Was thinking about how much fun a teenager like me used to
have on fifty cents. Four bits. Two quarters. Half a dollar. Fiddy cents. Half
a Shekel. Oh marvelous coin! To some, still a symbol of America’s greatness.
It brings to mind the great day of my youth when the latest
Elvis Presley single would come to the music store in our town. Sainted Mother
and I would have been saving for weeks. The news would spread that He had just
issued a ditty called Don’t Be Cruel,
and we would head to town. For the one coin you could get a 45-rpm version, the kind
with the big hole in the middle. We would be in “tall cotton” for a week or
more.
You could take a girl to the best movie in town for two
quarters. Of course, that didn’t include Cokes, popcorn, or Bon-Bons if she had
a sweet tooth. A boy needed two more “halvers” for that.
Later, fifty cents would buy you two gallons of gas, or a whole
evening of “dragging Main,” or hanging out at the “Wagon Wheel.”
For the wicked, the same amount or so would buy you three or
four packages of cigarettes so you could look cool in front of the other kids.
Oh, and the coins were great for flipping. (Quarters just never measured up). And
you could even clasp one in your eye and pretend to be a German prince.
Some kids would spend months banging on the edges of a coin
with a spoon, They said you could make a ring of one if you did it long enough.
I never saw a completed one, though. Attention spans had already started to
wither. These days, they give kids expensive drugs to help them concentrate. A
fifty-cent piece and a spoon would work just fine, every bit as well as molasses
and a feather.
They quit making them—fifty-cent pieces— somewhere along the
line. Why? I don’t know. I always found them useful and it felt reassuring to
carry one in your pocket. Their disappearance, as I remember it, coincided with
the decision to quit making quarters out of silver. As far as I was concerned, both
decisions amounted to “currency-debasement” and ushered in a whole era of instability
in our lives.
Now, the only memory of this most wondrous coin resides in
the name of a music rapper who calls himself “50 Cent.”
I still keep a couple around though, to remind me of those
days that we use as an example of when America was great. I like the coin
better than the symbol. If you think about it:
Fifty cents was less than a woman earned for filling a man’s
dollar-an-hour job back then.
If you weren’t white, fifty cents only bought you a balcony
seat at the movies, assuming the theater had a balcony.
Some families ate on little more than fifty cents a week.
There were kids my age who had never held a fifty-cent piece
in their hand.
Oh, but if you found a buddy who also had a fifty-cent
piece, you could buy (or get someone to buy for you) a six-pack of beer.
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