Piney Woods Philosopher: The power of 5 cents

By BILL COBBS/Columnist

Piney was thinking about the good old days of yore when a penny meant something!  Nowadays, the copper nuisances are often found on the pavement or floors of buildings and one looks at them and grins but do we pick them up, thought Piney? Nope, hit ain’t worth the trouble!
But Piney being born of parents wealthy (is that the word?) enough to give him an allowance of 5¢....that is five cents, one nickel a day, he well remembered how valuable a penny was in 1929-1935, the years of his vast dependence upon that allowance.
Here is how it worked, reminisced Piney:
Piney left his elementary school at 3:30 in Rocky Mount. He walked from the school on College Avenue to his Dad’s office, perhaps a mile away in the small village. Usually, his Dad would be examining a patient on his arrival, but if so, Miss Carrie Schneider, his Dad’s secretary-nurse, would pay him his nickel, his one five-cent piece for the day.
It was a wonder!
“Miss Carrie, kin ah have five pennies instead uh that nickel?” 
She’d comply, and the kid that became Piney would rush off. First, one had to decide what to do with the fortune. Here were some of the alternatives: The biggest thing was for five cents, one could go to Williams Bakery, and have a huge five-inch across sugared cinnamon bun with cream sauce. That was good for several hours or a day of munching but it did cost the whole five cents.
Or one could go to Coy Brammers Five-and-Ten cent store and buy for one cent a jawbreaker, big as a taw marble and suck it all day, or a small bag of lemon drops for three cents.
Best of all, at the Downtown Franklin Drugstore, for four cents one could have a soda with chocolate syrup and carbonated water, or for the whole five cents, a large glass of chocolate soda with a huge lump of your choice of flavor of ice cream in it.
If you were more enterprising, you could get a fish hook and line and a small bit of lead for five cents and go cut a pole from a small tree and dig up worms and go fishing and bring home to cook a mess of fish for the family supper.
Piney, the brat, soon wanted more money than his allowance so he went to work selling magazines on Saturday and sometimes after school. Two publishers dropped off his magazines at the train station (without the train stopping!) on Thursday afternoon at 4, so Piney had to rush from school to be by the railroad track at the station when the porter threw his two packages (one from Liberty magazine and one from Saturday Evening Post) out of the speeding freight car.
Piney sold each of them for five cents and was allowed to keep a penny of each sale! So, he usually sold all 50 of each and was earning a dollar, or 100 of the above purchase possibilities!
It was a great time and a tasty time, but, oh Lord, where has it gone?

A writer, Bill Cobbs divides his time between Florida and Southwest Virginia.