Release: JUNE 20, 2025
As I sit here writing, an ice cream truck just drove by. Honestly. It did. The tunes played to announce its arrival evoked memories of summers long ago. We kids would grab our nickels and dimes to buy a Bomb Pop. Today, those cost kids a few dollars.
As it passed, I wondered how long it would be before such trucks have literally passed, forever. They may soon fade as does their music when they drive to another neighborhood.
That summer ice-cream truck also made me consider other “essential” yet vanished everyday items. Long before my time, wall mounted wooden telephones were, without question, a revolutionary creation. Talking to someone miles away through a wooden box? Absurd! That evolved into the now-antiquated desk telephone with a rotary dial. By the 1970s, dial phones transformed to futuristic push button models. Those too are fading to become flat “smart phone” devices we carry in our pockets. Into those we merely announce who we wish to call....
Consider the impossibility of Dick Tracy communicating via his wrist radio, then evolving into a Wrist TV. Everyone rolled their eyes. Having a two-way walkie-talkie or video screen on your wrist was beyond a space-age absurdity. That fantasy has become an everyday reality for many iWatch wearers.
Ingenuities in modern cars are equally astounding. Speedometers replaced by video screens and/or literal self-driving modes. It wasn’t until the 1960s that AM radios in cars became standard. By the 1970s, FM was added. Soon, eight-track tape players revolutionized audio. Less than a decade later, cassette tape players were the mainstay of both cars and homes.
Jump to 1982 when compact discs supplanted both tapes and vinyl records. After that, the virtual world took over with the advent of Bluetooth. It too will surely soon be in the rearview mirror.
The list goes on. Fax machines; paper maps; pencil sharpeners; CB Radios; pay phones; phone books; movie rentals; and on and on. Many of those were home, school or office essentials.
Something that hasn’t vanished in any of our lifetimes is physical money. Plus, given people’s irritation to paying an extra three-percent for just using a credit card, cash is even making a slight comeback. On the flip side, there has been some money that’s vanished on its own.
As I’ve written before, the half-cent; two-cent; three-cent and twenty-cent coins were all discontinued in the mid- to late-1800s. I get ending the half-cent. Nothing is that cheap any longer. The two- and three-cent coins were struck because that was the postal rate of the day. One could conveniently buy a stamp with one of those coins. Interesting but impractical by the 1900s.
The twenty-cent coin was a three-year folly that quickly failed due to its size and appearance being way too close to the circulating quarter. Plus, no one had a problem simply using two dimes.
With President Trump’s edict for eradicating the penny from our change, we will honestly be the first people in multiple generations – literally since the 1800s – to experience a common denomination disappearing from our currency. Exactly what the financial repercussion might be waits to be seen.
Some might contend the “mill” was eliminated in the 20th century. Those were small coin-like discs used to pay 1/10 of a cent – most often in small taxes. Physical mill coins went away in the 1960s. Yet, they are still used every day for gasoline. For example, is it $3.20 per gallon? No, the price is $3.20.9 per gallon. That “9” on the end of gas prices is nine mills.
Occasionally, obsolete currency can be quite valuable – in time. Such was the case with two types of paper money. After the Revolution, “continental currency” that circulated during our early colonial days became totally worthless – so much so, it spawned the phrase, “not worth a continental.”
In 1865, Confederate currency printed during the Civil War was devalued and became useless. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, many kids were given stacks of the bills to play store with or paste on their bedroom walls. Bad idea. Today, many of those bills are rare and valuable. Collectors pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for pristine examples of both Continental and Confederate currency.
Will modern pennies eventually be equally valuable? Doubtful. Last year alone, over eight billion (with a “b”) cents were produced. There are just too many around to be rare or valuable in our lifetime – or the next. Plus, it would take several hundred pennies now to buy just one Bomb Pop.
That’s my two-cents worth.
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