He Lost His Cents Over New Car
Jerry Stevens never spent a penny for his thoughts after his daughter, Penny, was born. He knew what his goal was, and by her 16th birthday he had accumulated enough 1-cent coins to buy her a car. Stevens and friends loaded $11,000 worth of pennies weighing 3 1/2 tons into four pickup trucks and took them to a car dealership in La Center, Ky., and bought Penny a baby-blue 1985 Monte Carlo. “When Penny was born, I noticed if I took a penny out of my pocket, I couldn’t spend it,” Stevens said. “It seemed like it would be hurting my Penny.” So he collected in earnest, even during the penny shortage of a few years ago. When banks offered $1.10 for 100 pennies, Stevens was offering $1.15. Last October found him coming up short with just $7,000 worth of pennies, so he visited banks in 17 counties, buying up to $500 worth at a time. But after Penny got her car, Stevens said he’s through with coin collecting. He’s just spent his first penny in 16 years, at a grocery store.
The Associated Press erroneously reported last week that the Jackson brothers plan to take their Victory Tour overseas, and that Michael Jackson would sponsor two cars in this year’s Le Mans, France, 24-hour race. Racing team owner Jean Rondeau says he met with Jermaine Jackson, not Michael Jackson, and discussed Jermaine Jackson’s sponsoring cars in the race in connection with an upcoming concert tour by him, not by all of the Jacksons.
When Violet Drummond of Richland, Wash., got into a quarrel with her 13-year-old daughter, Cheryl, several weeks ago, she told the girl to show some respect. To emphasize the point, she told her daughter to look it up in the dictionary. But the dictionary had no respect. The word was one of quite a few that Violet Drummond was upset to find missing from Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language. She promptly fired off a letter to Modern Promotions and Publishers in New York asking for a $2.95 refund. “On page 270 the words go from ‘seventeen’ to ‘sharper,’ ” she wrote. “What happened to words such as ‘shade’ and ‘shame’ (which you should feel)? I bought this book in good faith that it would help my school-age children learn and it has ‘failed’ (also not in your dictionary).” The president of the New York publishing house, Lawrence Steinberg, said Drummond would get her refund. Speaking candidly, Steinberg added: “You’ve got to remember, this is a cheap, cheap dictionary.” He said the company gets about 20 letters each year from customers complaining about missing words--including the word “missing.”
