Most people these days won’t stoop down to pick up a penny in the parking lot and they usually donate any extra pennies to the cup beside the cash register. Some even suggest doing away with pennies entirely since they are considered a nuisance.
But Boomers didn’t consider a penny a nuisance. To us they were nuggets of gold and what could we ever do with a couple shiny pennies.
After all, there was penny candy. Sometimes our parents gave us a nickel for a 2-cent milk in the cafeteria. If you only bought a half-pint of milk, you had three pennies leftover to spend at the general store on the way home from school, and what choices we had!
First, bubble gum. There was a jar each of Fleers, Bazooka and Double Bubble. I liked Double Bubble best, but Bazooka had comics. Sometimes I’d get one of each. But at least one penny was devoted to a hot-as-fire fireball, and they were extra hot back then. It was a challenge to hold the candy in your mouth for the duration since it started to burn like fire after a few minutes. But we were tough. We held out and eventually the heat gave way to the sweet.
Another great way to spend a penny was on a Mary Jane Candy or a small Tootsie Roll. Other one-cent goodies included Bit O’Honey, Sugar Babies, Dad’s Root Beer, Peanut Butter Bars, Black Taffy, Lollipops (Tootsie Roll Pops were 2c), Caramel Crème cadies and licorice sticks – I liked the red licorice best.
Some of the candies were more – like a nickel. For 5-cents you could buy a Heath Bar, Milky Way, Payday, Mars Bar, Three Musketeers, 5th Avenue, Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, Junior Mints, Sugar Daddy, M & M’s, Hershey Bars, Zagnut, Reece’s Cups, Necco Candy, Bubble Gum Cigarettes, Milk Duds, Wax Bottles of Pop, a Clark Bar and much more. The sky was the limit with a whole nickel.
Today, those candies will set you back a buck or more. But for a while in our young lives, a penny or a nickel would go a long way.