Brick

PHILADELPHIA — While colum­nist con­fer­ees last Fri­day toured both the Lib­erty Bell and Inde­pen­dence Hall, I had a 40-year clo­sure issue with Ben­jamin Franklin so My Beloved and I skipped the latter.

When I was age 10 3/4, late sum­mer 1968, Dad had busi­ness in Cam­den, N.J. Time for a road trip! From Fort Smith, we first drove my sis­ter to the Uni­ver­sity of Ten­nessee at Knoxville, where she would have been start­ing her sopho­more or junior year. The east­bound des­ti­na­tion, for Mom and me, wasn’t Jer­sey but Philadel­phia (we then drove to New Orleans for busi­ness then back to Arkansas).

The Penn­syl­va­nia stop turned into an oft-told fam­ily story: We saw the main his­tor­i­cal sites in an after­noon, end­ing at Christ Church Bur­ial Ground. We reflected on the grave-and-a-half-wide flat stone cov­er­ing the remains of Franklin and his wife, Deb­o­rah. Being such an old church­yard we explored it, see­ing rest­ing places of other sign­ers of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. It was dusk and soon time for din­ner. But the gate was locked. Who­ever closed the ceme­tery for the night didn’t see we still were there. We shouted to passers-by. The care­taker was just down the street, for­tu­nately, and he returned to let us out.

Hav­ing not been back to Philly since, I had to see the grave again. Coin­ci­den­tally, it was clos­ing time again — who ever heard of shut­ting down a tourist site at 4 p.m. in the mid­dle of vis­i­tors’ sea­son? The two young bucks at the gate let us in for five min­utes, until 4:15, just to see Franklin’s grave, for half price, a dol­lar apiece.

Lin­ger­ing at the site were a man and his two young daugh­ters. As we approached the girls were jump­ing on the flat stone, about 8 inches off the ground, and the dad was doing noth­ing. Sac­ri­lege! To make it worse, we real­ized he was pitch­ing pen­nies on this hal­lowed spot.

“Finally, got a ‘heads.’ Let’s go, kids,” he said.

We took their place and saw dozens of coins on the marker, mostly but not all pen­nies. Jews put a peb­ble on a grave as a mark of respect, but this was not that. This seemed to be deface­ment, because Franklin said, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” and here pen­nies were being the oppo­site of being saved.

Ever the jour­nal­ist, I asked one of the mon­ey­chang­ers at the reli­gious property’s gate. He said it was a tra­di­tion. How long? “As long as I can remem­ber,” the obvi­ously native Philadel­phian said, and the other guy nod­ded assent. Why? “You try to get heads.” Why? “Heads is good luck.”

Luck is not a con­cept asso­ci­ated with Franklin the prag­ma­tist, but the tra­di­tion began long after he could have coined an apho­rism to con­demn it. The tra­di­tion had to have begun in recent decades, unless that old care­taker with cataracts and few teeth had removed the pen­nies for the day, before the Pol­lock fam­ily arrived in 1968.

Got to accept these things, I sup­pose. Research con­firmed the coin-to-fountain adap­ta­tion. Stu Bykof­sky, in the sem­i­nal Stu Bykofsky’s Lit­tle Black Book: A Gentleman’s Guide to Philadel­phia (1995, Black Tooth Press), writes, “It’s tra­di­tion to toss pen­nies (for A Penny Saved Is A Penny Earned) on the engraved stone that cov­ers his grave” (pg. 91).

If Byko writes it, it’s so. –30–