By Bob Copperstone
Coins of the Realm, and Where to Find Them
While I was “Growing Up Wigwam” in the 1950s, I treated downtown Wahoo as if it were my own little kingdom.
My kingdom’s capital city, of course, was the Copperstone family-owned Wigwam Café, where my very soul resided, and where I played out my royal existence.
Prince Bobby, if you please.
My royal throne was the swivel chair in the actual business office stuffed into a corner of the Wigwam’s humid basement, surrounded by the noisy clatter of the electric carbonated-water pumps
The basement -- you may remember my podcast story on Hank’s “Soil Bank” -- was where Dad was in the habit of burying silver dollars and currency.
But it was also where I, as wannabe sorcerer, turned copper into gold, in a manner of speaking. Or to be more accurate, I turned copper pennies into dollars.
You see, the Wigwam’s cash register drawer had separate coin compartments, but the penny cup was smaller. Dad would scoop the superfluous pennies into old cigar boxes in the cabinet below the register. He would periodically take several boxes of pennies at a time to the bank, where a machine would gather them in $2 rolls.
Fortunately, the 1950s and early 1960s marked the heyday of coin collection, when there were plenty of old, rare coins still in circulation, and before numismatics became big business and diminished the supply of unharvested loose change.
Of the thousands of coins that passed through my hands over the years, two pennies stand out, and I still own them – a 1909S-VDB and a 14D. I also retained hundreds of other silver coins from my Wigwam years. I keep them in a red cedar box I made in high school shop class
In addition to my copper cent treasure lode, my downtown Wahoo kingdom had a lesser, but nonetheless continual, source of pocket change.
Downtown sidewalks at the time were broader toward the curb than they are now, in order to handle the increased pedestrian traffic. And many of the buildings had shops in the basements with windows at ground level, and bump-outs into the sidewalks. Those pits were protected by iron gratings at sidewalk level (the Wigwam had a barber shop in its basement)
The grated pits made excellent traps for loose coins, and I would patrol my kingdom regularly to spot the shiny loot. There were a lot of nickels and dimes and pennies, but often a quarter would come shining through. Dimes were most plentiful, though. They are so thin and tiny that they are always escaping the human grip.
Only once did I spot a silver half-dollar deep in a pit, and I hurried to my Wigwam basement throne room where I had stashed a long piece of wooden quarter-round molding tipped with a chewing gum wad to capture the coin.
The wad on it had hardened, of course, so I dashed upstairs to grab a pack of Black Jack licorice gum (I found that to be the stickiest brand) from the candy counter and started chewing several sticks into a wad.
All this gathering of tools took time, and I finally quickened my pace. The memory of the glistening silver half-buck flashed in my mind.
I couldn’t run up the front basement stairs that spills into the dining room while carrying the long, gum-tipped wooden pole right in front of the main café’s dining customers. So I had to use the longer alley-way door up and out of the basement.
I was still several blocks from the window pit on the south side of Coast-to-Coast hardware store and upstairs FOE (Eagles club) building.
When I turned the corner I realized at once that I was too late. The coin was gone. Someone had beat me to it.
I was heartsick, but there was nothing I could do about it.
Yes, I saw it first. Yes, I was ready to do some spelunking for the treasure. Yes, in all fairness, they should have turned the coin over to me.
But even in the realm that I fancied myself as in control, it’s still a hard world out there, and I knew that my stuttering protests were to no avail. I couldn’t fight my way into possessing the wealth; I was too scrawny and the kids that took it were older and bigger.
I simply had to keep my eye to the pavement. I hit the jackpot once. I could do it again.
But I never did.
Basement Barber Shop Elegance
I was always fascinated by the remains of some beautiful Italian marble mosaic tiling that comprised the basement’s flooring in the front half. The room was once a barber shop.
Dad said the tiling was originally luxurious and expensive, and I used to wonder why, then, someone didn’t pick up each coin-sized tile and reinstall the mosaic somewhere else. They had been installed long ago, one at a time; such tiles weren’t made in easily-installed sheets those days.
Entry to the barber shop was via an iron-railed set of steps installed in the outside front sidewalk and leading down to the basement level.
Sunlight was admitted by two opaque glass-brick horizontal “windows” installed as part of the sidewalk. Over the decades the glass bricks became pitted, cracked, leaky, and dangerous to pedestrians, and were paved over when new sidewalks were installed by the city in the 1990s.
The cement steps, now leading up to nowhere, along with the barber shop’s wooden front door, remain in the Wigwam’s basement to this day.
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