FOR HIM, IT'S A PENNY SAVED, A MILLION COLLECTED.

Byline: Neal Rubin Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

John Tregembo spent a penny last month. The Avon Lady was dropping off some lipstick for Tregembo's wife, Betty, and the bill came to $11-and-something-three-cents. Betty had only two pennies.

``Don't worry about it,'' the Avon Lady said. But John pulled his coin purse from his pocket, plucked out a penny and handed it to her as though it was something he does every day.

Actually, it was the first penny the Plymouth, Mich., resident had parted with since 1982 - since the time he and the guys were talking in the lunchroom at Detroit Diesel and he looked up from his sandwich and asked, ``Has anyone ever seen a true million of anything?''

It was the first penny he'd parted with since the year Princess Grace died and ``Cheers'' showed up on NBC and EPCOT opened and Barney Clark got his artificial heart, since Poland outlawed Solidarity, since the feds found John DeLorean with 60 pounds of cocaine and the Brits drove Argentina out of the Falkland Islands.

For nearly 15 years, Tregembo saved pennies and scrounged pennies and bought pennies from anyone who had a handful or a jugful to cash in. Finally, on Aug. 3, he logged 4,602 new arrivals purchased from a former shipmate at a Coast Guard reunion, and the finish line was crossed.

The total: 1,004,024 pennies, or $10,040.24.

Hmm, he said to himself. Better keep going, just in case there's been a miscount.

Tregembo, 68, added another 30,000. Then he decided to buy a pickup truck. So, this week an armored van will pull up to his brick ranch house, and several burly guards will lug 206 bulging canvas sacks of pennies to the Federal Reserve Bank, the only financial institution in Detroit inclined to accommodate them.

First, however, Tregembo has to finish preparing them for their trip - which means undoing more than eight years of work.

The Fed doesn't want its pennies rolled. It wants them in bags of 5,000, sealed with twine and lead fasteners that have to be crimped into place by special pliers. That's one of the many things you learn when you set out to acquire a million pennies.

``This is what kind of tears me up,'' Tregembo says. He doesn't mean saying goodbye to the collection - it was a project and it's finished and he's done with it forever, the same way he was done with boats when he left the Coast Guard.

He means slashing open 20,600 brick-red penny rolls.

At first, Tregembo just stacked loose pennies against the wall on a counter in the basement. But a calico cat named Calli took to using the stacks as a stepping-stone to the window, which meant Tregembo spent a lot of time restacking. Then, on Pearl Harbor Day, 1987, surrendering to the weight of 275,000 pennies, the counter collapsed.

Betty says it sounded like dominoes falling. And falling. And falling. Tregembo cleaned up the pennies with a dustpan, filling a 30-gallon trash drum, a 15-gallon can, a five-gallon bucket, some 12-quart pails, assorted dishpans and a wastebasket.

Three weeks later, having reinforced the counter, he began sorting the pennies by year and mint mark and trapping them in rolls. ``Just to make it interesting,'' he said.

He stacked the rolls on the counter, working around impediments such as cabinets and a light switch. Eventually, he had a wall of coins 22 feet wide, up to 39 inches high and four rows deep. Each roll was registered with a slash mark in the green-covered spiral notebook he calls his Penny Bible.

With the turn of a page, he can tell how many of his pennies were minted in 1968 in San Francisco (150) and how many came from Philadelphia in 1987 (3,500). The Penny Bible also contains a listing of key dates such as Aug. 1, 1988, when he finished rolling his first 330,700 pennies, and Feb. 12, 1991 - Lincoln's birthday - when the collection topped 500,000.