Uses for the vanishing penny? There’s 114 billion of them.

There was also the art of pitching pennies against a wall to see who could skillfully drop them closest to the bricks. This was a penny-ante entrance into the world of gambling and idle competition.

I know I date myself, making childhood seem like a “Little Rascals” episode.

Life has changed, obviously.

First, kids no longer malinger around train tracks. Second, I’m now sorry I absconded with a couple dozen gumballs from Waxman’s Pharmacy. And third, gambling with physical money is just so 20th Century.

The announcement that the U.S. Mint is sending pennies the way of the 8-track tape brings forth nostalgia for the coin that has been with us Americans since 1792, and with our English forebears for 1,400 years.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

America’s mints shipped out 3.17 billion pennies in fiscal 2024 — basically, 10 cents for each American. It was a billion less than the previous year. So a trendline has been established.

Stories about the demise have noted that pennies cost 3.69 cents each to manufacture. That’s a bad fiscal return, even for government. For a country stumbling toward bankruptcy, this policy seems to make cents.

At one time, pennies could actually buy something: Like penny candy or even your thoughts.

But when was the last time you bent over to pick one up? (It now takes a dime for me to even pause.)

We rarely dig around our pockets to give cashiers exact change. In fact, we barely use cash anymore — just 16% of transactions. And pennies, of course, are our most annoying cash of any sort.

Still, there are perhaps 114 billion in circulation, or roughly about what falls from Elon Musk’s pockets when he’s bouncing around on stage. Many cents remain forgotten, relegated to desk drawers, piggy banks or change buckets.

As a kid, I was a numismatist, which is a unpronounceable term for coin collector. Pennies allowed struggling 11-year-old paperboys more bang for their coin-buying buck. It was more affordable to buy, say, a 1901 Indian head penny than a 1901 Liberty head dime from a coin shop.

It was a hobby that provided a dose of history.

After 1964, the government ceased minting silver coins (dimes, quarters and half dollars), causing speculators and collectors to snap up all the coins of that ilk. That meant old pennies and nickels were all that was left to pluck from circulation.

Credit: Bill Torpy

Credit: Bill Torpy

The Lincoln cent (which comes from the Latin term centum, or 100) arrived in 1909 on Honest Abe’s 100th birthday, replacing Indian head pennies, which were cooler. The first 50 years of Lincoln cents are known as “wheat pennies,” based on the wheat stalks on their reverse. In 1959, the crops were replaced by the Lincoln Memorial.

Having an Irish mum, I traveled to the old country several times as a kid and was allowed to dig through the change drawers at a relative’s shop. Back then, Irish and English pennies were of a grand scale, roughly the size of an American half dollar. Their girth did well staving off the cumulative wear of decades of human rubbing.

In my time there, I even came across numerous monarchs, including Queen Victoria pennies from the 1890s that were still in circulation — and still in a strongbox in my basement.

Interestingly, we Yanks turned the Brits onto the monetary metric system. Before 1971, the pound was based on 20 shillings, each with 12 pence — or 240 pennies per pound. The monetary changeover made each new penny worth 2.4 of the old, causing them to create half pennies, which have been since dumped.

Three of England’s Commonwealth nations — Canada, Australia and New Zealand — have since done away with the penny.

When it comes to ideas of what to do with pennies, I turned to my old friend Karas Cahill, who’s an artistic and industrious sort.

She once owned an aging home with a boring entryway and wanted a “coppery” floor.

“Then it hit me: Pennies are coppery,” Karas said.

Credit: Karas Cahil

Credit: Karas Cahil

She scraped up the floor, painted it black — because pennies don’t totally overlap and the floor will show — and then started gluing the suckers down to the 8-by-4-foot hallway, about 300 per square foot.

It was tedious work, but that’s why kids were invented. Her youngest son, Angelo, was detail-oriented and patient, so the two knelt hour after hour gluing pennies to the floor, row by row.

“You get a feel for it,” Karas told me.

She then covered her handiwork with several layers of epoxy. “It was Chicago, in the winter you come inside and stomp your feet,” she said. “I didn’t want pennies popping up.”

Not long after completing her coppery masterpiece, she got a job promotion in Atlanta, so goodbye penny floor.

Recently, she went by the old home to see if the floor still remained. No one was there, but she can’t imagine anyone removing it.

In all, there are 10,738 of permanently affixed pennies, with the old coins wheat side up.

“Every penny has its own story,” she told me.

A story coming to an end.