My wife is a penny hoarder. For years she has kept a jar of pennies on the kitchen counter which she regularly adds to by saving the pennies in her pocket change, cleaning out my pockets and stopping to pick up every penny she sees lying in the street.

My wife is not a coin collector by any stretch of the imagination. In fact she knows absolutely nothing about numismatics and does not understand why anyone would pay more than face value for an old coin.

When my wife was a little girl, her mother told her that it was good luck if you found a penny. Ever since then, she has been hooked on hoarding pennies. If one penny is lucky, think how much luck must surround a hoard of over a thousand pennies.

Last week my wife announced that she could not squeeze another penny into the jar on the kitchen counter so she was going to cash them all in at the bank and start over. While this may not seem the logical action of an admitted penny hoarder, it makes sense when you consider that there is not an extra inch of unused counter space in our tiny kitchen. My wife either had to make room in the penny jar or stop acquiring every wayward penny that crossed her path.

It took about five years for my wife to fill up her penny jar which held about 1200 pennies. My wife never looked very closely at the pennies that she saved, but she did mention that she thought that several of them were quite old and that the last time she had cashed in her pennies several had Indian Heads on them. When I heard that, I knew that I had to go through her hoard before she cashed them in.

It took me a full evening to look at all of pennies in her hoard. I didn't find any Indian Head Pennies but I did find seven Wheaties the oldest dating from 1940. Although none of the Wheat Pennies were very valuable I was surprised by how much fun I had. It really took me back to my childhood. Every time I found another Wheatie I felt like a kid finding the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks.

I plan to put the Wheaties aside until my grandchildren are old enough to be introduced to collecting. Then I can slip them into the pocket change that I give them to go through and watch their faces light up as they discover these treasures from the past.

The attached picture shows the seven wheat pennies that I found in my wife's hoard.

Top roll: 1940, 1940-S, 1943 (Steel penny)

Middle roll: 1950-D, 1953-D, 1952-D

Bottom roll: 1953-D

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