When a street person asked for help, I pulled out a gold-colored coin with the face of an American Indian woman and her sleeping papoose.
The beggar looked at it and looked at me.
"It's a dollar," I said.
He looked at the coin again, wrapped his hand around it and walked away.
I'm not sure if he was convinced.
A year and a half after the U.S. Mint unveiled the Sacagawea dollar with a $40 million PR campaign, I have yet to receive one in change. The dollar that was heralded as a boon to the vending machine industry and a moneymaker for the federal government has sunk without a trace.
But it's a beautiful coin, and I decided to see what would happen if I tried to spread some around.
Few people ask for these, the bank teller told me. I asked for $10 worth. He asked if I could take $25 so he wouldn't have to break the roll. The coins were from 2000 and the wrapper was pretty well worn from knocking around the bank drawer. I opened the wrapper and spread them on my desk. All shiny and golden, they made me feel like a riverboat gambler or King Midas in his counting house.
Of course there isn't a smidgen of real gold in these coins. They only cost 12 cents each to produce, which is why they make money for the federal government.
I headed for the street. Twenty-five $1 coins weigh you down a bit.
Outside the National Press Building is a row of 16 newspaper racks ranging from the New York Times to the Prince George's County Journal. Many of those papers cost $1 or more, especially on Sunday.
But only one, the Financial Times, took the dollar coin. Most of the others had signs that said "Use any combination of coins except pennies." But when I tried to stick in a dollar, it wouldn't fit.
How about down in the Metro? Harried subway passengers often try vainly to stuff crumpled dollar bills into the ticket machines. Surely this would be a place where the dollar coin would be accepted.
You can buy your ticket with nickels, dimes and quarters. You can use $1, $5, $10, and $20 bills. You can use MasterCard or Visa or your bank debit card. But do not attempt to use a Sacagawea dollar. I took my pocketful of dollars to my favorite Cajun take-out restaurant run by Koreans. They loaded up a Styrofoam container full of chicken and fried rice and rang up $6.15. I forked over seven coins.
The clerk and her colleague conferred with each other and peered into the cash drawer. No other dollar coins were in there and the clerks appeared to be speaking in Korean about where to put these.
It's not that Americans hate the new coin. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey in March found that people love them — love them so much that they want to keep them as collectibles and not spend them. In its report to Congress March 30 about the coin, the Mint said "on average most adults expect to collect and save about six Golden Dollars before spending one." That's about a billion and a half dollars stuffed in sock drawers.
The U.S. Mint has a shop at Union Station near the Capitol. The clerk there told me I was only the second person to pay her for something with a golden dollar since it was first minted.
"They ask for it all the time," she said. "But they won't spend it. I think they think there's real gold in it."
As legal tender, however, only 29 percent of the respondents to the Journal/NBC poll said they prefer the coins to the good old-fashioned dollar bill.
Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, said Sacagawea's days may be numbered.
"It's not circulating," he said. "No one is accepting it. The mint has spent millions of dollars on advertising, and it's clear it has failed. I'm not going to force people to use coins they don't want to use."
So if you want to save the Sacagawea, break open the piggy banks, empty the sock drawer, stuff them in your pockets and spend them.
Scripps Howard News Service