An L.A. Family Found One Million Individual Pennies in Their Late Father’s Crawl Space

When you clean out homes that belonged to a loved one who recently passed, you can make some unexpected discoveries. That’s exactly what happened to one family in Southern California who unearthed a huge trove while cleaning out their patriarch’s abode.

While John Reyes and his relatives were cleaning out his late father-in-law’s home in Los Angeles’s Pico-Union neighborhood, they found around 1 million pennies in a crawl space, he told KTLA. But these aren’t any regular ole pennies; it is believed that their father, a German immigrant, decided to stock up on the coins after the U.S. switched from making pennies out of copper to using zinc during WWII.

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“These have literally been untouched for decades, and I think that’s the super unique part about it,” Reyes said.

The family believes their father wanted to sell the coins, thinking that the metal would be worth a lot of money. This isn’t completely unfounded, as a 1943 penny sold for $1.7 million back in 2010, KTLA reported. Other rare coins have been sold for thousands of dollars. Reyes told the Los Angeles Times that he contacted a manager at a local bank, who responded in disbelief.

“I showed her a photo and she was like, ‘I’ve been working with Wells Fargo forever and I’ve never seen anything like this. You can’t cash these in. There’s a chance you may have valuable pennies,’” he told the paper.

However, the family decided they won’t be doing the laborious task of going through all the coins trying to find a high-priced needle in a haystack. Instead, they have listed the collection of crates, boxes, and sacks of coins on the OfferUp website at $25,000.

“We started going through the arduous process of looking at the pennies and that quickly turned into, ‘We don’t know what we are doing.’ And then we decided to pop open a couple of beers and have those instead,” Reyes said.

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