Susan Be Anachronism: The Dollar Coin Story

Like many of you, I've attempted to mail death threats to various celebrity personalities only to get to the post office and find the desks closed. Without human help, like most of us, I resort to these mechanical stamp-dispensing machines, and like most of us, with only large bills I have to buy stamps with a twenty and what do I get in return? I handful of gold Sacagawea coins. And as is no doubt a common occurrence, I immediately think I've been swindled with Showbiz Pizza Place tokens and trash the entire post office, leading police on a manhunt for several days until things cool down. But it doesn't solve the big question: What's with these dollar coins?

Explaining how and why they get into the vending machines would be a long and arduous process, and I would be stepping on the toes of a Gerald Rivera Fox News special that's currently being developed. Instead, I'll give a quick history of the dollar bill in coin form.

Anyone with piddling knowledge of U.S. history can tell you of the great bout of floods in the west during the late 1800s, and I just have. Early settlers shared the sentiment of our forefathers that dollar coins were a tool of the monarchy for keeping us in line. You could hear rich people coming a mile away by the clang-clang in their pants and that's how the king knew who to grab and shake until all the money came out. Americans, particularly the rich white ones who were making the laws, thought paper dollars were a great way to keep it quiet who had money and who didn't. And just so they could hear the poor coming, everything less than a dollar was made in coin form. Originally all coins were made from gold and really ended up fucking up a good system since a penny cost $3 worth of gold to make when they first started. The freshman American government decided to switch to low-cost metal alloys for coins of various worth before they started to lose their asses.

However, because of the great Western floods, any settlers of the West and tourists would soon find their clothes soaked and their money soiled. The great Western floods brought about a lot of adaptions in American products, particularly the highwater pants I wore in my youth, but we'll save that for future columns and possible therapy sessions. One of the biggest adaptions was the return of the dollar coin.

Originally only available in the west or localized flood areas, the dollar coin became novel because you could bite it and pretend to know a lot about money, even if you were a dipshit. Especially in the west, it was also cooler to throw a coin on the bar and buy a beer for the entire town, even though sometimes the bartender wouldn't know about the existence of dollar coins and assumed you were trying to scam him with a nickel, resulting in frequent ass-beatings and bar-bannings. But the dollar coin maintained what we could call "cult status" in America for a number of years, particularly among a sect of Reverend Moon followers in the 1970s known as the "coinies."

Sacagawea herself, if you're curious, was not a real Native American woman, but based on an Asian girl Franklin Mint founder Ben Franklin was sleeping with. For the design, and name, a group of Franklin Mint pranksters picked an easy Indian girl rumored to have slept with all travelers going west, including Lewis and Clark, and her name was Gawea. "Sack-a-Gawea for me!" was a popular cry among frontiersman of the day and made for a great inside joke for clever people who got it.

In today's paper and plastic economy, dollar coins aren't very practical and can't be doodled on or have phone numbers printed on them, which is all that people use a dollar bill for these days anyway, so the dollar coin is still produced for coin-collecting dweebs and old people who love shiny things. Typically they're so small in number most banks carry few of them, and prefer to deal in paper money since most bankers grew up with a Monopoly obsession, but dollar coins are still around, if you look hard enough, and you come across tons of them if you ever make the mistake of going to the post office with nothing less than a twenty dollar bill.

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