I recently got a dollar bill in change while enjoying a visit to the Piney River Brewing Company’s BARn in Bucyrus.
Something on the common piece of paper money caught my eye – one of its front edges had a web address printed on it: www.wheresgeorge.com. For some reason I was curious about it, so I asked around a bit to find out what it was about and discovered it’s a way people have fun tracking the travels of cash.
I decided to investigate and logged onto the site, and sure enough, it’s a fun-based “currency tracking project” that allows people to enter a bill’s serial number and their zip code and become part of an ongoing journal of where it has been.
Further research led me to find out that “Where’s George” was launched in 1998 by a Massachusetts database consultant named Hank Eskin. The “project” involves bills in denominations up to $100, and according to statistics, 269 million have entered with a total value of $1.5 billion.
About 70-percent of the bills entered are ones. I entered information about “mine,” and found it had been entered one other time – Dec. 6, 2016 – by a person in Denton, Texas.
I have a feeling the bill has been around, though, because someone had also written “Mahalo” on its right back edge.
The Where’s George site includes a “top 10” with regard to entries, led by a 1995 series dollar bill with 15. Its first entry came in March 2002 in Dayton, Ohio, and its last in March 2005 in Rudyard, Mich. Before reaching Michigan, it was exchanged (and entered) in Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, Texas and Utah.
It’s impossible to say whether the venerable journeyman of currency is now retired or will make yet another appearance on its monetary trek around the country. But I’m rooting for it to show up again after a 12-year hiatus – maybe in the Northeast, the West Coast or both.
Where’s George is also equipped with a bunch of other rather interesting (and often funny) pages and links. One page shows the top 50 zip codes where bills have been entered, and how many times a bill has been entered there.
Heading that list is Wattsburg, Penn. (“the 16442”) with a whopping 2,220,408 bills entered. I’m not sure how to process that, but it’s very interesting to note that 2,220,133 of those are tabbed as “unique bills,” which surely means their existence in the program began in Wattsburg.
So is there a club of about 100 people who gather twice a week, sip bourbon or tea and just enter bill after bill after bill? Without conducting a thorough, in-depth investigation, one can only speculate.
In Wattsburg’s defense, minor differences between the total and unique bills numbers is a trend from top to bottom on the top 50 zip codes list. I guess Where’s George entry clubs or parties must be more common in places like Cullman, Ala., and Salinas, Calif., than any of us could have dreamed.
By the way, no Missouri zip code is in the top 50. But I can honestly report that the 65483 is on the board.
In a month or two, I might just check in to see if my bill has gained a third entry. Heck, by then it might be in Myrtle Beach or Monterey.
You just never know where George might be.
Doug Davison is a writer, photographer and newsroom assistant for the Houston Herald. Email: ddavison@houstonherald.com.