Tokens

Every summer, the family goes to Sea Isle City, NJ for vacation. It’s on the southernmost shores of Jersey, separated from the mainland by swampy harbor areas and it’s not nearly as New Jersey-y as punch lines would have you believe. We get a house near a beach and we swim and eat ice cream and play mini-golf, and a good time is had by all.

Much to my personal delight, the whole area is also full of arcades around every turn, from the boardwalks in our own little town all the way to the amusement parks of Wildwood. So, I was intensely disappointed to find out that every single arcade has almost completely done away with all of their video games, and replaced them all with crappy machines that invite you to win redeemable tickets. Of course, these tickets are subsequently handed to the smarmy teenager at the counter who’d rather be at the beach as they wait impatiently for various 8 year olds to decide exactly which cheap, plastic spider ring they’ll going to cash in 20 bucks worth of tickets for. Spider ring breaks five minutes later.

Still, I can’t say I dislike the sounds of skeeball or machines bleeping and blooping away everywhere.

I have great memories of hanging out in these arcades and playing (and beating) Golden Axe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons and X-Men – but they were nowhere to be found. There was the random Mr. Do machine unplugged in a corner, and a few enormous $2 games that involved shooting aliens, as well as some excellent pinball machines, but everything was motivated by prizes and mini-avarice. There was no true FUN to be found. Are people making arcade games anymore? I know that there are a few new pinball machines out there, and I love ‘em.

With my quest for fun totally thwarted (and sporting a beard that made me look like a guy who isn’t hanging around arcades for the games), I turned my attention to greater goals. I’d spend my quarters on winning tokens from every kiddie casino I could find.

Over the course of one week, I managed to collect seven different tokens. While many machines paid out in cheap paper tickets, slot machines are the only holdover from my youth. These things always paid out in tokens – probably because it’s way cheaper to just keep the tokens in circulation than to retrofit the machines to spit out tickets. The machines that HAVE been retrofitted are lying jerks and I want my quarters back.

And it wasn’t easy. While just about every slot machine spat out a token or three on the first try, getting them out of the arcade was a different matter entirely. These tokens have been in circulation for years. The arcade owners rely upon the fact that they’re won, cashed in, and replaced into their machines. Some of these are thin aluminum, but the older ones are definitely made of heavier alloys. So, there’s usually an attendant wandering around the alleys of slot machines keeping an eye on you, for this and plenty of other reasons. Sea Isle City might be nice, but the boardwalks have a very significant creep factor – and after dark in Wildwood is an eerie reflection of the seething, bizarre underbelly of bored youth culture.

More than once, I had to pretend that I saw someone outside waving to me and hop on out of the mini-casino, a few tokens quietly in hand. I’m like a James Bond without the goals or sex appeal or cool name or skill at killing people (that I know of). This made the rewards even better, and the extras I ended up with I gave to my niece and cousins as ‘pirate gold’.

But there’s another great aspect of going to the nethers of NJ. The Garden State Parkway is full of rest stops, and many include a penny pressing machine. There’s something very, very American about pressing a penny of The Statue of Liberty at a machine packed next to a busy restroom and a shop that sells bootleg sunglasses, as QVC plays on the TV hovering over the Roy Rogers in Cheesequake, NJ.

The amusement parks at Wildwood didn’t yield such great results, though. Despite having a few machines to commemorate conquering various rides and coasters, they were either out of order or pressed the pennies so off-mark that they were unreadable, and a very powerful reminder of how miserable I was that particular day for no particular reason. Possibly the fifteen-cheese lasagna that we traditionally eat because the family believes that my lactose intolerance is a fairy tale.

I try not to make acquisition the focus of my adventures out of the house, but it absolutely leads to some interesting places. And it’s something to do while your niece goes on the Cygnus X-51 again.

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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A lot of people have a stack of Sacagawea dollars in a sock drawer, not as some starter of their life-savings, but because the coins look collectible: their value is something more than what’s written on the front. We Americans haven’t experienced a gold-colored coin in quite some time, so the yellow metal dollar just doesn’t quite look like what we think of as money. Despite all the press, the buzz, the attempt at training US citizens to use the Sacagawea dollar as money, it didn’t quite hold. Today’s topic might be why, even though they are advertised as having no monetary value.

While it’s illegal for anyone but the government to mint money, there’s a huge industry producing coins of all denominations and sizes. Most any coin-operated machine has the option to accept tokens of many sizes, shapes and weights. The variety of tokens available far exceeds that of national currency, now or ever made. Although collecting tokens fits into the general definition of numismatist – the coin collector – afficianados of these non-currency coins have taken their name from the word vecture, the technical term for tokens, and call themselves vecturists, while others prefer the term exonumia. When I was looking through my coins for examples to put in my article about the new dollars, I found I’m much more of a vecturist than I previously thought. I’ve got examples of quite a few types of non-monies:

Transportation Tokens are the most common and widespread form of alternative currencies, dating back to the early 20th century in the US. These tokens usually have a cut-out in the center, sometimes just a ‘dot’ like my Fargo MAT bus token from 1980, to complicated geometric shapes like stars and letters. From buses to subways, custom coins for transportation were minted for cities all across the US. As time passed, fares changed rates and new coins were minted, causing obsolescence as the fare machines ate or jammed on the coins, or the coins were melted down and reminted or sold as scrap.

Gaming tokens are more common since the origins of 1980s video game arcades, but extend back as far as coin-operated games have existed. Some like the current Chuck E Cheese tokens are the size of a quarter, their usual equivalent value, but a more common size is just a little smaller. Eurocoin and other companies make generic tokens without any identifying features, but many arcades opt to have their logos imprinted in them. It’s not limited to large chains: the dark token pictured on the lower left belonged to a very small arcade called JR’s in Fargo, ND that operated in the back half of the Mom’s Kitchen diner on Main avenue. Chains like Chuck E Cheese alter their coin designs regularly, creating a desire for collectors, while the scarcity of small or long-gone arcades makes for rarity. Their size and value usually doesn’t change, so it’s possible for older coins to sometimes appear in the arcade change machines.

Casino tokens are issued by these grown-up arcades to drop into the coin-operated games or bet at the card tables. Younger players might not recognize that the unwieldly size of casino dollar tokens matches that of the Eisenhower silver dollar, which was discontinued in 1978. Other coins, like the commemorative “Calamity Jane” Deadwood coin pictured, are around the size of a poker chip. Because visiting a casino is often an event and their tokens have a far greater value than a bus fare or video game, these coins are usually more detailed and higher quality. Clay chips from casinos are also collectible, for much the same reason.

These are the most common tokens that have found their way through my fingers — and ended up on top of the dryer after almost going through the laundry — but tokens have been issued for hundreds of years for an innumerable variety of purposes. In many economies where the value of the national currency has been difficult to fix, individual stores have issued tokens redeemable only for their own purchases, and monopolistic industries have paid their employees in interal currency which can only be redeemed at company-owned stores. In other cases, tokens have been issued as money-proxies to encourage spending, such as the Walgreen’s “Prosperity Token” pictured here, which was worth 10¢ off a quart of ice cream. These kinds of tokens are often referred to as “trade tokens,” as they work like a coupon and are only traded for products or discounts. I remember, from my childhood, the Country Kitchen chain of restaurants once issued small aluminum coins with the children’s menu, redeemable for a trinket at the end of the meal. Sambo’s restaurant issued the humorous ‘wooden nickel‘, redeemable for a cup of coffee. Substitute coins have been around for a long time, giving collectors an endless source of items to get their hands on.

You may have noticed that I included a Sacagawea dollar in each photo as a size reference — if you didn’t, then you may understand why most people treat the Sacagawea dollar as something other than money. We’ve seen brassy and gold coins for decades, but have been taught that they belong in the subway turnstile or the casino one-armed bandit. Our opinion of money isn’t entirely shaped by what we take to the bank by the bucketfull, but also by the coins that pass through our hands, from time to time, that only have value at one place or another. While tokens can be used at a particular place, our dollars don’t have the immediate recognition of a casino logo or animatronic rodent impressed in it’s obverse, confusing its purpose. Collecting money, whether it’s backed by government gold or not, revolves around the knowledge that it’s worth something anyway. That value isn’t always apparent, like a generic arcade token, but to a collector, there’s significant value if the coin fills a lonely, empty spot in an incomplete collection.