1914-D Wheat Ear Penny

When I was very young I enjoyed looking at my oldest brother’s coins. He collected several denominations of coins, but for some reason I was attracted to the penny collection. Pennies were cheap and it just seemed natural to begin to collect them. We were a large family and money was not readily available to us. Each of us received small amounts of money for doing chores around the house. My other brother (just older than me) took on a paper route. He gave me a small part of it to handle—deliver and collect the fees—and the proceeds from it. This was another small source for pennies.

An inexpensive penny folder allowed me to categorize and display the pennies. It was a challenge to find each date and mint mark. I was ten when the reverse of the Lincoln cent changed from the wheat ear design to the Lincoln Memorial. The new design appealed to me, but even at that age I knew wheat ears would be harder to find as time passed.

I began to collect nickels and dimes, also, but most of my interest and efforts still went to pennies. The Air Force moved my family from Georgia to Oklahoma. I left my coins among the things for movers to pack, but somehow they never made the destination. In my high school years in Albuquerque, our house was burglarized and all my coins disappeared. We suspected the perpetrator but could never prove it, so once again I started over. The moral to this story is be careful where you leave your coins and to whom you show them.

I learned to keep my eyes open for coins and quickly check dates, mint marks and condition. The easiest thing to notice is the wheat ear on the reverse side. My collection is nearly complete from 1909 through the last year of the wheat ear (1958) and from then to the present with the Lincoln Memorial reverse. All of the coins except one have come out of circulation. Several jobs working with money, and occasional purchases of rolls of coins from the bank, have served as the means to find them. My only purchase has been a 1909 VDB in uncirculated condition. It would be difficult, indeed, for a person to begin and complete a set of wheat ear pennies totally from circulation now, but one could concentrate on the Lincoln Memorial reverse (1959-2008), the four poses of Lincoln (2009) and the new design for 2010.