Time Capsule #24: coins and vending machines

 

Two days after the muddy crowd stumbled home from Woodstock, Atlantic Records released Boz Scaggs’ self-titled album.

 

 

Sales were more lead than gold or platinum. Only 20,000 copies of the album were ever sold.

 

But on the second track of Side 2, a cover of Fenton Robinson’s blues classic, “Somebody Loan Me a Dime,” Duane Allman’s guitar leads the way through a searing 11-minute blues jam, a preview of his all-too-short career with the Allman Brothers Band.

 

 

The first verse begins, “Somebody loan me a dime / I need to call my old time, used to be.”

 

Schoolmarms may wag fingers at the song’s lyrics for using the noun loan as a verb, but breaking the rules of Correct English, “CE,” has long been de rigueur in American popular music. I mean, Bob Dylan, the Nobel Literature Laureate no less, wrote and sang pseudo-illiterate lines like “when ya ain’t got nothin’, ya got nothin’ to lose” and “lay across my big brass bed.”

 

Let’s forget about the words.

 

What I’d like to think about is the dime.

 

Indeed, from the 1950s until the mid-80s, a Roosevelt dime let you call someone on a pay phone. When we were in college, for long-distance calls to parents or girlfriends, a pocketful of quarters had to be at hand.

 

A dime didn’t get you very far with the ladies, though. The Drifters’ song “On Broadway” has the line, “They say the girls are something else on Broadway,” and then asks,

 

…how ya gonna make some time

When all you got is one thin dime?

And one thin dime won't even shine your shoes (On Broadway)

 

I grew up soliciting dimes for the March of Dimes every year. In March, naturally. My Mirabeau B. Lamar Jr. High classmates and I fought polio by filling the little half-round pockets in the folder with the thin dimes we collected door to door. The class that brought back the most dimes won a prize of ice cream cones at lunch break.

 

 

That same dime (or two nickels, but not ten pennies) would also buy a Coke on ice in a plastic cup from a dorm vending machine.

 

 

Another machine dispensed paper cups of brown, coffee-flavored water and grainy hot chocolate.

 

 

A dime bought a Milky Way chocolate bar or chewing gum from all the ubiquitous vending machines.

 

 

Combined with a quarter, a dime bought a pack of filter cigarettes in machines in The Hop snack bar.

 

 

Looking back, you could say we went to college during the Copper-Nickel-Sandwich-Coin age of vending machines.

 

What we weren’t buying with personal checks or 1-dollar bills (who ever had larger than a $5 bill anyway —except dope dealers?) at Edith’s and the Bookstore, we bought with coins.

 

Gumball machines? A penny.

 

Washing and drying clothes in a dorm? Quarters.

 

The rare occasion that any of us parked a car downtown on South Main St? Coins in parking meters, or you got a ticket.

 

 

Getting through the toll plazas on turnpikes? Tossing coins in baskets mounted on the counting machines.

 

Riding buses in cities meant dropping coins in that little glass box by the driver.

 

 

Poor Charlie, the man who never returned in the Kingston Trio’s 1959 hit “M.T.A.”, didn’t have the nickel exit fare he needed to get off the train.

 

 

I remember stalls in grimy bus station restrooms that only opened when you inserted a dime and turned the knob.

 

 

Coin-operated toilets still exist in some urban areas. I saw one of these kiosk restrooms on a Palo Alto street corner earlier this year. Lucky I didn’t need to use it: the door had a scrawled Out of Service sign on the latch.

 

Next to the mirrors in those negligently cleaned bus station restrooms with that nauseating fluorescent lighting, vending machines offered little bars of soap, razors, cologne, combs, and other grooming products for the overnight traveler …as well as condoms for the optimist. Now every restroom in University of Washington buildings has a wall-mounted box full of free condoms. Okay, every men’s room does.

 

For decades, I bought local papers and the New York Times from metal vending boxes on streets and outside coffee shops. The Tacoma News Tribune and the long-gone Seattle Post-Intelligencer went for one of those thin dimes that wouldn't buy a shoeshine on Broadway. The NYT machine took two quarters for a long time, and then four. In the aftermath of the online news Apocalypse, most of the papers have folded, and all the paper machines have all disappeared.

 

Panhandlers in Nuevo Laredo, Central America, and Madrid were handed coins from my pocket. Friends who lived in London in the dreary 70s tell stories of warming up by feeding one-bar electric heaters in their cheap bedsits with 50-pence coins.

 

And entertainment!

 

Pinball machines? Coin operated. Jukeboxes at The Dot and Tony’s Pizza? A dime a song, or 3 for a quarter.

 

Not to forget coins’ place outside the economy.

 

Haven’t you looked in the fountains you’ve passed by? Full of coins.

 

And in sports, there’s the ceremonial coin toss at midfield to start football games, and New Yorkers in the right field bleachers at Yankee Stadium throw not just insults, but coins at visiting teams’ outfielders.

 

Treasure Island will always have its buried chests of gold doubloons and pieces of eight, and Eli Wallach as ‘Tuco’ will always fall face-first into the Confederate gold coins in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

 

But do you ever have coins for spending money in your pocket these days? —I rarely do.

 

On the odd occasion I pay for something with cash, I leave the change in the penny bowl on the counter. Should I absent-mindedly accept coins, when I get home, I empty my pocket into a kitchen drawer with the truck keys. Every 12 months or so, I take a little bag of coins to a CoinStar counting machine at the local grocery store and redeem them for an Amazon credit.

 

I do have some old quarters at the bottom of the truck's cupholder to pay for parking on city streets when I venture into town. Nowadays though, the Seattle parking meters only take credit cards, and Tacoma makes it hard to use coins.

 

The last time I used any of those dirty quarters caked with dried café au lait spilled from jostled cups in the console was to turn on the 3-minutes-for-a-dollar air pump at the gas station to inflate a tire with a slow leak, and one of the quarters was rejected by the machine. It might as well have been salvaged from a sunken pirate ship.

 

Retail checkout lines take credit cards, Venmo, PayPal, or ApplePay, and lots of other e-payment systems. It’s as much an anachronism to call the checker’s machine a “cash register” as it is to call the refrigerator an “ice box.” Where I shop, cash is tolerated, but not really welcomed.

 

Times have changed, and these days coins ain’t what they used to be.

 

I read that pennies cost the mint 2.5 cents each to produce now. Yogi complained 60 years ago that “a nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.” In fact, it costs the U.S. Mint more than 10¢ to manufacture those new nickels that still ain’t worth a dime.

 

For years there has been floating around the very reasonable idea that metal one-dollar coins would be cheaper to circulate than paper bills, which have a short life and quickly have to be pulped. Fine, but how many Susan B. Anthony or Sacajawea dollars have you had in your pocket lately?

 

I’ve never even seen anything other than a picture of the brassy Sacajawea coins, and they’re already out of production. The newer coins are widely used in El Salvador, where the US dollar has been the de facto currency for over twenty years now. You can’t make this stuff up, although I’ve tried often enough.

 

Pundits grab eyeballs, announcing that we are headed toward a cash-free economy. Sounds plausible enough. After all, we’re all doing RFID sticker tolls on bridges and roads, automated electronic payments, ACH transfers, and using our credit cards to pay for more and more things. I am, even though it's ridiculous to use a credit card to pay for a 43¢ galvanized carriage bolt at the hardware store. I arrive at the counter with empty pockets, except for my cash-free wallet and phone.

 

But what about all those ATMs out there? What do people do with the $20 bills they are withdrawing?

 

Certainly not airline travel. Try using cash to buy a drink or something to eat in a coach seat on an airplane, or getting one of those luggage carts in the Arrivals Concourse of an airport. Card only, please.

 

What’s left are cash transactions that have a whiff of illegality. Think of your house cleaner without a Green Card or the tax-dodging contractor who will do the job for 20% less if paid in cash. Of course, if you’re out on the street buying sex or drugs, your local pimp or dealer ain’t gonna take no VISA card or a personal check.

 

Until recently, gambling was all cash. My father’s business partner in Laredo had a desk drawer with $10,000 in bills in it. His wife didn’t know about it, until she became a widow. When she came to clean out his office, my dad had to explain to her that the money was her husband’s NFL betting stash.

 

The Native American casino down the road is fine with credit cards, but high-stakes poker games in strip mall backrooms are cash-only.

 

American $100 bills are the coin of the realm, mixed-metaphorically to speak, in the worldwide crime economy.

 

How do we know?

 

Because 80% of the Benjamins in existence are held outside the United States. People in Russia, Colombia, and Nigeria aren’t using those $100 bills to buy groceries. Impossible to track, large American bills have been used for avoiding taxes and as cryptocurrency since long before BitCoin. That’s why law enforcement requires that you file IRS Form 8300 for transactions paid in cash over $10,000.

 

My dad amused his spell-bound grandchildren by telling stories about boyhood summers during The Great Depression at his uncle’s farm in DeRidder, Louisiana, where he helped with the plowing behind a mule. Soon enough, our children will be telling their own incredulous children how granddad used to reminisce about using coin-operated washing machines and buying cigarettes and 3-minute rock songs with metal coins back in Antiquity .

 

Who knows? When our grandchildren are our age, coins may only exist in ancestral coin collections and museum exhibits.

 

Boz Scaggs sang about his “old time used to be” girl.

 

We 75-year-olds idly muse about old-time-used-to-be things. Like penny loafers.

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