Penny Fortune
May 25, 2023 – Indio, California, USA
For young adult cousins, Johnny, Silvie, and Marcela, their grandmother’s funeral was a chance to reconnect. All three lived in Southern California, but rarely had actual contact. While they attended the memorial service, their parents volunteered them to help empty their grandmother’s house. The one-story stucco building was built in the 1960’s and had many small rooms, closets, and attic spaces for storing and forgetting possessions.
The old house also included a short basement containing two unfinished rooms. The dust and spiderwebs covering the doors made it obvious the rooms had mostly been neglected. The three cousins cautiously turned one of the doorknobs and looked inside. The entire floor was covered in once-white cloth sacks.
“What’s in these?” Johnny asked with some curious excitement. He kicked a bag to find it was filled with something heavy. He kicked again and heard a CHUNK sound, which reminded him of dropping a plastic bag full of change. “Guys, I think there’s money in here.”
Before the three cousins could get the nearest sack open, they speculated whether it was filled with gold and silver coins. Were they about to be rich? When they finally reached into the sack, they were disappointed to pull out nothing but pennies and a few nickels.
“Pennies? A whole room of pennies? Why would anyone keep a room of pennies?” Silvie asked her cousins.
No one had a good answer, so they called their parents to come take a look. Johnny’s dad saw the sacks and immediately chuckled, “My dad, your grandpa, was convinced that the metal in pennies and nickels was going to be worth more than the cash value. Every week while I was growing up, he’d go buy five dollars’ worth. He said he was gonna make a lot of money and use it for his kids’ and grandkids’ college fund.”
“So why didn’t we get any of it?” Johnny asked.
“I forgot all about the pennies until now. I figured he must have stopped collecting, but it looks like he kept going strong until he died. At some point he moved the pennies down here. Your grandma never mentioned them.”
Johnny’s dad leaned down and picked up a sack. “That’s pretty heavy. A lot of money here if we can get it to the bank.”
Silvie’s mom stared at the many sacks and the thought of lifting them made her back hurt. “I’ve got an idea. How about we say the grandkids can have all the penny money. An inheritance, like their grandpa intended. As long as they move the sacks.”
“Sounds good to me,” Silvie said in response.
“Wait. How much money are we talking about?” Marcela asked.
“We could weigh one of the sacks to get an idea,” Johnny suggested.
He hefted one of the sacks upstairs to a bathroom scale and found it weighed thirty pounds. Then he used his phone to look up how many pennies were in a pound.
“About 5000 pennies per sack and at least 200 sacks. That’s a million pennies. With some nickels in there too. At the very least, $10,000.”
“Split three ways,” Marcela said, “That’s worth it if all we do is haul them to the bank.”
“We can use my truck,” Johnny added.
Dragging thirty-pound sacks up a flight of stairs and into the back of Johnny’s truck proved to be sweaty and exhausting work. The intense desert sunshine sent the three cousins searching for ice and cold water in Grandma’s refrigerator. When they moved about half of the pennies, the back of Johnny’s truck sagged dangerously low.
“I don’t think we should add any more or we’ll ruin my shocks. Let’s drop off this load and come back for the rest.”
The cousins squeezed into the truck’s cab and Johnny drove very slowly to the nearest branch of Wells Fargo. He and Marcela stayed with the money while Silvie went inside to find a bank employee. She returned with a cashier and the branch manager.
“That’s all pennies?” the branch manager asked after whistling in amazement.
“Some nickels too,” Johnny replied.
“We’re not set up to handle that much change. I mean, we could take maybe one sack, but not a whole truck full.”
“Where else could we take them?” Silvie asked.
“Maybe a much bigger bank. Maybe a bunch of banks. How old are the pennies?”
“My grandpa collected them for a long time, starting maybe fifty years ago,” Johnny replied. “Does it matter?”
The branch manager poked at one of the sacks. “I was just thinking there could be some valuable pennies in there. I know some of the rare ones can be worth like a million dollars. You ever looked through them?”
“Not closely,” Johnny admitted.
“Well, like I said. We can take one sack, but otherwise you’ll have to find something else to do with them.”
The cousins drove back to their grandmother’s house with all penny sacks still in the truck. They hated the idea of driving to 100 different banks and were also intrigued by the possibility of finding a million-dollar penny.
“This says a 1943 D Lincoln Wheat Penny is worth $2.3 million,” Marcela said, reading from her phone.
“What’s the D mean?” asked Silvie.
“It came from the Denver mint.”
“You’d think with all the pennies we’ve got, there’s at least one 1943 D in the bunch,” Johnny said excitedly.
On Grandma’s kitchen table, they poured out one of the coin sacks and began searching.
“A lot more nickels than I first thought,” Johnny said. “Here, put those in one pile.”
“So we’re only looking for 1943 pennies?” Sylvie asked.
“I guess. But if you see anything else that looks old, maybe we should keep that too,” Marcela suggested.
“My hands are already dirty. This feels gross,” Sylvie said after sifting through a handful of coins.
Half an hour later, they had not found any 1943 pennies or any others which looked especially valuable. “How long are we going to do this?” Johnny asked.
“I don’t know. I hoped we’d get lucky and find a 1943 D right away,” Marcela answered.
“Yeah, there’s no way we’re looking through all of these,” Silvie said. “I mean, we all have jobs. We don’t have time for this.”
“But someone else might want to do it,” Johnny replied. “They might even enjoy it.”
“Who?” Silvie asked.
“I don’t know. There’s lots of people out there with time on their hands.”
A smile crept up Marcela’s face. She obviously had a good idea. “What if we sold them all to somebody? Advertise it as an old collection that might have a bunch of valuable coins. That way we could get more than just $10,000.”
“And we’ll make the buyer carry them out and haul them away,” Silvie added.
“We could advertise on Facebook Marketplace. I see weird things on there all the time,” Johnny said.
“How much should we ask for?” Marcela greedily wondered.
The cousins made a quick calculation, estimating they had 900,000 pennies and 100,000 nickels. If the face value was $14,000, they should be able to ask for $25,000 if it included the promise of undiscovered treasure.
Johnny put up a posting on Facebook Marketplace explaining the details. Ten minutes later, he got a response from someone named Claudio Reyes. He lived in Indio and accepted the price. He had a pickup truck and could haul away the coins right away. He would bring Johnny a check.
“Wow, a sucker right away!” Johnny said with a laugh after reading Claudio’s message.
“This will be the easiest money we’ve ever made,” Silvie added happily.
Earlier that day, Claudio Reyes had been wondering how his six kids were going to spend their summer. He wanted them to work instead of laying around watching TV and playing video games. But there were not any obvious places kids might work during a blazing hot Indio summer. When Claudio saw the Facebook posting, he imagined his busy kids sorting and stacking mounds of coins. They could do it indoors. It would be like a treasure hunt and keep them entertained. Paying $25,000 for the coins was a risk, something Claudio usually avoided, but he had an indescribably good feeling about the deal.
Claudio showed up at the cousin’s grandmother’s house in his pickup truck. He was followed by his wife and six kids in a minivan. He carried a cashier’s check for $25,000 and handed it to Johnny after inspecting the bags of coins.
“That’s almost everything I had in savings,” Claudio said matter-of-factly.
Johnny nodded and replied, “I hope it works out for you.”
Since agreeing with Claudio, Johnny had received many other messages asking about his coin collection. When Johnny told the messengers the collection had already been sold, they hinted they would be willing to pay more than the asking price. Johnny and his cousins decided they should honor their original commitment.
The Reyes family spent the rest of the late afternoon and evening lugging pennies from one pickup truck to another and up the basement stairs. All the kids helped, from the fourteen-year-old daughter down to the three-year-old son. By the end of the night, all the pennies and nickels were piled up inside the Reyes’ garage.
Claudio woke up the next morning with a sore back and doubts about his purchase. Crammed in the garage, the volume of a million coins looked larger than he expected. How would he keep his kids motivated to sort through all of them? And how were they supposed to identify the valuable ones? Claudio figured he needed to start with a worktable. He carried the plastic one his family used for picnics into the house’s TV room and called for his kids to gather around it. His wife stood next to him as he talked his way through a plan.
“Okay, one of you needs to carry the coins from the garage and put them on the table. Then we need some buckets or bowls.” Claudio turned to his wife. “Do you have any extra bowls?” She nodded.
“Okay, you’ll put the nickels in one bowl and the pennies in another one. But maybe you should look for the valuable ones before you put them in the bowls.”
“How do we know the valuable ones?” asked Claudio’s oldest daughter.
Claudio had been up during the night studying webpages about valuable coins. While a few modern nickels and pennies were valuable, most of the best ones were very old. “Let’s sort them by age. For the nickels, anything before 1964 you put in a special bowl. For the pennies, anything before 1956 goes in another special bowl.”
“So we’ll have four bowls?” his daughter asked.
“Yes, four bowls. Regular nickels. Special nickels. Regular pennies. Special pennies. The regular ones we need to put in paper tubes so they’re easy to take to the bank. And I’ll look carefully at all the special ones.”
“And I want them wearing gloves,” Claudio’s wife said. “Who knows where these pennies have been.”
The first sorting day did not go smoothly. Claudio’s children argued about what jobs they should be doing and who was the fastest sorter. They were slow about counting regular pennies and nickels and pushing them into the paper tubes for the bank. Claudio may have given up on the entire operation if they did not find a 1914 D Wheat Penny. Claudio pulled the coin from the special bowl and compared it to an online picture.
“I think this could be worth $300,” he said in a tone mixing excitement with relief. “I need to have an expert check it out.”
The next day, Claudio stopped at the nearest coin shop and met the friendly owner who confirmed the value of the 1914 D Wheat Penny. Claudio showed him more nickels and pennies from the special bowl and talked about his family project. The man said he would be happy to appraise and purchase anything special the kids found. He also suggested that Claudio spend $200 on a machine to wrap the coins into rolls for the bank. With a million coins to process in a summer, there was no way the kids could count and wrap them all by hand.
It took a few days for the Reyes children to find their groove, but they soon transformed into a sorting and wrapping factory. The 1914 penny was proof they were part of a treasure hunt. The oldest daughter took charge of the operation. A nine-year-old son was good at moving bags of loose and wrapped coins around. A seven-year-old daughter was amazingly fast at separating old coins from new ones. Sorting a million of them in about 60 days meant 16,000 per day or 2,000 per hour. The children spent the time listening to music and paused for plenty of swim breaks and runs through their backyard sprinkler.
Each day, several dozen coins were added to the special bowls. The kids got very good at recognizing Buffalo Head nickels and Indian Head pennies. Every so often, Claudio took the special coins to his collector friend and returned with a check. Their most valuable find was a 1926 S Nickel worth $5000. It was more common to find things worth $10, but big money coins kept popping up and they all added to the collection’s total value.
It only took three weeks for the Reyes kids to earn back their dad’s $25,000 investment and the returns seemed to accelerate from there. Claudio told his kids they would all split the profits evenly, something his oldest daughter used as motivation as numbers climbed higher.
They got through all the coin bags that summer. The total value for new and old pennies was just over $144,000. After subtracting Claudio’s initial investment, that left a little less than $20,000 for each of his children.
“Not bad for a summer job,” Claudio told them. “More than I ever made.”
“How much can we spend?” his older son asked.
“None of it. We’re putting it all in the bank with the regular pennies. This money’s for your future. It’ll buy your first car or send you to college.”
Claudio did not know it, but Johnny, Silvie, and Marcela’s grandfather had intended that for his pennies and nickels all along.
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