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Penny Lovers of America
P.O. Box 6141
Somerset, NJ 08873-6141
732-873-3827
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Penny saved could equal $1.6M earned
THE HOME NEWS AND TRIBUNE, October 24, 1995
By Peter Genovese, Passing
Give us your isolated, abused and trampled upon, lonely and hidden pennies yearning to be loved and useful. You'll find us in desks, kitchens and dresser drawers, in closets, behind and under furniture, in shoe boxes, under and between car seats and in piggy banks, forgotten and therefore nonproductive. We lead a humble and hermit-like existence, not fully appreciated ...
You've got bottles and containers full of them, and you can't get rid of them - or don't want to, for some strange reason.
They are the bane of banks, the scourge of everyday existence.
Penny. The very name exudes worthless-ness. Richard Barber wants to change your thinking about the lowly penny. He wants your pennies, too, and not because he'd like to have the correct change every time he goes to the supermarket. I "Did you know that a pound of pen-nies is $1.64?" the Franklin resident asks. Or that if you wanted to make a mile-high stack of pennies, you'd need 1,077,120 of them?
Barber is probably the country's number one penny lover. He is founder, after all, of Penny Lovers of America. The group's purpose is to send disadvantaged high school students from around the nation to college - through donations of pennies.
There is a penny-filled wine bottle in my closet that I've been lugging around since college- why, I have no idea. Maybe I knew I'd run into Barber some day. He's getting all my pennies, and I hope he takes the wine bottle, too.
Barber, director of purchasing for the University of Medicine and Den-tistry of New Jersey's various cam-puses, and a deacon at First Baptist Church in Franklin, founded Penny Lovers in 1984. He has conducted smaller-scale penny drives, but this is the first year the program has gone nationwide.
President Clinton has designated this week as National Penny Charity Week, and actor Ossie. Davis and ac-tress Ruby Dee are national spokes-persons for the campaign, which hopes to round up 1 million pounds of pennies and turn them into schol-arship money.
That's $1.64 million.
The motto of Penny Lovers (for information, call 908-873-3827) is "Character, Scholarship and Patriotism." Barber believes there is no limit to what people can do, united, with a sense of purpose.
Minnesota Vikings quarterback Warren Moon is among the personalities who have signed five-year commitments to donate a penny a day for five years ($18.25) to the campaign.
And to think it all started because Barber swallowed five pennies as a kid. "What possessed me to do such a foolish thing, I'll never know," he says, laughing. "Forty-two years later, I jumped up in bed one night and for some reason was inspired to write 'A Penny Speaks.' "
Let the pennies come forth from the North, the South, the East and the West. From the great cities of America ... to small country towns such as Trenton, and Seaboard, North Carolina; villages and sleepy hamlets in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Arkansas ... all the states and territories. From prison cells, to military installations around the globe, let the pennies come!
If that doesn't make you run to the closet and round up your pennies and call Barber, nothing will.
Sure beats swallowing them.
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