FRONT PAGE NEWS -- HOLYOKE DAILY TRANSRIPT TELEGRAM -- MASSACHUSETTS

 Those were the days when we had real money.  That 50¢ was enough for five days round trip bus fare from home to school.  Truth to tell, that was the student discount fare.

The bus company was local.  The Holyoke Street Railway Company was the name.  

My favorite story out of all that could be told about that period of notoriety is one that didn't make the papers.  It is the story of the doctor who owned and operated an x-ray lab.  His services were required because after about two weeks the coin proved to be too heavy and too large to be expelled from my stomach to the outside though the bowels.  I was being poisoned by the digestive process taking place in my stomach.

The surgeon who was going to perform the invasive extraction needed an x-ray of the situation.  My father, EFR Dion and I went to the x-ray lab.  The doctor there did not believe my father (no one was about to believe a nine years old miscreant) that I had indeed swallowed that size of coin.  After a short back and forth the doctor said, "If he did swallow a half-dollar coin, I'll pay the tab."  

Click, click, whrrr, whrrr, clunck and hold the x-ray up to the light and...Whooaa, that looks like a half buck!  Reach into the pocket, put a coin up to the screen and the Doc had to pay.  My father and I laughed all the way home.

The next evening they took me to the hospital.  I was there for a full week.  I was on a baby food diet for 8 full weeks.  I missed nearly four weeks of school.  I studied at home after the hospital and passed all the final tests so I did not have to repeat the grade.

The coin?  My father ordered me to give it to the church in the form of a candle offering.  There was no way he was going to allow me to glorify my imprudence.

That was 1946.  I haven't seen a 50¢ piece in decades.  No, I never swallowed another one!