When junior Sarah Havlicek, a manager at Tommie Central, begins her shift in the Anderson Student Center, she expects to answer phones and assist students. What she doesn’t expect is to gather pennies from in front of the oil painting of Lee and Penny Anderson – a whopping 406 of them.
“It’s our job to collect garbage and stuff, so at first it was kind of irritating to keep finding these pennies, but then it became this running joke: Like, why are people doing this?” Havlicek said.
The answer is a bit complicated. Inspired by creativity and absurdity, Lee and Pennyism is a pseudo-religion dedicated to the couple who donated $60 million to the university, and it has spread through the student body since early last semester.
Sophomore William Erickson was one of the first students to initiate Lee and Pennyism. He said it started with a few small inside jokes between him and his friends.
“Me and a few friends saw a penny once laying in front of the picture in the ASC,” Erickson said. “And we thought, why not make something dumb out of this? So we started making up stories about it and telling our friends to leave pennies.”
In the beginning, these stories only included the idea that Lee and Penny Anderson were deities, but with time, they have grown into a full-fledged pseudo-religion with its own tradition and lore.
The Lee and Pennyism canon doesn’t just include the sacrificial “pennies for Penny” left under the portrait but also satirical notions such as the “AARC of the Covenant,” according to sophomore Ryan Arland.
“Just like the Ark of Covenant in other religions, we have the Anderson Athletic and Recreation Center,” Arland said. “The reason we know that place is the AARC of the Covenant is because the Andersons have a plaque of their faces mounted on one of the walls.”
Junior Rani Mohanty explained there are some rules to the seemingly nonsensical nature of this movement.
“We only have a few rules. Don’t sink wooden boats because Lee owns 18 wooden boats, and if you were to sink one, he would be upset,” Mohanty said. “Also, if you were to make an offering to Lee and Penny down in the student center, only leave pennies, no other form of currency. Otherwise that’s heresy.”
While the psuedo-religion is satirical in nature, some Lee and Pennyism lore is based on fact. Lee Anderson actually does own a collection of wooden boats in the “Anderson Classic Boats Museum,” last showcased at the 2013 Gull Lake Classic Boat Show in Nisswa, Minnesota.
Since its beginnings, the lore has developed a large student following. What started as a joke between four or five close friends has now expanded beyond its founders. Erickson, Mohanty and Arland have all overheard people they’ve never spoken to talking about the religion.
This wide appeal is senior Matt Anderson’s favorite thing about Lee and Pennyism.
“I’ve gone into ASC before and seen pennies on the picture frame that none of us have put on there. Random people are doing it now, and it’s great because it’s catching on, and I love it,” Anderson said.
Erickson said the reason for Lee and Pennyism’s popularity most likely has a lot to do with its absurdity and acceptance.
“I think a lot of people at this school are really weird, including myself,” Erickson said. “And we don’t feel like we fit in a lot, so it’s just kind of one of those weird communities that includes everyone.”
More and more pennies are still regularly found beneath the portrait of Lee and Penny and are swiftly collected by Tommie Central staff and added to the jar.
“We kind of laughed about it and figured it would only last a couple weeks and die out, but now we’re halfway through second semester and still find pennies,” Havlicek said. “I think the most I’ve found at one time was around 200.”
Whitney Oachs can be reached at oach5325@stthomas.edu.