Someone once said, ‘find a penny, pick it up, and all day you’ll have good luck’.

For one family, though, that old adage proved to be a bit trickier than you might think. But it did give them some good memories to share about the father they had lost years ago.

When Elizabeth Reyes’ father, Fritz died, the family knew they would keep his home for their family and other generations to enjoy. It was just as Fritz wanted. But, it needed to be cleared out and renovated. But that job quickly turned into a bit of a treasure hunt.

The Los Angeles home, which Fritz shared with his brother, had been built in the early 1900s. The men, both German immigrants, bought the former bed and breakfast, and lived there until Fritz died, John Reyes said.   

Photo from KTLA

But all of their work halted when they reached the basement. Hidden in the crawlspace was a decades-old treasure: a stash of more than 1 million pennies.

The renovation job, which was being carried out by the Reyes and other family members on their days off from work, had already been a labor of love. The home is filled with items Fritz and his brother had left behind. 

“They kept everything,” Reyes told local news outlet KTLA. But the real shock, he said, came when they had crammed into the crawlspace and first saw some scattered pennies. 

That’s when I saw some rolls of pennies,” he said. “And as I started to move more stuff out, that’s when I found boxes of pennies, and then crates of pennies.”

He said Fritz and his brother were both “war babies,” who knew how important the need for metals was. So in the 80s, Reyes said, Fritz took the U.S. government’s switch from copper to zinc pennies as a time to build up wealth for his family.

“The moment that my father-in-law knew that they were switching over to zinc, then he would have started collecting. That’s just the kind of man he was,” Reyes said. “He never told us they were there but he always said that whenever his time came that we should make sure to go through the house and take our time with it.”

But the family quickly ran into a problem – banks didn’t want the pennies.

‘I don’t even have the room in my vault,’” Reyes recalled a bank manager telling him. “‘Don’t bring them here.’”

So they decided to try their own bank back home in San Bernardino County and began the process of moving the coins from the basement.

“Literally bag-by-bag, we had to take them out of the basement, up the stairs, and into the trucks … it took hours,” Reyes said. “It took a whole day just to get them out of the crawlspace.”

Photo from KTLA

But it turned out their bank didn’t want the pennies, either. Instead, employees pushed the family to look through the coins and see if any were rare.

“You see all these stories of people finding pennies worth $2 million,” Reyes said. Resigned, the family decided to look through the coins, but also list them for sale on multiple coin-selling sites.

But their story went viral, and Reyes said they easily got more than 1,000 offers to buy the coins. There were so many messages, that Reyes said he couldn’t keep up with them.

The family said they were very happy with the person who bought the coins, for an undisclosed amount. A requirement was that the person would see the coins as more than just what they were worth monetarily.

“We wanted to make sure that it was somebody that was going to have genuine interest in the find,” Reyes said.

The closing of the sale was a sad moment for the family. The importance of letting go of something that was such a reminder of Fritz and his need to care and love for his family, isn’t something they will forget.

“The sense of connection, the depth of really what it was, it was not lost on the family at all,” Reyes said.

Watch below for a look at the original news report as well as the updated one with the sale of the pennies!

Sources: KTLA | Daily Mail