A childhood belief about money

Some older kids showed us how to file pennies (USA) down to the size of dimes. At this time a bottle of coke from a machine was ten cents. We’d pound nails into a board, around a dime, remove the dime and then use the nails as a guide. We’d keep filing until the penny fit between the nails and under the nail head. As you can imagine, it would take much of an afternoon to come up with five or six dimes. We did this in a shed in back of one of our houses. Knowing this was a federal offense, both in counterfeiting and in defacing a US coin (the penny), we actually stationed lookouts, one at each corner of the front yard, fully expecting a big black car full of Federal Treasury agents to come barreling down the dirt road at any moment.