My little collection of non-money is growing every so slowly. Exonumia, if you’ll remember, is the collecting of money-like objects that aren’t really legal tender. I’ve picked up a few odd arcade tokens here and there and I tend to pocket one casino coin before I lose it all, but this weekend I happened across a little cache of tokens at a rummage sale, all a little different than anything else I’ve found in a while.
We stopped at a rummage sale which advertised some antiques and sounded like it was an estate sale. The classified ad said they were open until 1pm; we walked up at 12:55, so we weren’t expecting a lot, but we did pick up some good things, including a handful of interesting tokens.
First up is this locally-grown wooden nickel. Wooden tokens have been around since the 1930s, used as a substitute currency in times of money shortages. Since then, however, their unique shape and feel has resulted in the wooden discs being used as keepsakes, coupons, and tokens in a variety of ways. This particular wooden coin hails from the Leonard Cafe, in Leonard, ND. The front offers “Good For One Drink”, with a picture of a cocktail glass, a design which isn’t particularly old, since you can still order them here. A lot of small-town cafes do double-duty as the local tavern, too, so it’s possible the cafe served something harder than black coffee. The front reads, “This Too Shall Pass…Leonard Cafe” – which might have some Alcoholics Anonymous implications, since the group has taken that philosophical phrase as its own.
The latter might be more true than I originally thought, because right next to the “free drink” were some Alcoholics Anonymous tokens. The first, on the left, is a rather standard anniversary token, in this case honoring 1 month of sobriety; there were several others in the sequence, but I decided on only getting one. The circle with the number is raised slightly, and the reverse has a slightly depressed center, which would allow these coins to stack nicely as you slowly built up your years of freedom. The one on the right was minted for a specific AA chapter, the Primary Purpose Club, an addiction recovery center in the Denver, CO area, with the correct phone number imprinted and an image of the ever-present coffeepot. Both coins have the serenity prayer on the back. While I’ve known people who carry their own hard-earned AA tokens in their pockets, I don’t think I’ve ever held one before, and I was surprised at how solid and heavy they are. A variety of manufacturers produce AA tokens, so the quality varies from plastic to gold-plated keepsakes, but these are both nice, solid brass. These are also the first two (and now with two below) tokens I’ve owned that don’t have a monetary or barter value: they were meant to be kept, not traded.
A token from a small North Dakota town and a AA coin from a Denver treatment center proves the previous owner travelled quite a bit. I ignored the generic arcade tokens and Showbiz Pizza tokens, but the three to the right were the only other really interesting ones, and their size was a big part of it. The one on the left is from the Bayfront Blues Festival, Duluth, MN, and dated 1989. The one on the right is from the Mount Rushmore National Monument and Rushmore Cave. The last one at the bottom is from the Fort Cody Trading Post, North Platte, NE, “Buffalo Bill’s Home Town” according to the reverse. All three are different in size than the quarter-sized and silver-dollar sized coins in my little collection: these are just larger than a Sacajawea dollar, each measuring 1-1/8″ across. This is a relatively common car wash token size, and is actually pretty close to the common 28mm token size used in the 19th century for Hard Times tokens and the like. Each of these three tokens is made from slightly different materials. The blues festival token is a very light aluminum coin, while the other two are brass, and the Mount Rushmore token is nickel-plated for a silvery finish. Two of these, the blues coin and the Fort Cody coin, have reeded edges, which is unusual compared to my other non-coins, too. The blues festival token appears to have been used for purchases, because the reverse notes “no refund”, “trade only”, and “no cash value”. The other two are tourist keepsakes; Mount Rushmore, of course, is a national treasure, while Fort Cody is a tourist trap of sorts, a destination and a side-trip depending on your level of devotion. The Cody coin simply says, “GOOD LUCK,” and I hope it worked well for its previous owner.
That reminds me why I like finding and keeping odd tokens and unusual coins. A country’s money is kept within strict tolerances of size, weight, and design, their mint runs are counted and documented, and errors are extensively documented. In the world of exonumia, you never know when you might run across a small-town wooden nickel, a brass disk from a tourist trap, or a reminder of personal diligence. Collecting tokens is an unbelievably open-ended industry, and that keeps it interesting. People have been making personal coinage for centuries, and in the next few minutes, for a few hundred bucks, you could mint your own custom coins online – there’s no end to what can be added to a collection.
