Newspaper Clipping: 'Hey Mister, Could Ya' Spare A One Cent Check?' · Greer Heritage Museum collection

Title

Newspaper Clipping: 'Hey Mister, Could Ya' Spare A One Cent Check?'

Accession Number

2026.31.17.10

Accession Date

11 August 2026

Accession Creator

Sophie Pendergraft

Depositor

Kala Kennemore

Description

Newspaper clipping containing article titled "Hey Mister, Could 'Ya Spare A One Cent Check?" by Bill McDonald

Contributor

Written by Bill McDonald for The State

Date

30 October 1977

Storage Location

Box 78, Folder 4

Text

The State

Columbia, S.C., Sunday, October 30, 1977

‘Hey Mister, Could ‘Ya Spare A One Cent Check?’

On The Road
Bill McDonald

GREER – Somewhere along the way, you figure L.C. Pearson might have given up.

But he “dreamnt up” a slogan tucked it inside his head and let it guide through 71 years of life.

His slogan, “Low Aim is Sin.” (What he meant by that, L.C. said, is the same thing a fellow meant when he once wrote: “Let your reach exceed your grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?”)

L.C. Pearson?

He was born into poverty, went to work at Victor Mills here in the fourth grade, and finally finished high school at the age of 61.

While attending high school, L.C. also established an insurance agency and did his own typing and such. His spelling? It was atrocious. But so markedly did his spelling improve without education, he says, that the parent company in Maine later wrote: “We’re glad you fired that secretary and got one that could spell.”

(L.C. is now enrolled at North Greenville Junior College.)

I did not come up here, however, to write the Horatio Alger success story of L.C. Pearson. Rather, I visited him here last week to make inquiry into his unusual hobby. To wit: collecting “one-cent” checks from famous people.

L.C. tells it this way:

And his wife, Evie, began wintering at West Palm Beach, Fla., turning up on occasion at the Atlanta Braves’ spring training baseball games.

At one such game, he says, he and a stranger stuck up a lovely conversation. Before the game was over, the stranger pulled out his check book and wrote L.C. a one penny check. “Something to remember me by,” the stranger said. It was signed, “Marion Penny.”

Thus was born L.C. 's hobby. Today, he has half a dozen books, all filled with one cent checks from famous– (and some non-famous) – people, ranging from Nancy and Ronald Reagan to Nancy and Strom Thurmond to Lawrence Welk to Oral Roberts to David Pearson to Frank Howard to Pug Ravenel.

The most unusual checks, however, have been collected from Dr. C.E. Achenbach, a chiropractor; a Des Moines lawyer, Vernes Lawyer; Truly Right, a ladyjudge in Troutdale, Ore.; Don Look, a Boulder, Colo. photographer; and Richard Sleep of Ava, Mo., who noted that “anyone of my family is a Sleep.”

“Some folks I write and ask to send me a one cent check thing* I’m trying to pull a fast one,” L.C. says. “They think I’m going to change it to one-thousand dollars” (which in fact, he never cashes the check at all.)

L.C. is the mirror image of a lot of retired folks. Interesting hobby; a devout churchgoer; no vices (to speak of); and a big fan of a fellow named Lawrence Welk.

Why is he so addicted to Lawrence Welk?

L.C. leans back in his chair and says: “When you get old you’ll know. Ain’t no way to explain it.”

L.C. is enjoying his retirement to the fullest, and if you’d like to send him a one cent check to his South Line Street residence, he says he sure would appreciate it.

(And you don’t even have to be famous.)

*Typo made in text