A Confederate $100 bill.

My generation didn’t have video games, at least not until Pong came along. Imagine the novelty of a TV where we could use paddles to bounce a ball across the screen, from one side to the other, hoping our opponent would miss. We normally played board games with a fever pitch, sometimes making the rules up as we went along. But one of the most enjoyable activities was “collecting” things. I went the entire route: butterflies, rocks, stamps, and so on, but the one which provided hours of pleasure was coin collecting. And, if you had enough tenacity, you could take fifty cents to the bank, get a roll of circulated pennies, and one by one, check the dates, mint marks, and hope to find one perhaps with the iconic “d v d” mark. If you got lucky, you might even be able to sell one to another collector, or coin shop, for a slight profit if its condition was good enough. Then you could head back to the bank for another roll. Life was good.

With stamps, I would anticipate when a new stamp would be issued, marking the calendar so I could hop on the Lester Lines Bus and head down to the Post Office on Liberty Street. I would always have a pre-addressed envelope made out to myself so I could purchase a new stamp, place it on the envelope, and mail it. In a few days, it would arrive in our mail box with the official first day of issue post mark! Of course, I would also purchase a plate block or two, of the newly issued stamp with the numbers. Nothing expensive, but clearly something we could devote ourselves to. I never really got into ordering all those stamps touted on the back pages of comic books and magazines. I wonder if any of you did. Oh, heck! You know I did! All I got was a bunch of worthless foreign stamps, not one of the rare ones advertised. I rank this right up there with those x-ray glasses, but that’s another story.

With inflation rearing its ugly head again, many are bemoaning the shrinking dollar. This brought a smile to my face and I had to reach into a desk drawer and pull out a couple of vintage pieces of paper currency. Both were handed down to me by my grandfather. One, which is paper thin, and worn almost completely through, is a $100 Confederate States of America note. This I keep in an envelope, protected and safely tucked away. I can only imagine how many hands this was touched by as it traveled the country, and how it eventually arrived in the Bronx where my grandfather grew up. Must be a story somewhere in that.

The real gem, and the crux of this article is a one dollar bill, from 1899, a Black Eagle, which is an example of the old, larger sized paper money which was printed and in use from 1861 to 1923 as legal tender. I’ve kept this silver certificate tucked away with other memories. The creases from it being folded and carried, used to buy food and pay bills, and perhaps given to a child in a birthday card, are like the lines in our faces. I suppose we can grab a jar of wrinkle cream and smooth away our image for a fleeting period of vanity, especially a high school reunion, but nothing will reveal all those individuals whose hands touched and held this note.

These larger size notes were originally created as demand notes and minted in $5, $10, and $20 denominations. They were approximately 50 percent larger than today’s currency, or if you reverse the equation, our present day paper currency is 50 percent smaller. I believe many of you have noticed this if you’ve bought groceries in the past few months. Oh, wait! I’m speaking of size, not value. Sorry. Many of the older notes were hand trimmed which resulted in slight variations in size. The standardization concept, which old Henry Ford birthed, resolved this.

The government responded to the demand for government-guaranteed currency and began issuing large size currency in a variety of styles and artwork, with denominations ranging from $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, $500, $1,000, $5,000, and $10,000. For those of us of the older persuasion, you may remember Bret Maverick always kept a $1,000 bill pinned to the inside of his jacket.

There were gold certificates, silver certificates, bank notes, Federal Reserve notes, and more. I collected many of these over the years and still have some squirreled away. Somehow, the artwork on these older bills was much more detailed, often depicting spectacular scenes and events. Perhaps all this variation helped counterfeiters in their endeavors.

I miss the old, exquisitely detailed currency. We moved on to standardizing it all, then moved on to plastic money, and now are returning to a cash basis. I won’t delve into crypto currency. The jury is still out on that. I guess there will always be that romanticism with days gone by. And, our constantly shrinking dollar.