WINCHELL WAS AHEAD OF HIS TIME

In those late 1940s and early 1950s days, with postwar inflation beginning to take its firm hold, a person soon came to realize that a single dollar could no longer buy a candy bar, a pack of chewing gum, a pay telephone call, a cup of coffee, a couple donuts, a trolley car or bus ride, admission for two to a movie theater, and a hot fudge sundae for your girl friend after the show. On a particular evening, we heard the famed, yet not exactly lovable columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell voice a contemporary era joke over the airways.

The semi-grim witticism featured the proverbial fellow asking his friend “Hey, did you hear the government is going to stop making one dollar bills?”, to which his compatriot typically answered “Why?”
Then came the first speaker with “What good are they?”

Although Walter’s point wasn’t quite that true at the time, more than a half-century has since gone by, and the joke’s underlying principle has not only remained, but expanded considerably.

Today, we fail to understand why the U.S. Mint continues producing coins below a quarter. By updating Winchell’s punch line, we sincerely ask why waste time, effort, and needed government expenditure churning out pennies, nickels, and dimes? What on earth can a person buy today with any such chunk of metal? The price of smaller value items could easily be rounded up a mite to arrive at the nearest twenty-five cent piece multiple as appropriate, and the consumer would barely notice or probably not even care.

In these days of world economic crisis brought on by our Republican masterminds when they were calling the shots, we believe our idea has merit.