No Mashing the Maple-Leaf Penny

I’ll pick up again with scenic wonders of the Canadian Rockies and even North Dakota on Sunday or, the weekend proves really busy, Monday. Today I have to take up the topic of elongated souvenir pennies in Canada.

Most of my life, I’d ignored those machines, usually found at tourist destinations, that mash pennies into souvenirs. But while we were in Florida early last year, Lilly started asking for them, and I mashed her a few from the Kennedy Space Center, the Florida Aquarium in Tampa and so on.

By the time we went to Yellowstone last August, she’d become a collector, mostly pennies from machines she found herself, but also a few from machines that I’d encountered, such as one at the Central Park Zoo when I was there by myself last September. At that zoo, I also bought her an album in which to keep her mashed pennies, since by then we had quite a few knocking around loose. I’m happy buy her mashed pennies because, like postcards, it’s a fairly cheap way to get place-specific mementos. She now has 22 from seven U.S. states and one Canadian province.

Lilly kept an eye out for mash machines on this trip. True to zoo form, there was one at the Red River Zoo in Fargo. Would there be any in Canada? Sure enough, there were. Same concept, same kind of hand-crank equipment, but a couple of differences. For one thing, each souvenir cent cost C$1, or about US90¢, while the U.S. price is 50¢ (or 51¢, counting the penny you take out of circulation). So it cost a loonie. A little annoying, but I was willing to pay.

But that wasn’t the peculiar thing. Each penny-mashing machines that I saw in Canada sported a tray built into the side, like a coin-return tray, except that it was full of U.S. cents. A small sign said to use these for making souvenir pennies. So we did.

This week, while wasting time on the Internet, I came across a web site dedicated to the mashed-penny hobby. According to that site, in Canada it’s unlawful to mutilate currency for any reason, as opposed to in the U.S., where it’s illegal only for fraudulent purposes. Just another example of the regulatory-happy Canadian federal government, eh? Anyway, to avoid legal entanglements, the owners of the penny-mashers in the Great White North stock ’em with cheap yet spanking-new copper-coated/zinc-base portraits of Abe Lincoln, which visitors to Canadian tourist attractions are free to mash to their heart’s content.