Collecting Tokens on Vacation : Wildwood, NJ

It’s been about a decade since I’ve been to my family’s rented beach house in Sea Isle City, NJ, but they return to the same beautiful spot every year. I’m usually prevented by school, or work, or a simple unwillingness to be stuck in close proximity to the family for longer than it takes to eat a meal, defend my life decisions, and run crying from the table.

Schedules and patience finally converged this year, and I was able to return to my childhood summer haunts. If there was anything that drew me there, it was the promise of arcades, taking Polaroids at amusement parks, and miniature golf. The prospect of walking around shirtless on a beach with my pale, white fish-belly self certainly wasn’t what drew me back down there again (though I was salmon-pink by the time I left). I didn’t get in any mini golfing, but I did manage to find a few good arcades (and photographs) on the Wildwood boardwalk.

Curiously, the arcades of my youth have almost all completely converted into places filled with machines designed for gambling. Everything was about winning tokens or tickets or making floppy claws try to grab basketballs of unusually large circumference – there was no playing for PLEASURE anymore. If you couldn’t win a fabulous prize, or at least a set of fabulous plastic vampire teeth, there didn’t seem to be a purpose. While the prospect of sculpting kids into little gamblers didn’t set too easily with me, the prospect of souvenir tokens from these arcades appealed to the exonumismatist in me.

Even in my youth, I’d be pretty fascinated by the idea that each of these arcades along the boardwalk had fashioned their own economy, complete with differently colored coins and even paper ‘money’ in the form of tickets and vouchers, incompatible with the neighboring territories. Some slot machines would pay out in tokens worth one point, and some would dispense the ultra-desirable 25 point token. Of course, the effort and expense of winning these usually made the little pink parachuting ninja in the prize case have an approximate cash value of five bucks, but there was always the reward of earning money in this strange economy and getting to choose your cheap, plastic payout.

I wasn’t going for the spider ring this time, though – mostly because I couldn’t use it to scare my sister anymore, but also because I wanted to bring home a handful of tokens and tickets from whichever arcade I passed. My large collection of unspent tokens from my childhood is likely lost in the unfathomable depths of the attic, so I started anew – not so much interested in collecting any token, just tokens from places I’d been. The collection extended into tickets also, but the coins were endlessly more interesting. While most of them are made of lightweight aluminum, Stanley Sportland’s still using something far weightier and more significant, and more satisfyingly like actual coinage.

The pseudo-coin collection didn’t stop at arcade tokens, though, as I found a great penny-crushing machine along one of the piers. Normally, I’m not so much of a sucker for souvenir items such as this, but flattened pennies are inherently awesome, and come with memories of hanging out at the railroad tracks and seeing what the 2:45 to Poughkeepsie would do to the change in our pockets. While losing their spending value, elongated and stamped coins still fall under the heading of ‘exonumia’ and remain collectible, and a directory of coin elongating machines exists on the internet. You know, should you have a pocket full of change and a year or so to drive around. Which seems a lot better than the job that I have now.

I eventually found an arcade that had 4 actual pinball machines and camped out in front of Family Guy until my niece had gotten all of the rides that she wanted to go on out of her system, but it’s almost as if video gaming for the sake of gaming is beginning to be relegated to the home instead of the classic arcade. Of course, a decade ago, the really high-tech, high-resolution stuff only existed in the cumbersome cabinets of yore, but there’s still nothing like standing in front of a large screen with a goofy plastic gun and shooting at zombies or orcas or whatever, for all the world to see. My pocketful of tokens and I were satisfied.

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