It was our sanctuary.
In a tiny town in rural, Northern Pennsylvania, the college dominated the commercial landscape. Unfortunately, the night life suffered for this. There were a handful of bars along the main street in Meadville, each one a carbon copy of the last. The music was loud, the beer was cheap crap, and the clientele was drunk and rowdy. Locals and students that sought refuge from the dark, loud, sweaty watering holes had to go to the other place.
The beer was still cheap crap, but nobody ever complained about that.
Walking through the door, I first noticed the the hot, sulfur-yellow lighting, and the immaculately well-scrubbed terra cotta colored industrial ceramic floor tile. Every wall was paneled with pine boards, the aging varnish thick and dark like molasses.
I didn’t even see the pennies, at first. But as I approached the bar for my Miller Lite, passing the old cigarette vending machine, my vision filled with gleaming copper. The wall behind the bar was a great clock: a mosaic of clean and painted copper pennies. The bar top was covered with pennies. The opposite wall, which ran the length of the entire building, was another penny mosaic: a street map of Meadville both artful and practical. Every penny was meticulously placed — spaced evenly and glued perfectly flush against the substrate. The same honey-colored shellac sealed the bar and the walls.
In the back corner, a glass case displayed two scale models atop a green lawn of astroturf. The first, in some manner of wry meta-commentary, was the Lincoln Memorial, and the second the Jefferson Memorial. As with the murals, the models were constructed with the precision of a Swiss clock master. Our eyes wide with wonder, my companion and I were wordless for several minutes. Then, in a voice high with puzzled excitement, she exclaimed, “WHO DID THIS?”
“A madman.”
The reply had come from Jimmy, whom we had yet to meet, passing behind us and rolling a fresh full keg along the floor. Small and tidy, he had the careful grooming of a military man. His silver hair was buzz-cut, and his well-ironed tee shirt was tucked into his faded, clean jeans. His sun-soaked hide was as orange as his pennies, and the teeth beneath his bristly mustache were tobacco-stained like the pine walls. On a busy weekend night like this, Jimmy never stopped moving. There was never a single human tending to the bar beside Jimmy himself, and so he did everything from hauling heavy kegs to making the pickled eggs and ham sandwiches on white bread — crusts cut away with care — the only menu items at The Other Place.
Slight but strong, Jimmy was one of those men of indeterminate age. Each day, while his patrons were reading a college-provided copy of The Times and drinking coffee, Jimmy was making his beer run. Most bar owners would have their beer kegs delivered by the distributor, but Jimmy didn’t see the need for this. He wheeled a flat-bed cart down the broken and pitted cobblestone streets, (which visitors thought were very quaint and charming, and the rest of us found incredibly inconvenient,) to the beer distributor a block away. There, he and a young employee at the distributor would load the cart with a single keg, and off he’d go, carefully wheeling his precious cargo back to the bar. He might make several trips each day, doing it this way, but a precise and deliberate man, he was set in his habits. Meanwhile, most of us have trouble navigating an empty grocery cart through the aisles of a Wal-Mart.
His amazing ability to hoist full kegs onto one shoulder belied his old-school morals: use of the word “fuck” was grounds for expulsion from the bar. Many an un-initiated student, upon missing an easy pool shot, (which amazingly, was free to play, by the way,) would flippantly express his frustration with garden-variety vulgarity, only to be shuffled out the door in complete bewilderment.
Swearing at a lady merited a permanent ban. Generally speaking, I was and am a rage-filled feminist who flinches at the thought of gratuitous paternalistic behavior. But, I can’t be the only one to have secretly delighted at the sight of a shitty frat boy receiving a free attitude adjustment from Jimmy, who became every female student’s unofficial tiny but terrifying ex-military dad when the chips were down.
“Every woman is gonna be a mother some day, most likely,” he’d say. “Mom is the best of the best. You better show them some respect.”
One early evening, a man I’d place in his mid-thirties walked into the bar. Brimming with nostalgia, the man sunnily yelled, “hi, Jim!” Jimmy’s face darkened before he yelled, “OUT! Get out, kid!”
“But Jimmy! That was over fifteen years ago, now.”
“It’ll be another fifty! OUT!”
He never would tell us what that “kid” had done.
First, we tried simply asking Jimmy how old he was. He would smile, and coyly evade our questions, which only served to make him more mysterious. His non-answers would include, “I fought a war overseas, but I’ll never tell you which one,” and “I’ve been collecting social security for quite a while, now.” He drove us mad with curiosity.
It took quality time spent with the proprietor on weeknights to begin to tease out some answers. Here is what we were able to learn. Jimmy had opened The Other Place in 1973, and had covered it in pennies ten or twenty years later.
It was late in the evening on a Wednesday night during mid-terms week. My room-mate and I had opted to escape the campus for a little pick-me-up, and breathed a sigh of relief when we saw the empty bar. A single booth was occupied by a hunkered-down student, studying feverishly. We selected two stools at the bar, opposite a few silent, chain-smoking locals. Lightly out of breath and shiny with a thin film of sweat, fresh from some impossible task “out back,” Jimmy emerged behind the bar and took a seat on a hard folding wooden chair.
“Ahh,” he sighed — “the old man gets to rest, now.”
Finally, content at the near-empty bar on a Wednesday night, with some pickled eggs and an ice-cold Miller Lite, it occurred to me to ask Jimmy why: why the pennies?
Here is what he told me.
The one thing that really inspired me — that really started this whole thing, was this man. This one man. He taught astronomy at Cornell, and he just had this way of talking to me. He just knew how to talk to me. I’m not an educated man, but he knew how he could explain what he knew in layman’s terms, so that I would understand perfectly. I watched all thirteen episodes of his show, and boy, I’ll tell you, I got real smart.
The professor was Carl Sagan. The TV show was “Cosmos,” a science mini-series on PBS in the 80s. It just tickles me, imagining Jimmy watching Sagan on the little black and white TV behind the bar. Customers would ask if he would tune into some sporting event, but Jimmy always stuck with Sagan.
Everything he said was about millions, and billions, and millions of billions. That’s all he ever talked about, ’cause he was talking about the universe. After long enough of hearing about all of these millions of billions of stars and planets and solar systems and years, I started to notice how often people threw “millions” around. I have a million things to do… I walked a million miles today… I have a million things on my mind… I started to wonder, do these people have any idea what a million is? So I decided I’d show them. I’d save a million of something, so they’d know just what a million looks like. These people, I thought, these people don’t know what a million is, but I do, because I’m smart.
But I thought, what on earth could I possibly save a million of? And it hit me — pennies! There was nothing I could buy for less than one cent! I started to save pennies.
So I used this bar, where we are now, and I saved pennies from the registers, too. After a year and a half I had this little jar sitting there. It seemed like I’d never get to a million — that it was too much, that I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t think it would be right to just go to the bank and order a hundred dollars in pennies — that just wouldn’t be right.
So, I came up with an idea. I had penny night at the bar: one beer was fifteen pennies. Not fifteen cents, you had to bring it all in pennies. Well that got things rolling real fast. They were bringing bags of pennies and setting them on the bar. Bags! Soon enough I had 250,000 pennies. I kept them in a heap, right over there in the corner. It boggled my mind! I thought, wow! 250,000! I was only a quarter of the way there, and I couldn’t believe how much 250,000 was.
So now there was the issue of what to do with them all. So, I was sitting at the bar one night and I saw these bare tables. I took one home one night, and about a month later, it was done — all covered with pennies. Then I did the next, and the next, and soon they were all done.
Then, somebody said, “Hey, Jimmy, do the bar!” So I did. And then the wall, and the divider. They were in these piles in the corner — halfway up the wall, there.
Somebody said to me, “Jim, aren’t you afraid people will steal those pennies?” But even if they fill up their pockets with pennies, they probably wouldn’t get but ten dollars’ worth. By the time they got to the door, their pants would fall down. So who’s gonna take my pennies?
In 1991, I hit a million. I had more than that, in fact. I got to about 1,300,000 pennies. Pennies, everywhere. I don’t have that in here now, of course — this is only about half that. The rest, I gave back to the bank, because there was a penny shortage. The girl from my bank was having a drink here one night, and she said they were hit hard by the shortage. She couldn’t get any pennies — just couldn’t get em! She knew how many pennies I had, and asked if I could help. I gave them about a half a million pennies, because I had already done it — I had reached my goal. And the most important thing I learned? That I had no idea what a million was. I couldn’t believe 250,000 when I was only a quarter of the way there! And that’s the whole story, now you have it.
In 2012, Jimmy sold the Penny Bar, as it is colloquially known, to another local Meadville businessman. The local newspaper ran a short article about it, and I finally learned his age. The caption under his picture reads:
Jimmy Fucci, 75, founder of The Other Place (The “Penny Bar”), stands behind his bar, which he built himself. After 39 years of owning The Other Place, Fucci will retire at the end of 2012, selling the rights to another local bar owner.
I felt a painful twang at my heartstrings when I read that item. Even though the Penny Bar will remain open, it is the end of an era. It is the death of an era that I would liken to a celebrity who is also a dear friend. But though the era may be over, the legacy this man built remains with me.
Jimmy is the son of a billiards owner from Meadville, and he never graduated from high school, and he never left Meadville, except to serve his country in the military. But he set a goal and he achieved it. In so doing, he felt what so many of us feel when we become passionate about a goal: a mania bordering upon obsession. Then, for years thereafter, he shared himself fully — his values, his curiosity, his shortcomings, his pride, and his humbling — with anybody who ever thought to ask. Cheers to you, Jimmy.
The old man gets to rest, now.