The Macon County Free Lance

This is a Presidents' Day column, although you'll need to bare with me to get to much talk about presidents.

In my 40 year 'working life', I've spent a couple of them as a substitute school teacher, making $25 to $40 a day, babysitting a bunch of adorable brats and blooming bozos in grades K-12.

I found the surest way to get a 6th grader's eyes to glaze over was to talk about how much things used to cost "back in the old days."

"Baby boomers" like this writer, born in the 40's and 50's, can easily remember five-cent Cokes and candy bars, Saturday nights in high school when you could drive around all night in your parents' car on a buck's worth of gasoline, and even on into our college days in the mid-Sixties when you could purchase three quarts of Old Milwaukee, or a bottle of French table wine for a dollar plus tax (only two or three cents on the dollar).

All that changed in the 1970s and 80s. Inflation, stagflation and the Arab oil boycott put us in gas lines, and began a mad race to buy stuff before it got even more expensive.

This brings me around to the humble Lincoln penny, which celebrates its 100th birthday in the next calender year.

The "wheat penny" replaced the Indian-head penny in 1909. Lincoln has remained on the front of the penny, but the back side was re-designed in about 1960, with the Lincoln Memorial replacing a sheaf of wheat wreath on the back.

The modern Presidents' Day Uniform Monday Holiday Act has robbed both Washington and Lincoln of their "own" days, which naturally should fall on their birthdays (February 22 for George; February 12 for Honest Abe).

Still, it's traditional to honor and remember our greatest presidents on coins and paper money. Lincoln on the penny; Washington on the 25-cent piece, and so on.

The "quarter" is in no danger. You can still buy half a newspaper with one.

But the penny has lost its usefulness. You can't buy anything today with one cent. It costs our Treasury more to produce one than the face value of the coin.

They clutter up our pockets, and our change jars. Two-thirds of those in circulation are actually in our floorboards or down between car seats along with dropped French fries.

We lose countless hours in a lifetime, digging for two or three pennies so we don't get two or three back in our change.

Any logical monetary system would have done away with the penny a long time ago; we stopped minting the half-cent piece in the 1850s.

Since we honor our greatest presidents by displaying their profile on a coin, the Lincoln penny might have a hard time following the fate of the half-penny for purely sentimental reasons.

One proposal I've heard which would improve our coinage is partially borrowed from our cousins to the north in Canada.

The Canadian "looney" (nicknamed because a common loon appears on the obverse of their dollar coin) and the "twonie," a classy silver piece with a copper center, have replaced Canadian paper money in those denominations.

Our two dollar bill is the very best-looking example of American currency, with a handsome portrait of Thomas Jefferson on the face, and the "signing of the Declaration of Independence" on the back.

But no one uses the $2-bill (although they are still around--just ask your bank cashier for one) because for some nut case reason they are considered "bad luck."

The Canadians have replaced these two, low denomination bills (one dollar and two dollar) with distinctive coins. The brass and copper "looney" has a unique eleven-sided polygon design, and as aforementioned, the "twonie" is a bi-colored silver coin with a copper center.

We could be just as creative with our coinage, if we simply abandoned the nuisance penny.

Here's my humble proposal: move Lincoln's profile to the nickel; put the great Jefferson on a new two-dollar coin (Tom's already on the $2 bill).

Get rid of the dad-blasted worthless penny!

The U.S Mint could pacify the Republican Right by putting "Dutch" Reagan on a new one dollar coin, on the theory that if Susan B. Anthony, or an Indian woman wasn't on the face of a one buck piece, people might actually use it for something other than to ride a subway in New York or Boston.

Okay, this idea isn't going anywhere; for one reason because it makes too much sense.

But it's my way of getting a newspaper column out of "Presidents Day" week 2008.

jerrygreenway@yahoo.com