By CHRIS DAINES and KELLI HART
Friday, August 1, 2008
A 1943-S bronze Lincoln cent.
What does $72,500 get you these days? If coin collecting is your thing, it gets you a penny.
Steve Contursi, a Laguna Beach resident who owns Dana Point-based Rare Coin Wholesalers, has acquired the 1943 penny that was mistakenly cast out of a bronze planchet – the prepared metal disc before it is formed into a coin.
The coin was originally found in 1944 by Kenneth S Wing Jr. while collecting Lincoln pennies. Wing died and his heirs, who never saw the coin until they opened the safety-deposit box, took the coin to Contursi's rare-currency company to be evaluated. When he determined it was authentic, he bought it.The coin was part of an error by the U.S. Mint in 1943 when the mint switched from using copper for pennies to steel. Copper was needed at the time to make bullets for World War II, and the few pennies struck in copper were perhaps an employee joke or mistake, Contursi said.
The mistake was widely known by coin collectors at the time as only a few pennies were struck in copper in the U.S.
"It’s a pretty well recognized rarity," Contursi said. "Being a coin collector since I was a little child, I remember people were always looking for the penny struck in copper instead of steel."
A simple magnet test failed to attract the San Francisco-minted bronze coin. A normal penny in 1943 was cast out of zinc-coated steel to save copper for the World War II war efforts.
Contursi purchased the rare coin from Wing’s sons, which is even rarer as it came from the mint in San Francisco, which released only a handful of the copper pennies, about seven of which have been found.
Contursi showed the rare coin at the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money in Baltimore recently and had planned to display the coin, and more of Rare Coin Wholesalers' large collection of rare currency, at the Long Beach Coin, Stamp and Collectibles expo in September. However, he said Monday that he expects to sell the penny this week.
"A coin like this comes by very rarely," Contursi said.