Louis Staffilino, the Man with the Most Pennies

The slogan of the Steel Valley Bank in Dillonville, Ohio is “Reliable banking since 1901.” The bank proved its reliability when assisting its customer, Louis Staffilino, a bar owner to make a deposit. Saffilino had been saving pennies for 65 years, since he was five-years-old. In 1995, when he was 70, Staffilino decided to deposit his pennies in a bank. This would not have ordinarily been a problem, however, his collection of pennies amounted to a whopping 8 million, which is $80,000. This is the largest amount of pennies ever deposited in a bank by an individual at one time. On average Staffilino would have had to collect $1,230.77 each year, or about 337 pennies each day.

Two other banks had refused to deposit Staffilino’s pennies before he received assistance from Steel Valley Bank president George Hazlen. For four days, a pickup truck hauled the 40 garbage cans of pennies from Staffilino’s house to the bank. The total load of pennies weighed an astounding 48,000 pounds! The Bank’s coin machine bags 5,000 pennies in 5 to 10 minutes, and it took three and one-half months to count all of Staffilino’s coins. The pennies were then sent to the nearby Federal Reserve as they were bagged.

The irony of this achievement is that Saffilino deposited his pennies five months after the Cleveland, Ohio Federal Research began rationing pennies, because its inventory was being depleted. They now had a substantial amount of pennies to distribute to others who may also be “penny savers.”