Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Found something the other day . . .

Found something the other day that I had almost completely forgotten about.  Been around in one form or another since 1866.  Its diameter is .835 inches and its thickness is .077 inches.  It's composed of 75% copper and 25% nickel. 

Yes, I found a U.S. nickel on the ground the other day.  I can't remember the last time I found a nickel on the ground -- or used one, for that matter.  Pennies, yes.  People intentionally leave those for good luck:  "Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you'll have good luck."  (another topic for another day). 










Finding a nickel reminded me of several things:

1.  I almost always have to look up the word to see how to spell it.  Nickel? Nickle?  Damn, why can't I remember that?

2.  For a brief time during college days, I remember always starting the day with $39.44 in my pocket (one twenty-dollar bill, one ten, one five, four ones, one quarter, one dime, one nickel (or is that nickle?) and four pennies.  As I remember, my thought process was to either have exact change -- which somehow always made clerks excited, or have a variety of change to receive back "non-penny" change -- which often confused clerks to no end:  "That will be $12.87"
Handing him/her $13.02 and waiting for the LONG pause.  

A Nickel!  When was the last time you even thought about a nickel?

On one of my jobs, I have to count the change drawer each shift.  There could be $18 in quarters, several dollars in dimes, but only a few nickels. 

3.  Frank Deford.  Who? And why?

"Frank Deford was to sports writing," wrote Roy Peter Clark, "what Secretariat was to horseracing, what Babe Ruth was to baseball, what Michael Jordan was to basketball, what Ali was to boxing, what Pele was to soccer: the undisputed master of his craft."

Deford was a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated for more than fifty years.  He's perhaps best known for his weekly commentaries on NPR's Morning Edition

I recently found Deford when I found the nickel.  Finding that nickel, for some reason, opened a filing cabinet in my brain and directed me to pull out this file.  It's a single paragraph from the book "The Old Ball Game" and it stretches to just 207 words:

Uneeda knew pricing. The nickel was king in America at this time. It was so common a currency that the dime was, often as not, called a “double nickel.” You didn’t want to get stuck with a wooden nickel. The ultimate depth of worthlessness was a plugged nickel. What this country needed was a good five-cent cigar. At a time when laborers in New York made twenty cents an hour and a good meal would set you back fifteen cents, you could go into a saloon and, for a nickel, get a stein of beer and free bread, salami, pickled herring, and hard-boiled eggs for the asking. “Barkeep, I’ll have another beer.” When the subway opened up, naturally a ride was pegged at a nickel. This was the same as for streetcars, which particularly crisscrossed Brooklyn, so the players had to be nimble to negotiate streets to reach the ballpark: hence, the borough’s team of Trolly Dodgers. The new movies not only charged a nickel, but were not called what they were, but what they cost: nickelodeons. A cuppa coffee cost a nickel. So did a soft drink. “A Moxie, please.” “Sure thing, mister, that’ll be a nickel.” Ice cream was a nickel. Likewise a Tootsie Roll.

There you have it.  Thank you, Frank Deford, for inspiring a blog post by a fan -- even though my readers may think it's not worth a plugged nickel. 




Carpe diem Life,
David Kuhn

P.S.  A long time ago, Franklin P. Adams quipped, "There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel." by

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