King's View: pinching pennies

Does it bother you, too, when you see someone – usually a young person – receive change after making a purchase at a store and then take the pennies out of his pocket and fling them off into the distance as if getting rid of trash?

Anyone who lived through The Great Depression – and those numbers are thinning considerably by the day  – or anyone whose parents lived through those times – shudder at the sight of any type of money, even pennies, being wasted. For indeed, there was a time when pennies, let alone, nickels, dimes, quarters and dollar bills, were hard to come by.

Yes, times are tough now – we all know that – but they were even tougher during the Depression.

We’ve all heard the stories, but it doesn’t hurt us – especially the penny-pitchers in the crowd – to hear them again. Here are my offerings:

• My dad wore his football jersey to high school every day because that’s the only shirt he had.
• His mom fixed soup beans and cornbread for dinner all the time because it was cheap to make.
• Dad and his buddies would go sorting through the trash to find glass pop bottles, which they would take to the store for the deposit to get the 15 cents needed to go to the movies.
• They also played baseball using a ball of string that was taped together so it wouldn’t unravel, with bats made of old broomsticks. Years later, to teach his skills-challenged kid how to hit a baseball by first concentrating on watching it, he would make me use a broomstick as my bat while throwing me batting practice with a golf ball. It was like trying to catch a chicken with your bare hands.
• My mother, one of 11 children in her farm family, got hand-me-down dolls for Christmas, or maybe a shiny, new … orange.
• She and her brothers and sisters would take the mile-long walk to the state route to sit and watch the traffic go by for their Sunday afternoon entertainment after coming home from church.

Even when the Depression ended – which came with the start of World War II and the need to fire up the shut-down factories to produce armament – those people remained scared to death for the rest of their lives it would happen again.

And this time, they weren’t going to be caught off-guard. They were going to have enough – enough of everything – to get by on.

When we cleaned out my parents’ house to get it ready to sell after my mother passed away, we found all kinds of things she saved – scraps of aluminum foil, tiny remnants of bars of soap pressed together to make a useable amount, shoes in such bad shape landfills would reject them, and socks and pants and shirts whose existence had been extended so many times through stitching and sewing that there was nothing left to stitch and sew.

It was a history lesson.

And one in love and humility as well, for the funny thing is, my socks, shoes pants and shirts always seemed to be flawless, if not brand new.

I didn’t grow up poor by any stretch of the imagination, but I never would have thrown pennies away, either. I would have instead picked them up and put into my dalmatian bank from the movie “101 Dalmatians”.

One incentive to do so was that if I saved five pennies, I could buy a pack of baseball or football cards. Or if I was good and didn’t pull my cousin Gayle’s pigtails when she visited, Mom would spring for the cards herself.

To influence her toward that end, I was not past begging. One day, as she left for People’s Drug Store – do you remember People’s, advertised as “the largest drug store chain in the East?” – at Coventry Plaza, I pleaded for two packs of cards. Was I worth a dime? Or worth a darn? Gee, I hoped so.

I walked into the house after she had returned and watched with utter glee as she reached into a kitchen cupboard – the one that held all the dinner plates – and handed me not just two, but three packs of cards.

“Three packs?! Oh, Mom, thank you!” I shouted.

She looked at me and said, “I accidentally picked up three, and I didn’t have the heart to put the other one back.”
Mom was already splurging by spending a dime. To raise the expenditure by a whole nickel meant I had better not even think of pulling Gayle’s pigtails.

Who knows why you remember such things from your childhood so many years ago? And, for whatever reason, I’ve especially wondered about that one.

Nearly 50 years later, I think I’ve finally figured it out. It’s that a mother’s love means giving all she’s got – clothes, cards or anything else – even when she doesn’t have it.

So if you’re lucky enough to still have your mom, give her a hug and a kiss and tell her happy Mother’s Day today. It won’t cost you one red cent, but she’ll look upon it as being worth its weight in gold.

That’s a lot of pennies.