Find a penny, pick it up. Find a million more, and what are you supposed to do with them all?
That is the coinundrum facing John Reyes, a realtor from southern California. While helping his wife clean out her father’s Los Angeles home, the family found more than 1 million copper pennies stowed away in a cramped crawlspace.
The pennies were stashed in dozens of bank bags and are worth anywhere from $10,000 at face value to potentially much more, according to KTLA News.
The family believes the 1900s-era home, once owned by John’s father-in-law, Fritz, was used as a bed and breakfast. Fritz and his brother, both immigrants from Germany, had lived in the home for decades until Fritz passed and his brother moved away.
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Since then, the family has been working to clean out the house and renovate it for modern use. But that’s proved to be a difficult task.
“They kept everything,” Reyes told KTLA, adding that it has taken several years to remove items of various levels of importance.
He said the crawlspace was packed so tightly with stuff family members had to get on their knees to reach into its deepest corners. And that’s where they made the centacular discovery. First they found loose pennies, once held by paper rolls that had long since disintegrated. Beyond the pennies were crates, boxes, and dozens of coin bags filled with an unknown amount of copper pennies from decades ago.
“Some of the banks don’t even exist anymore,” Reyes said.
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The family grabbed handfuls of pennies and had them tested, confirming they were made of copper.
Modern pennies are made of copper-plated zinc. The U.S. Mint began making zinc-coated steel pennies in 1943 because copper was needed for World War II. Since 1982, pennies have been made primarily of zinc.
Based on the weight of the bags, the family estimates they…
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