Money

(entry for 1/8/25)

When I was a teenager, around 14 or so, there was a television advertising jingle I used to love, though some people hated it. (To get the full effect of the jingle, you need to be aware that there was then, and is now, a chain of grocery stores called Safeway.)

A rather rotund middle-aged cartoon man is counting a veritable snowstorm of dollar bills and letting them fly through his fingers like confetti. “Money,’ he sings. “Money’s my hobby! My wife’s out saving money now at our Safeway store!” The ad is long gone, but it evidently worked, because the stores are still going strong.

I think one reason I liked the ad so much is that I had learned to count money myself, at a very young age.

When I was about four, my maternal grandma, Emma, and her oldest surviving daughter, Eda (subject of an earlier post which you can get to HERE), in addition to being, respectively, the church organist and church pianist for the Denver Central SDA Church (now a batch of medical clinics but still looking like a church building) were also the Church Treasurers. (My dad was also the Choir Director and played the tenor Sax, and my mom was an alto in the choir, so I came by my musical interests naturally, and then some!)

When we left the church environs about 12:30, after the 11 o’clock Sabbath Service was over, we went to Grandma’s and Aunt Eda’s house, down near the Porter 'San' where I had been born, taking the church money bag with us, and after eating Sabbath Dinner (the noon meal) in the kitchen, we repaired to the dining room and emptied the money bag onto the table. This was not a huge task, as the two hundred or so church-going families were far from rich, but on the other hand Adventists believe in ten-percent tithing, so the bag was fuller than it might have been had it been from a church that did not so believe. The average ‘take’ on any given Saturday was several hundred dollars, occasionally even over a thousand, of which quite a few were in coin form. (A few of the better-off income earners in the membership paid their tithe by handwritten check, but the vast majority of the money was in cash.)

I had no particular interest in paper money, not even the larger denominations. My job, and I loved it, was to separate the coins into separate piles of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half dollars, and ‘roll’ them. Rolled coins in those days did not have the crimped edges at each end that modern rolls do. Instead, the paper cylinders that you put the coins into were considerably longer than the finished roll was going to be, and you folder the ends over at each end to ‘close the roll.’ The first few times I did this I had to have a lot of help, but by the time I was six or so I could do every step by myself, and the results were just as good as anything an adult could have done. (And, on the smaller coins, sometimes better!)

The other difference between coin rolls then and now, in addition to the change in how the ends are closed, was in the colors. Penny wrappers were a solid deep red, nickels dark blue, dimes deep green, quarters a very pale tan, and half-dollars a sort of grayish brown. (The few silver dollars that we got didn’t get rolled. They were turned in loose to the bank, and there were never enough of them to justify rolling anyway.)

Here are two related illustrations: the first is how you slide coins into the paper wrappers, and the second is of what the wrappers look like when they are filled and the ends folded over. (These, like the photo at the head of this post, show the modern colors, not the ones we used back then.)

I had been to the Denver mint and had seen pennies being made, so that was my favorite coin, but I also loved dimes, because I got a roll of them for every semester ‘A’ earned in school. (These, obviously, did not come from the church offering plate!) That’s five dollars per ‘A,’ which was a small fortune in those days, but my dad could afford it because he was making eight hundred a month. I don’t know how much the reward actually contributed to the effort, but I do know I got ‘straight A’s for a long time. (I got my first-ever non-A mark in 6^th grade, and was outraged. But it was the start of a trend, and I didn’t return to straight A’s till the eighth grade.)

At the dining room table on Sabbath afternoons, once we were all through counting, my Grandma would begin filling out the deposit slip for the bank. She had herself counted the larger bills, and entered those totals first. Then she would turn to Aunt Eda, who had counted the fives and ones, and would ask her for the totals of those categories. Finally, she would turn to me and, although she could easily see how many rolls there were, would ask me for the totals. Having added these up in my head and memorized them, I recited the necessary numbers eagerly. (I was responsible for all the counted coins, even though I usually had help rolling the quarters and halves.) She never double-checked me, at least not while I was watching, and once the deposit slip was completed she would put all the money and the paperwork into the bag, and go and hide it. Since the banks didn’t open till Monday at 10am, it was necessary to squirrel the deposit away, and we didn’t own a safe, so the money was simply hidden. She never told anyone where it was, and I never asked, figuring it was better not to know.

When we moved to Greeley in 1948, my participation in the coin counting came to an end. Grandma’s and Aunt Eda’s stints as Church Treasurers ended about the same time, so even when we visited them on weekends, which wasn’t often, the money aspect of Sabbath afternoons was gone. My young experience in the process came in handy later, when my dad owned the Lifeline Natural Foods in Grand Junction from 1953-55, and still later, when I had my own bakery from 1975 to 1979, but nothing ever quite equalled the thrill of handling “all that money” when I was very young.

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