Numismatikforum

I was scanning a few American newspapers for contemporary mentions of the S.S. Rex and happened across the unrelated story below:

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But here I'm inserting a correction to the narrative. Please substitute "1930s nickel" for mentions of the "1931s nickel," as immediately below. Checking my coin-notebook, I see (too late!) that San Francisco's 1931 nickels were "Depression-delayed," and very possibly weren't released to circulation until 1934-35. Sorry about that.

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The Los Angeles Times of 10 July 1931. It was a daily edition and the newspaper’s price that Friday morning was five cents. A 1931s nickel like this one, coined just up the coast in San Francisco that year, would have been easy to pull from a workday pocket and flip onto a newsstand counter-top….

Front page, lower right, was “DIME SLAYER OF WOMAN MAY DODGE NOOSE DEATH.” Serious business, of course, but guaranteed to catch the eye of a coin collector. “Benjamin J. Brown,” reported the LA Times, “who murdered a young Los Angeles mother for $2.20 in 10-cent pieces, and who now is in San Quentin awaiting execution, may escape the noose.”

“Underlying the governor’s deliberation of the case, it was hinted, is the fact that Brown was sentenced to die for the crime while Emery Ells, who paid the twenty-two dimes as hire for committing it…received only life imprisonment.”

It was Ells’ 22-year-old ex-wife who was killed on 5 November 1930. She had been asleep with her 18-month-old child—Ells was its father—and Ells had paid Brown “$2.20 in dimes as ‘deposit’ against a fee of $2000.”

Here are 22 dimes of the kind circulating in Los Angeles in November 1930, exactly the purchase price of one particular shotgun blast….

California’s Governor thought better of pardoning Benjamin Brown, and I have seen an image of his prison file photo with a cursive “Dead” handwritten in ink across his forehead. The date of his execution by hanging is also noted on the card: 31 July 1931.

So another nickel at the newsstand, and one of the two dime-slayers was history….

But the other dime-slayer finds that his lifetime sentence doesn’t…well, it doesn’t actually mean “lifetime,” and after 20 years in prison Emery Ells is paroled on 1 January 1951.

After twenty years the nickel had a new look, and here’s San Francisco’s 1951 Jeff….

But twenty years can be a long time where money is concerned—especially when it begins in the deflation of economic Depression and proceeds through the inflation of a prolonged wartime and postwar boom—so when dime-slayer Emery Ells emerged from the penitentiary the daily price of the Los Angeles Times was no longer a nickel, but seven cents….

It was an awkward time for American small change; a nickel wasn’t enough, and for a lot of smaller items, raising the price to a dime was just too much of a jump. Vending machine owners and operators in particular had a difficult time—candy machines, pop machines, newspaper machines and the like--on all these a few pennies made a real difference.

By the late-‘40s the vending machine industry was lobbying for “intermediate coinage,” that is, a 7½-cent and its complement, a 2½-cent piece. It was a problem that was soon solved, however, by the inflationary spike occasioned by the Korean War that began in 1950.

By the summer of the year that Emery Ells was freed, the daily edition of the Los Angeles Times had gone up to a pair of nickels like these two San Francisco products….

And I’ll bet dime-slayer Emery Ells took note of these 10-cent pieces one way or another until the end of his life. I don’t know it for a fact, of course. He might have been a changed man. But for me it’s difficult to believe that a man who once counted out 22 dimes to kill his 22-year-old ex-wife…well….it might have been a coincidence, but I’ll bet not.

v.

To increase its chances of being seen, here's a repeat of my belated addition to the beginning of this post:

But here I'm inserting a correction to the narrative. Please substitute "1930s nickel" for mentions of the "1931s nickel," as immediately below. Checking my coin-notebook, I see (too late!) that San Francisco's 1931 nickels were "Depression-delayed," and very possibly weren't released to circulation until 1934-35. Sorry about that.

v.

Thank you for the story!

Great read !

Yes indeed
Sigi
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