Shirt Maker Is No Loafer When It Comes to Pennies

A thought for your pennies?

Stephen Baker, 38, an antique salesman who lives in Tucson, Ariz., but is moving to La Jolla, likes attention, so he constructed a shirt from 1,516 pennies. Now he gets lots of attention.

“Attention is me,” Baker said. “I’m a Leo.”

Baker drilled four tiny (one-sixteenth-inch) holes in each penny and strung them together

with No. 6 lock-washers. Including the research and development phase, the project took about 800 hours, Baker says.

At 9 pounds, 12 ounces, the penny shirt is not for wimps. It also has drawbacks on cold or hot days. Copper tends to conduct rather vigorously.

Baker wears the shirt mostly while strolling down the street or through airports or occasionally for jogging (or being interviewed). He made a bikini for his wife from 320 quarters.

Future projects: a book on “Coin Clothing,” a “Run for the Pennies” from San Diego to New York and maybe a Penny Power poster. The shirt was only a prototype.

“Nineteen out of 20 people are great and ask me all the right questions,” Baker said. “One person will say I’ve illegally defaced the coins. That’s not true. The law says you can’t mark up paper money, but nothing about coins.

“You’d be surprised how little people know about pennies.”

Cops Without Coughs

Citing health concerns and complaints about secondhand smoke, San Diego Police Chief Bob Burgreen has banned smoking in the stairwells and parking garage at police headquarters.

He also eliminated the smoking section in the cafeteria. Smoking is allowed only in private offices and on an outside patio.

So far, there have been few gripes about Burgreen’s move, according to police spokesman Cal Krosch. Burgreen talked with the Police Officers Assn. before he issued his order, and besides, the image of cops as a hard-smoking lot is rapidly changing, he said.

The last smoker among the top brass to occupy the headquarter’s seventh floor was former Chief Bill Kolender.

Ear of the Beholder

Of the estimated 20,000 Arab-Americans in San Diego County, possibly the two most politically prominent are Tawfiq Khoury, the home builder, and his cousin Fozi Khouri, owner of a commercial bindery.

Both are naturalized citizens and both are working to improve communication between Arab-Americans and Jewish-Americans in San Diego. One question they are commonly asked is why they spell the family name differently.

It’s a classic American immigrant explanation: One immigration clerk, struggling with Arabic, spelled it one way; another immigration clerk, struggling with Arabic, spelled it another way.

Khouri says his cousin got the more accurate spelling. “I thought later of having it changed, but I’ve been too busy,” he said.

Coad of Generosity

The culture shock for a Hmong girl recently transplanted from Thailand to San Diego is daunting enough. Add a deformity and a severe speech impediment and the odds for a successful assimilation into a strange new land would seem enormous.

“I knew if she is going to make it in this country, we have to do something,” said David Lemay, principal at John J. Montgomery Junior High School in Linda Vista, where 12-year-old Kazoua Vang is a student.

What Lemay did was contact Coad International, an El Cajon-based group run by a former contractor named John Martin. For a decade, Martin has been arranging for local doctors and nurses to provide surgery and other medical help for poor children, mostly in Mexico and Latin America.

On Wednesday, Kazoua will undergo the first of several operations at Mercy Hospital to repair a cleft palate and cleft lip. The cleft palate has left Kazoua with a hollow, hard-to-understand voice.

A surgical team led by Dr. Jonathan Jones, a plastic and microvascular surgeon, will donate its services. The team has been active in Coad for several years.

“It’s the right thing to do,” explains nurse Pat Robinson.