.

I had a math teacher at Admiral King named Elvis Dollar. He was a great teacher, very military in the way he conducted himself (not surprising since he was an Army veteran) and guess what his daughter's name was? Penny – what else? Mr. Dollar even came to the 20th reunion of my Class of 1977. A really great guy.