Thursday, November 13, 2025

The Last Penny

The very last penny was minted Wednesday in Philadelphia and the U.S. Treasury declared the coin dead.

Pennies lasted for 232 years, and many of them had stories, told and untold. What follows is one penny’s story from an essay I first published in 2007.

The other day I found a penny. It had been sitting on the sidewalk near my house for a few days. Many people had passed it by but none had thought it worth their time to pick it up.

I did. It was marked with the date 1971.

***

1971 — What a year that was! I returned from the Peace Corps in Afghanistan, only later to quit my job as a pizza deliveryman for Cottage Inn Pizza in Ann Arbor and drive an old white Chevy van with “Ft. Myers, Fla.” stenciled on the side all the way across America.

Exiting the freeway in San Francisco, we chugged up Fell Street, turned right onto Fillmore Street, and drove until just before Pine Street, arriving at our destination: the world headquarters of Running Dog Inc., publisher of the forthcoming SunDance magazine.

The building was nestled into a space next to a blues club called Minnie’s Can-Do.

We were a very small start-up team and before we could publish the new magazine, we had to build out the office by sheet-rocking the walls, painting them, refinishing and shellacking the floor.

As a flourish of sorts, we sealed a penny into that newly shiny hardwood just before we finished preparing the space that would see an amazing menagerie of the famous (John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jerry Rubin, etc.) and the crazy (too many to list) and the talented (everybody) walk through its front door over the next two years.

The experience of helping produce that magazine helped shape my career, leading directly to Rolling Stone, the Center for Investigative Reporting and all the rest.

***

Many years later, when SunDance was a distant memory, I happened to be back in what was by then known as the Upper Fillmore District. There were no blues clubs left in the area but plenty of upscale shops. After a brief search, I located the building at 1913 and stepped inside for the first time since the magazine had died three decades earlier.


The space was now a boutique and my hair was now gray. I feigned interest in the women’s clothes on the racks. What I was actually seeking was pretty vague — some wisp or ghost of a memory, something that would confirm what had once happened here. The sheetrock had long since been dismantled, the walls had been repainted many times, and the track lighting overhead was a major upgrade from our day. All the evidence of our time there seemed to have vanished.

I suddenly felt very old, maybe for the first time. It was disorienting. But then, near the back of the store, I spotted something that stopped me dead in my tracks. There was the penny we’d imbedded in the hardwood floor, still frozen in time with its date, 1971. It hadn’t aged a bit.

Think about it. Every coin has its story but very few get told.

This one’s did.

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