Fassnacht collecting a penny for every day of his 100 years

It’s always a fun time planning activities to celebrate a birthday, and a 99-year-old resident of East Park Villa has found a unique way to plan for his pending 100th. 
Ramer Fassnacht will turn 100 on March 4 of 2024 and is preparing for that occasion by collecting a penny for every day of his nearly 100 years of life. 
“I found myself wondering ‘Well, how many pennies can I collect?’” Fassnacht explained. “If I got a penny a day for every day of my life and be 100 in March, I was wondering how many I can get?” 
Doing the math on that, 100 multiplied by 365 days in a year amounts to 36,500. However, when one adds in an extra day in February every four years for leap year it comes out to 36,525 pennies, or $365.25. 
Helping Fassnacht collect pennies is his daughter, Teresa Smith, who commented that collecting and sharing coins was nothing new to her father.  
“When my daughters were little, every year for Christmas they got a set of coins (from him),” Smith explained.
Since starting the project in April, Fassnacht’s penny collection has been a fun topic around East Park Villa.
“There’s always a joke about the guy the who went to the hardware store to buy a washer,” Fassnacht said. “One guy says, ‘That’ll be 15 cents.’ The other guys says, ‘That’s too doggone much for it! I’ll take a quarter and drill a hole in and use that!’ That joke goes around once a while about that.”
Other residents and employees have pitched in their own pennies to help the veteran reach his goal. One fellow resident, Joe Miller, brought an entire milk jug full of pennies estimated to be worth up to $41.
As of November, Fassnacht had over six jars of pennies stored inside a wheeled chest in his apartment and he estimates he is about $30 dollars short of reaching his initial goal.
“I think we’ve got 14 containers but they vary (in size),” Smith explained. 
Smith picked up a penny jar to demonstrate how much it weighed. 
“It’s approximately 12 and a quarter pounds, which isn’t $20,” she commented.
The father and daughter estimated the jugs of pennies inside the chest altogether weigh approximately 55 pounds.

Collecting coppers
Counting 36,525 pennies is a daunting task on its own, but sometimes just identifying the coins can be a challenge, according to Fassnacht.
Among the pennies he has collected, he has found some where it was nearly impossible to tell if it was a penny to begin with. Completely corroded over, chipped or scratched, Smith explained that a bank wouldn’t accept them.
Other pennies, while in decent condition, wouldn’t be accepted because they were not U.S. pennies. Within the current collection, Fassnacht and Smith have found pennies from Canada and the Commonwealth of the Bahamas.
But even among the Lincoln head U.S. pennies, Fassnacht explained not all are created equal. He cited as an example the Denver Mint wheat head pennies, noting that in the 50 years they were minted the design had changed three or four times. 
“They had made them from 1909 to 1959,” he explained. “They just had one tail piece. If you’ve got a 1921 Penny if they were my all made in Denver, so they all would have a Denver mint mark on them. Some of them don’t which makes them kind of rare.”
According to the experienced coin collector, millions of wheat pennies where made, but over time disappeared after their production was discontinued.
“If they aren’t in a collector’s hands, they’re either lost or buried,” Fassnacht commented.
Other unique set of pennies the family has collected is 2009 Lincoln pennies. Instead of the familiar Lincoln head being paired with a tail of the Union shield or Lincoln Memorial, the coins feature Lincoln’s log cabin, Lincoln reading while sitting on a log, Lincoln in front of the capitol building in Illinois or the White House during Lincoln’s presidency.

A gift to give back
When he finally collects 100 years worth of pennies, Fassnacht stated that he won’t be keeping his collection for too long.
“I don’t know where else I would go with them,” he said. 
To make his birthday more sentimental, once he has collected all 36,525 pennies, he is going to donate the money to those who need it, such as local memorials or nonprofit organizations prominent in Hamilton or York Counties where he has spent his life.
“I’m going to see whether they’ll take them or maybe Habitat for Humanity would take them,” Fassnacht commented.
He said he wanted to donate his collection as a way of giving back to the places that he and his family have called home.
“More or less, it would be nicer than giving it to somebody like in Lincoln, Omaha or Lexington,” Fassnacht commented. “I don’t know anybody in Lexington. If it was for a food bank in Aurora, Hampton or McCool, then yes!”
The family is planning on celebrating not only Fassnacht’s birthday on March 4, but also his penny collection on March 10 at East Park Villa.