Blogs

By Linda W. Curtis

Joe Huxley was a lucky man. Not only did he have a large bathtub in his home, he also had a shower in a second-floor bathroom. Good thing, because Joe threw his extra change in the bathtub from his vending machine repair job. So, he used the shower upstairs instead.

After several years, the bathtub bottom could no longer be seen and Joe periodically ran hot water with soapy suds to keep the coins clean, after swishing them with a broom. Joe eventually used a shovel to cleanse the coins, and even brought in a power cleaner with a hose to rinse them well.

The time came, however, when the tub was full, clean, but too full.

Joe's bathroom of this older house was built during the Great Depression when building materials were expensive and carpenters improvised by setting floor joists farther apart. Naturally, that weakened the support for the ever-increasing weight. Since Joe showered upstairs, he didn't notice the disintegration of the floor under the first-floor bathtub filled with coins. That is until...

Well, it was the year of the tremor. No one had ever heard of an earthquake in the area, but it began with a shudder, then a rattle, then an up-and-down pipe joint-snapping motion. The drain hole in the bathtub popped up and out of alignment and the coins flowed into the exit pipe, flushed with water from Joe's shower upstairs.

After the tremor, village workers drove by looking for ruptures on fire hydrant lines and were amazed at the coins flowing up and out of Joe’s front lawn.

Joe had just gotten up and showered. Still in his blue bathrobe, he saw a village truck out front and lots of coins. He flew downstairs and stepped out the door and immediately saw what had happened.

He argued with the men as they wanted to shovel all the coins into their truck. Instead, he persuaded them to bring their giant suction street cleaner to vacuum it all up and blow the coinage into a pile on the front lawn.

A news reporter caught the action. There was Joe in the background barefoot and in his blue robe, watching the coin pyramid grow taller. The next day’s front page announced, Coin collector benefits from tremor.

Traffic around Joe’s house increased as sightseers snapped cell phone photos. A few drove their cars onto the lawn and grabbed a handful of coins. Joe had no choice but to put a fence around the mound.

The tremor created havoc on the town’s water and sewer pipes, dislodging and breaking pipes. Actually, it led to replacing outdated lead pipes for safer new pipes. Joe’s street was one of the first to have old pipes dug out and replaced, which was a good thing.

A stone-lined tunnel that led down to the river was discovered in front of Joe's house. That exit was blocked and undetectable where it met the river.

The state archeological agency was called and the exit was hand-shoveled and opened. The workers carefully video recorded the tunnel that led to Joe’s house. The tunnels concealed an entry wall in the basement. That was a surprise as the stones covering the door perfectly matched the wall.

Artifacts were collected, mostly tools, and dated to bootlegging during prohibition. The local town's historic society was interested in displaying the equipment used in the fermenting process. A small leather-bound book — a journal — was sent off to a lab for special scrutiny so as not to damage the fragile pages. That revealed an extensive operation that employed many people.

The local high school math teacher saw a potential math problem. Joe agreed to let him put up this printed sign on the fence: “Calculate how many coins, no pennies, are in this stacked pyramid on Joe’s lawn. Hint. Count the number of mixed coins in a measured box first. The four-sided pyramid was three by four feet, but cone-shaped with a five-foot diameter after a heavy storm.

The town’s historic society wanted the bath tub brought out and the coins replaced for a realistic photo. Joe said no. They were also interested in the bootleggers' tunnel, and he allowed guys with metal detectors sweeping the lawn around the house to enter the tunnel that led to the river and downstream.

Joe was quite unnerved by all the attention and requests for interviews and had retreated into the house, where he took off his jacket and flung it into the closet. It hit the back wall and a creaking noise followed. A door in the closet wall opened to a hidden room loaded with stash. Oh, no!

Screens, buckets, jars and more were in this long narrow room. Turns out, it was a tea leaf prep room that preceded the bootlegging operation. Apparently making booze was more profitable and replaced the tea business. A few coins on the floor verified the approximate dates of the tea prep room, and historians were now abuzz with the family history, now long gone.

When he saw himself in Historic Events Magazine, Joe was pleased. That inspired a grandiose plan. He hosted an open house on Saturdays, charged a fee and gave tours on the first floor, which he turned into a museum. Part of the tour included the tilted bathtub with the floor damage underneath. 

He allowed visitors to refill the tub with coins, a bucket at a time. They then used a scale to subtract the weight of the bucket from the tub's full weight. A low table built alongside the pyramid of coins allowed visitors to spread out a bucketful and tally the rows of quarters, dimes and nickels.

Families enjoyed eating cookies with quarter- and nickel-stamped face impressions. The retired lady next door needed extra income, and Joe paid her from the fees for the Saturday cookie batch. She also made counterfeit cookies made of sawdust and dry wall plaster for souvenirs. She also created jewelry, making  a hole in each and threading a ribbon for a necklace.

Visitors entered their data on a chalkboard that included the number of dimes, nickels and quarters per bucket, and the results were a full spectrum of low, medium and high numbers of coins.

Joe covered his walls with old maps and framed historic photos, including ones from the Depression era with a bootleg still. He displayed some artifacts as well.

A statistics teacher had his students graph the results, and his more adept students figured the weight out of the kinds of coins that were in each bucket. Yes, even individual coins were weighed. The local reporter entered the finds in the newspaper’s family page, and circulation increased, pleasing the editor and reporters who received a raise in pay.

This story has no ending because it never ended. Joe still gives tours and school buses still pull up in front of the house that now has a simulated cone of coins out front and a silly sign of Joe in a rocker in the bathtub filled with coins, waving.

— Linda W. Curtis

Linda W. Curtis is a botanist who has written extensively about Carex sedge plants in books and scientific articles.