In 1987, an eighteen-year-old high school graduate faced a massive $28,000 tuition bill for his four-year university degree. With only $2,500 saved from his job as a drugstore clerk, he calculated that he needed exactly 2.8 million strangers to mail him a single penny.
Decades before the internet introduced online platforms to solicit donations, this bizarre math equation launched a nationwide postal phenomenon that flooded a small-town post office box with literal tons of copper coins.
A Desperate Mathematical Solution
Mike Hayes graduated from Rochelle High School in Illinois in June 1987. His parents, a pharmacist and a schoolteacher, had already put four older children through school and could not fund his upcoming semester at the University of Illinois.
The teenager realized he needed to reach millions of people to make his one-cent proposition work, but the World Wide Web was still more than a year away from being developed by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. Needing a massive communication platform, Hayes turned directly to traditional print media.
Pitching a Syndicated Columnist
Hayes approached Bob Greene, a forty-year-old syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune. At the apex of his journalistic career, Greene earned over $750,000 annually, and his articles appeared in nearly two hundred newspapers nationwide.
When they met, the teenager immediately asked Greene to confirm that millions of people read his work. Hayes then pitched his unusual request, arguing that no one would feel it was a hardship to send just one penny. On September 6, Greene published an article detailing the student’s plea. He specifically instructed his readers to stop reading, find an envelope, and mail a penny to Box 13 in Rochelle.
The Cost of Mailing a Cent
Neither the journalist nor the student truly expected the printed request to work. At the time, the cost of a standard postage stamp was twenty-two cents.
This meant readers had to pay twenty-two times the value of their actual donation just to mail it. Despite the financial illogic of the transaction, the column gained immense traction across the country. Envelopes containing pennies, nickels, and occasionally larger donations began arriving from all over the world.
90,000 Letters and a Food Science Degree
The volume of incoming mail completely overwhelmed the local postal system. Hayes ultimately received about 2.9 million pennies alongside 90,000 physical letters. The massive influx of coins easily covered his college bills. He successfully attended the University of Illinois and graduated with a degree in food science.
Known around campus by his friends as “Penny Man,” Hayes announced plans to give his surplus funds to another college-bound student selected from one of the families who had originally mailed him a coin. Greene’s career took a very different turn. In the summer of 1988, he met a seventeen-year-old aspiring journalist. When she came forward in 2002 with allegations of an extramarital affair, the prominent columnist resigned from the Chicago Tribune.