Pennies pay off when Ohio collector cashes in
By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
To describe Gene Sukie as "penny-wise and pound-foolish" would be seriously underestimating the man.
He has, after all, collected nearly 10,000pounds of pennies in his lifetime - the greatest feat of spare change collecting yet recorded.
Tuesday, it will all come to an end.
The retired glass-factory supervisor, 78, will cash in what remains of his record-setting collection of 1,407,550 pennies, worth $14,075.50, accumulated over 34 years.
"I didn't set out to set a record, but they add up," Sukie said. "It was something I could save without hurting our household."
Pennies saved from his childhood paper route paid for a $45 Schwinn bicycle in 1939. "Top of the line," he said.
He cashed in his entire collection of 40,000 pennies in 1970 to pay for a daughter's wedding. After the ceremony, he started fresh with an empty cigar box.
Friends and family heard Sukie would make change. Co-workers would leave five pennies on his desk; he'd give them a nickel. A friend gave him his biggest stash: a trash can with more than $100 in pennies.
He collected pennies at a rate of 112 per day. "He'd give me dirty looks if I tried to make exact change at the grocery store," said Violet, his wife of 57 years.
Sukie inspected every penny. He separated them by year and mint location. He wrapped pennies of the same year and mint into 28,851 rolls.
He stored the fifty-cent rolls in 559 boxes in his basement.
He documented the contents and date of each roll in a loose-leaf binder that is now 3-inches thick. "He is a bit meticulous," Violet said.
Her husband protests good-naturedly that he was not obsessed: "Sometimes I'd go two or three weeks without touching a penny." He pauses: "Then, I'd roll for two or three hours. It was very relaxing."
Until lightning struck, twice.
Electrical storms knocked out his living room television, directly above his penny collection. "I thought the copper in pennies may be attracting lightning," Sukie says.
His notebook shows he wrapped his last roll 8/07/04.
Getting rid of the pennies was harder than collecting them. "Nobody wants pennies," he says.
One bank refused to take them. His credit union limited him to $300 worth every Monday. He lugged pennies to the coin-counting machine at the local grocery store.
One day, he met the man who serviced the coin machines. "Do you make house calls?" Sukie asked. "How much you got?" the employee responded.
Coinstar, a Bellevue, Wash., company with coin-counting machines in 11,000 grocery stores, set up two machines to count Sukie's pennies and will finish today. The old Coinstar record was 792,141 pennies turned in by Sylvester Neal of Anchorage, in 2001.
So what's next for Sukie? He says he may finally have time to index his pencil collection.
