Maybe an example will help you understand: when you stomp on a bug you smash it, when you put a board on a bug and push down, you mash it, and when you step on a bug, you smush it. Smush has quite a few more meanings, but we won’t go into them here.

A smushed penny is just a little bit different. The only way you can get a real, honest-to-God, smushed penny is to put a regular penny on a railroad track and have a train run over it. When the train passes over it, you’ll have a penny a little thicker than aluminum foil and about the diameter of a half dollar, but you can still see the Lincoln head and markings on the front and back.

Now I’m sure that a smushed penny doesn’t sound like it would be too valuable to most of you, but back in my elementary school days it was a very highly prized commodity. A regular penny, even back then, had a minimal value, but a smushed penny could be bartered for any number of prized objects and valuable services. At different times I traded a smushed penny for a two-bladed pocketknife, 14 cat-eye and 2 genuine agate marbles (which I promptly lost playing “for keeps”), a purple baseball cap with a Humble Wildcats logo, and for a smushed penny made into a necklace, the prettiest girl in the fifth grade agreed to be my girlfriend for a month.

In order to understand why a smushed penny had such high value back then, you’ll need to know just a little history: Humble Elementary opened in 1949 as a brand new, state-of-the-art school with all the modern educational tools and latest architectural designs. The only problem was that the playground behind the school was directly adjacent to a railroad track and there was no fence between the playground and the track.

The only thing between the children and the kid magnet railroad track was a ditch where the railroad’s roadbed had been pulled up, so from day one there was a problem with kids being attracted to the tracks. Also, from day one came the edict that any student caught on or even near the railroad tracks before, during or after school hours would be subject to disciplinary action -- and back in those days disciplinary action usually meant three things. First a lecture and a paddling from the teacher that caught you, second a paddling and lecture from the school principal, and third, an ass-whipping from your daddy when you got home for getting into trouble at school. From that, it’s easy to see why only the more adventuresome and foolhardy among us were in the smushed penny business.

Truthfully, I didn’t do my pennies around the school. I’d save up and gather up and con my sisters until I had 10 or 15 pennies and then I’d go through the woods behind my house to the railroad tracks and put them on the tracks there. After the train passed, I’d usually be able to find about half of them worth keeping. The rush of the train passing either blew the rest away or they didn’t smush good for one reason or another, but the 6 or 8 I wound up with made me a hero around school for the next several days.

I suppose you’re thinking that if smushed pennies were so valuable, why not smushed nickels, dimes or quarters? The simple answer is that we rarely ever even saw nickels, dimes or quarters -- and when we did, we had much better uses to put them to other than smushing them.

Weren’t things simple and fun back when we were kids? Sometimes I think I’d like to go there again. Maybe I’ll go put a penny on the railroad track -- do you reckon they’d arrest me or maybe haul me off to the asylum?