Pennies For Kilimanjaro….

The summit: Our family, from left, Linda, Andy, Stu and Max Corliss celebrates at Kilimanjaro’s peak at 2:50pm on December 31, 2025. Courtesy photo

A scuffed-up World War II-era silver nickel picked up by Stu Corliss on Bullock Street in Socorro. Courtesy photo

BY STU CORLISS
Los Alamos

My parents were depression-era skin flints, hardscrabble New Englanders.

So it‘s not a surprise that I would stoop to pick up pennies – dirty and scuffed up – and any other sidewalk change. My parents would be smiling from above.

Most people throw accumulated coins in a bucket. Some just leave them under the couch cushions for safekeeping.

Some chuck them out the car window – such is the disdain for the tiny fractions of the dollar constantly clipped ever more by inflation.

To me there was no point in filling up the water jug until it got heavy with dusty coins. I needed a goal for the “found” money.

My goal was to fund a climb up Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest peak, a bucket list thing.

The bank interest was just too low, so I needed a stock investment.

So over thirty years ago, in 1994, I decided to invest the scuffed-up coins in micro doses into a dividend reinvestment program (DRIP) with Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (MMM.)

3M was a Dividend Aristocrat, after all, a company that through the market ups and downs kept taking care of its investors with a growing 3 or 4 per cent dividend and stock appreciation.

A generation ago, stock commissions were often $99 or more, with discounter Schwab much lower at $49.

But the 3M DRIP commission at that time was free! Better yet, the investment minimum was only $10, while most plans had minimum investments of 25 or 50 bucks.

Over the years, I dutifully chipped in my tiny investments to 3M at a little over $10 a pop as soon as my stacked-up pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters met that threshold.

Of course, quite a few coins logically must’ve tumbled OUT of my pockets over the years while fishing for phones or keys. But I focused on the positive.

Omaha’s Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest people, supposedly picked up pennies too. Maybe it was only for the cameras.

Sometimes I’d find more than just coins. I spotted a tightly folded $100 bill on a bright sunny Sunday in the middle of a San Francisco street, my biggest lifetime find. I stumbled upon a gritty twenty in a snowbank while walking on Diamond Drive. And spied a $5 bill twirling underwater in the surf off Waikiki Beach in Hawaii; it probably slipped out of a surfer’s pocket. Those were the “big” infusions into my beloved 3M.

But mostly it was slow going, at about $35 per year of coins through about 2010, but dwindling down to less than $15 per year in recent years as the country became “cashless.”

The final blow to the dignity of small change was the elimination of US penny production altogether on November 13, 2025.

I kept my eyes on the Kilimanjaro goal, though, even as I got married to Linda and we raised two sons, Max and Andy, now at UNM and Rice University.

Flash forward to 2025 and I had accumulated 19.054 shares of 3M stock worth about $170 each, through contributions and dividends reinvested. That amounted to $3,230. And then there were the 4 Solventum company shares that 3M spun off in in April 2024, so add another $320.

So it looked like I really could realize my dream of trekking up Kilimanjaro, paid for by my long-term plucking of sidewalk coins.

My 3M investment covered just one climber, but no transportation, climbing equipment or family members. No matter. Linda and I found the funds in other pockets.

Climbing that mountain at age 69 was a big struggle for me. Our family had to rely on hardy Tanzanian porters and an altitude drug, but no supplemental oxygen – only what our lungs could coax out of the thin air. The last 3.6 miles took over 9 hours!

But it was an emotional high for our whole family as we finally made it to Kilimanjaro’s summit at 19,341 feet. We closed out 2025 by standing proudly for a moment atop the highest mountain in Africa.