Pittsboro, NC – When I left home at age eighteen 1954 for New York City to seek my fortune, I was a small town hick and really wasn’t fully aware of just what I was getting myself into. But I adjusted fast. One has to. I believed my family really didn’t expect me to stay up there .
My father and I really never had a lot in common. So to make points with him was a challenge. I was home once on vacation and discovered that he collected old Indian head/buffalo nickels. Common in the early 1900s in my father’s youth. But in the 1950s becoming sorta seldom seen. He proudly showed them to me. All loose in a cigar box in a trunk beside his bed. He didn’t know how many he had, the value or anything else about them. I really think he delighted in seeing how many he could find and bragging about it to his old cronies.
That set things into motion. A way to score with my father. I started watching my small change for Indian head nickels. Even in New York City, they were few and far between. At one busy lunch counter where I was a regular, I was friendly with one waitress and told her about looking for those old nickels. She frequently checked all the cash registers and saved those special nickels for me.
Every time I went back home I had a few of the “special” nickels for daddy. In that cigar box they went. When my father died in 1967, those nickels were still in that cigar box, in that trunk by his bedside. To even out inheritance with my brother, I gave him the cash equivalent of the nickels. They, in the cigar box, flew back with with me to upstate New York. There they sat. Doing nothing…