SACRAMENTO—
We can toss the moral of the story right up front; coins are made for flipping, fingers are not.
“A finger is missing,” said Ashely Espinoza, an elementary school-aged sightseer at the Capitol.
She pointed with her own finger at a statue that sits in the rotunda of the California State Capitol building in Sacramento.
Espinoza isn’t the only one to see the damage.
“I noticed. I did notice,” Jasmina Garcia, a sightseer from Southern California, said.
The statue shows Christopher Columbus asking his queen – Queen Isabella – to fund a little trip he’s planning. Since 1883, the piece has been sitting in the California Capitol rotunda. It’s not only a centerpiece for sightseers, but the centerpiece of an odd bit of superstition.
The tradition is that legislators, their staff, and lobbyists will pitch a penny off the second floor of the rotunda. If the penny lands in Queen Isabella’s crown, their bills will be signed into law by the governor.
If you look from the second story of the rotunda, you can see there’s a penny in the queen’s crown now.
But this year, somebody also missed that crown, and missed badly.
“I have five fingers,” Garcia said, holding up one hand. Any less, she told us, would make her a sad little girl.
The pageboy in the statue isn’t the first figure de-fingered in the million dollar piece.
Her majesty lost her pinkie.
And where is the pointer on the pageboy’s other hand? Well, it’s there, but it had to be reattached too, after another run-in with the worst kind of fiscal policy.
“Oh no,” Garcia said. “I didn’t know they allowed that.”
In truth, they don’t allow it. Damaging a historic state treasure is a felony.
But FOX40’s source at the capital says it happens so often, fingering the suspect would be nearly impossible.
The pageboy’s finger was found, and will be reattached to the statue.
