The Locomotive and a Flattened Penny

In sorting through some of my ancient “treasures” the other day I ran across a flattened penny, which brought back some memories.  First, I was surprised that I have kept the penny now for more than sixty years.  It serves as a reminder of how small things are often the things that bring back good (and bad) memories of the past.

It is not a penny flattened out by a machine at a fair.  No, this is a special one flattened by a Seaboard train locomotive in Auburndale, Florida.  It occurred when I was age eleven or twelve.  Let me tell you about it.

Johnny, a neighbor boy about my same age and who lived just two houses down from me on South Oak Street in Auburndale (and someone with whom I often played), was involved in this remembrance.

For a while Johnny and I were the best of friends—and then they moved to Lakeland.  He and I were not in the same class at school.  In fact, Johnny was a little “slow,” and was in some sort of alternative educational program.  I never knew exactly what program it was; all that mattered to me was that he was a “friend” who lived nearby and was usually available when I wanted to do about any activity.

One of the things that Johnny and I often did was to go down into the orange grove south of Derby Avenue.  There we could explore the old building that housed the irrigation pipes; we could shoot at birds with our slingshots or with a BB gun, catch gopher turtles, and that sort of thing.

South of the orange grove, on down the sand road, was an open field through which the Seaboard train tracks ran.  Sometimes we would be down there playing when the train rolled through.  Most often, as I remember it, the train was usually a string of freight cars loaded with phosphate from the mines down around Bartow and Fort Meade.

One of us came up with the idea of laying some pennies on the track and having the locomotive flatten them for us.  Over the time of several days the first couple of attempts failed because the vibration of the tracks would jar the pennies off the rail before the locomotive got there.  Either that, or we could never find the pennies among all the rails, railroad ties, and rocks.  We would have nothing with us to stick the pennies to the track, so one day while playing in the grove we heard the train coming.  Quickly we each grabbed a couple of pennies and ran across the field to the track, and just in time stuck the pennies on the rail with our own spit.  All the while, the engineer was tooting the horn, and I am sure he was worrying about what these two boys were doing running toward the track, spitting, and laying something down.

But, it worked!  The problem was trying to find the pennies, for when hit by the giant rolling steel wheels of the locomotive they would go flying off.  Looking through the large rocks along the tracks we finally found a couple of them, and I have mine to this day.  Maybe I can attach it to this note and leave it as my inheritance to our children.