Auburn man on to ‘cent’ of next million pennies

The Associated Press

AUBURN — A couple of months ago, Sylvester Neal was heartbroken when he had to give up more than three-quarters of his collection of about a million pennies.

Now he’s feeling much better. He’s back to collecting. And his wife is back to what she knows is a losing battle of trying to make sense over cents.

Ever since he began tossing coppers willy-nilly into coffee cans 40 years ago as a high school senior in Austin, Texas, Neal has been entranced by pennies — the way they shine in the light, the way the design has changed, the way a few rare ones still escape his clutches.

Out for a walk, he keeps his eyes on the ground. Take a penny, always. Leave a penny, never.

"I don’t even understand my own fascination with them," said Neal, 58, a retired Alaska state fire marshal and former Anchorage Daily News safety coordinator. "I just love pennies. There’s no rational explanation."

On the other hand, he said, penny collecting once helped keep him rational.

Drafted into the Army out of high school, Neal was assigned to Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska.

"I wanted to leap over the desk and kiss the sergeant when he told me I wasn’t going to Vietnam, but boy, was it cold in Fairbanks," Neal said. "Collecting pennies kept me from going crazy."

He wound up staying 13 years, taking over security at the Fairbanks airport after leaving the Army. He and his wife, Doris, had two sons.

In their basement, first in Fairbanks and then in Anchorage, pennies accumulated in Gatorade bottles, glass cowboy boots, a wooden buffalo with a jar for a belly, small fish tanks, water cooler bottles, a Cardhu scotch bottle and other containers.

Neal bought pennies from banks and church fund-raisers. He kept a secret bank account into which he slipped $50 a month to buy pennies.

A new phase began when he received the "Hygrade Penny Coin Collector," which contains pockets to fill with pennies with different mint marks and dates, for his birthday in 1981.

Soon he was buying more of the books and had a goal: to collect every type of penny since 1909.

Among those that elude him still are a 1955 penny stamped twice by accident so there are two dates on it and a 1943 penny made of copper at a time when practically all were minted from steel because copper was needed by the military in World War II.

By this summer, he said, the collection weighed about 8 tons.

Then Neal was elected governor of the Pacific Northwest district of the Kiwanis club and knew he would need to move south.

Shipping the pennies as freight would cost $1,600. Hauling it himself would take, at minimum, a rental truck and trailer.

Finally, he caved in to his wife and agreed to save only about 200,000 or so pre-1974 pennies. The other 792,141 he poured into Coinstar machines in Anchorage, more than doubling the company’s record of 310,928 processed in Baltimore in January.

"Forty years of work," he said. "When I was putting them in that machine, I was almost crying. It was like getting rid a part of me."

Now he has a new goal.

Since it took 40 years to collect a million pennies while he was working, he figures he should be able to do it in half the time now that he’s retired.

"Now," he added, "I can be full time in the search for those elusive pennies."

"Elusive ones?" his wife asked in exasperation as he slipped a few from her wallet.

"They’re all elusive."

Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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