JOPLIN, Mo. —
It wasn’t exactly “pennies from heaven” for pastor Phillip McClendon and his wife, Jackie, after the May 22 tornado.
It was more like “dollars from the attic” when containers of silver dollars and other coins fell from the ceiling as their home was destroyed.
McClendon said the coins weren’t discovered until he and his wife returned to the house on South Monroe Avenue the next day for cleanup. He said they had moved in just a few days earlier, and the money had been left there by the previous owner of the home.
“They were in three old-time cookie tins that I guess had been in the attic over the garage,” he said. “Two were taped closed, and one had broken open.”
The couple gathered up the coins. McClendon said his wife took them to Susan Zerkel, the daughter of John and Marjorie Castagno, who built the home and lived in it for years.
Her father was an avid coin collector, said Zerkel. She said that in addition to silver dollars, the cache included a variety of other coins of various ages and denomination.
“I’m not sure of their value,” she said. “I took them to a coin collector that dad always used.”
Zerkel said her father died in 1999, her mother last December.
She said she wasn’t all that surprised by the McClendons’ discovery, because the family members also found coins in unexpected locations when they cleaned out the home after her mother’s death.
“He kept a lot of them in his safety-deposit box,” she said. “But we also found them in his closet, and in the garage in a box of old light bulbs, and other places. I guess these were in the attic.”
John Castagno, along with his brother, owned Castagno Appliance, a longtime Joplin business. Zerkel said that for her, the discovery brought back memories of when she and her father would sit down together and look at coins he had brought home from the store after work.
She said coin sets would be among gifts from her father to her, her sister and brother.
Her parents built the home in 1984, and the McClendons had bought it and moved in just days before the tornado.
“I feel bad for them; they had just got in the house,” she said.
McClendon said he and his wife had returned home just before the tornado hit.
“We were in the closet, holding on to each other,” he said. “When we felt like we couldn’t hang on any longer, it stopped, and we looked up and saw sky.”
McClendon said he was told that the closet withstood the storm because extra structural members had been added to that part of the house.
Senior pastor
PHILLIP McCLENDON retired a year ago as senior pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Joplin. He said he is staying active in ministry and public service programs.
Local News
Related Photos
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Susan Zerkel holds a container of coins that was in a yard near what was her family’s former home on Monroe Avenue. Some other containers were found by Phillip and Jackie McClendon, who had moved into the Monroe address just days before the May 22 tornado. The McClendons said the coins must have been in the attic. They gave the containers they found to Zerkel. GLOBE | B.W. SHEPHERD
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