the scourge of green pennies

This is an event that has come up on multiple occasions in my life. I’ve met many people who have experienced it too, and I wanted to test you readers to see if you have also been affected by the scourge of the green pennies. Have you ever ended up with a Canadian penny that is green and crusty on one side, maybe something whitish or blackish seems to be stuck to it?

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Ok, want to know something? It’s my fault. Ok not really but it is my junior high school’s fault! Back in about 1993 my junior high school had a great idea. They wanted to raise money for Unicef so they asked all the students to bring in their extra pennies. Surprisingly, there was a good response and each classroom collected around over 200-800 pennies. Admittedly this isn’t a lot of money, but with all the classrooms pooled their pennies we had quite a bit of cash to donate. Great, huh? Well unfortunately someone at the school had another good idea – we drew haloween shapes (it was October) and glued the pennies to the outline of the ghosts and ghouls. We used that white glue you have in school as a kid. All those coppery, shiny haloween characters looked great in the gym and everyone was so proud of the money we raised. Hooray!

But then, someone had to shuck all these pennies off the paper and roll them. That someone was me and about three other people who happened to be in one of the school clubs. So, we shucked and we rolled. I don’t know how many times I had to go to the bank across the street and ask for more penny rolls. The shucking wasn’t always so successful, though, and sometimes the paper tore off with the pennies. The ones that didn’t have paper stuck to them had turned green from oxidation caused by the glue. So we sent about $30 of half-oxized, gummy pennies into circulation and I’ve been finding them or meeting people who have found them ever since! So, have you found any of my pennies? I think the mint is probably pulling them out of circulation since I see them less often these days. Hmm, I wonder if it is considered a defacement of the national currency!