(MONEY Magazine) – When I was a kid growing up in Dallas after World War II, pennies, nickels and dimes really meant something. They helped you toward specific and attainable goals. Three cents each bought my cousin Butch and me a streetcar ride out to the state fairgrounds, where the Tilt-a-Whirl and Dodge 'Ems awaited, at a dime a ride. Or for a nickel we could dip elbow-deep into soft- drink coolers filled with ice and gelid water, and pull out a bottle of RC Cola so cold it numbed your hand. We also learned early that saving had its rewards. For 29 cents we could buy a Mustang fighter plane; 35 cents would get us a Walgreen's soda fountain banana split in a heavy cut-glass ice cream boat, a treat so exotic it was the child's equivalent of the college freshman's First Drink. A generation later I toiled in college-crowd bars, cadging change from kids who needed instruction in the art of tipping generously. At my last stop on this trail, the Sandy Pond Club on Cape Cod, I came under the tutelage of a deceptively soft-spoken Mississippian known only as Judge. The two of us used to hustle drinks on cork-lined plastic trays to tables filled with Super Studs and the Pickups they were trying to impress. They paid cash by the round, and we would return with their change. Judge showed me how to wet the cork at the bar tap, then spread the change around on the soggy surface. It took gritty determination to pick up more than three or four coins from one of those trays, especially with your Pickup watching. Judge used to stand there smiling at the girl; the guy usually quit after the first quarter. It is recorded that, on opening night of the July 4th weekend, 1965, at the Sandy Pond Club, Judge made $20 in change in four hours -- enough for him to go out the next morning and buy a loaf of bread, a pound of bologna and 19 bottles of Arriba wine. In today's society, bounded by credit cards on one side and the specter of double-digit inflation on the other, do people have any use for loose change anymore? Oh, there's still a lot of it to jingle, all right. The count last March came to $15,444,891,060 worth of coins in circulation -- an increase of about 59% from 10 years ago. Chalk that up to inflation. More money about means more dimes as well as more dollars. With all those coins around, your chances of finding one with numismatic value nestling in your pocket are roughly one in 20. But you won't get rich that way. Forget about priceless buffalo-head nickels and Liberty dimes; collectors hoard them. More likely you might turn up a battered Lincoln copper penny dating from the 1920s. Its worth: about 2 cents. So the question remains: What is change good for? Katherine Ortega, the Treasurer of the United States, steadfastly defends the utility of metal; she says she keeps a purse full of change handy for pay phones, parking meters, stamps and newspapers. Of course, she's got a stake here; take away the $15 billion of change in circulation, and her job's not nearly as big a deal. And you have to wonder if anyone else carries around change for newspapers. A guy who runs a popular newsstand on New York City's East Side says that just about everyone pays him in bills, and that he has to go to the bank each morning to get rolls of change to see him through the day. Some people are so frustrated by the fecklessness of the change in their pockets that they are ready to lay the problem, quite literally, on President Reagan's doorstep. One of them is Melvin Belli, the flamboyant San Francisco attorney. ''Everything costs so damn much these days,'' he fumes, ''that you have to pay in paper money. I should put all my loose change in a bag and send it to Reagan with a note saying, 'This is what you've driven me to.' '' Belli aside, we are still a nation of piggy-bankers. There is a pastor in Martinez, Calif. who has been saving change for three years in a three-foot- tall replica of a soda pop bottle to buy his son, now 10, a car for his 16th birthday. So far he has about $430. A comfortably retired Westinghouse executive in Maryland actively collects coins off the street and squirrels them away in a good-sized tuna-fish can. (This guy collects used golf balls too, but that's another story.) A woman I know makes a thorough sweep of the sidewalks for dropped coins every time she walks her dog Harry; one night she picked up 39 cents -- all in pennies. Out in the suburbs, change hunters in the know say that parking lots are the place to go, since coins drop out of pockets when people get into or out of cars. Alas, there is a dark side or two to coin hoarding. A colleague of mine is a very sharp poker player who used to save all of his change from his regular Thursday night game. Over the years he piled up nearly $6,000, only to come home with another bagful one night to find his front door busted and his trove gone. He is still trying to calculate how many burglars it took to make off with roughly 1,300 pounds in nickels, dimes and quarters. Or take this couple I know who several years back started stashing their loose change beneath their mattress. When the money began spilling onto the bedroom rug, she got him a coin sorter for Christmas, a real professional model. Trouble was, he still didn't know what to do with the change once it was sorted. Finally he poured it all into a bowl. One day he deposited one coin too many; in the small hours, he heard ''a river of change gushing through the bedroom.'' Of course, you can always take your sack of booty to the bank -- provided you can find one that will take it. No kidding. If you want to turn in a sizable stash, plan on either rolling your own or tracking down some enterprising soul, like the lobster fisherman in Maine a colleague knows who, between tending his pots, will do the job for you for 10% of the gate. (A word of caution here: whoever rolls the coins should be sure to fill the packet with the right number. The banks don't have to count the contents; tellers just weigh them.) Still, there are a few banks, such as the First Commercial Bank of Little Rock, Ark. or the First Alabama Bank of Athens, < where tellers will roll coins on the spot if they aren't too busy. My friends of the mattress caper, who have since tamed the aforementioned river, say they are thinking of driving their swag 1,232 miles to Little Rock. Maybe it's best, then, just to use change where it's still good -- or, in particular instances, where it's necessary: buses, pay phones and exact-change lanes on the highway. Having coins handy is also the best way to beat the dread nuisance of the $2.98 item with the 7% sales tax. Quite a few household shoppers report that they save $50 to $60 in change to buy groceries, a ploy sure to make you a hit with the throng behind you at checkout counters. It is also a truism that charity begins with small gestures. A woman I know, who has enough shame to insist on anonymity, says she saves her pennies and nickels for the blind man's cup, because the clatter makes her sound a lot more generous than she is. With sighted beggars, you have to be more careful. One fellow tells me he tried to give a panhandler a quarter recently. The beggar returned the quarter, and told the guy to come back when he had a dollar saved up. In the end, as I round into my forties, I come full circle to the belief that loose change is basically for kids -- coins they can heft and measure. It helps them learn to count, and maybe, in this age when department stores sell little girls' purses accessorized with play credit cards just like Mommy's, coins can teach them something about the value of money. My daughter Meade, who's four, looks forward to that moment each night when I empty my change into a small pewter dish on my dresser. She then separates it into denominations, and together we feed the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters into her bunny bank. It's a ritual I love as much as she does, if only because it more than compensates for that late-night twinge of sadness I sometimes feel, when I reflect that I will never again reach into an icy cooler for an RC Cola, or send off for a Mustang fighter, or cadge quarters off damp trays with a guy named Judge up at the Sandy Pond Club.