Lumpy's "Run to the Wall" and Adventure's: 12/1/07

Took a ride today to the Penney Bar in McKittrick, California with a couple of buddie's, Tim and Alan, (no not the Tim Allen) Alan is the o'eighter in the overalls. The bar and cafe are what is left of the McKittrick Hotel, which has not operated as one for decades and is one of just a few businesses downtown, such as it is. A road sign off Highway 33, the main drag, gives the population as 190.

It began innocently enough, like most casual obsessions. Annie Moore dropped a penny into an empty coffee can. Clink.

And then another. Clink. And soon enough, many, many more. Mrs. Moore began scouring parking lots for lost pennies. Clink, clink, clink. She filled several cans.

Like many penny hoarders, she was never sure what to do with all of them — until she and her husband bought a roadside bar and cafe in this speck of a town in California oil country near Bakersfield. Why not, she asked her husband, Mike, festoon the bar with the pennies? And he dutifully obliged the crazy idea, using regular Elmer’s glue to affix them from one end of the bar to another.

It was his task to complete the job, penny by painstaking penny, six years of gluing, gluing and gluing.

Now, one million pennies later — from Annie’s cans, customers with loose change and not a few trips to the bank for exchanges — Mike & Annie’s Penny Bar is a sight to behold. The pennies, like a swarm of copper ants, cover nearly every surface: the floor, the walls, even the sides of the pool table.

Mr. Moore did not exactly count out one million pennies, but after calculating 304 pennies per square foot of surface area, he figures it is pretty close. It’s 200,000 on the floor alone.

The establishment’s pennies surely lure some, but it is also the only restaurant to speak of for the growing number of energy workers in this part of Kern County, which locals have nicknamed West Texas for all the oil derricks and natural-gas plants.