Dating military mess token
Historiker
Posts: 3 ✭
Hey there collective wisdom!
I recently acquired an NCO Open Mess Token from Fort Riley, and for the life of me, I can't find any information that tells me when this token would have been used by the US Army. I checked Curto's Military Tokens, but discovered it doesn't contain dates.
I'm hoping someone here may have more info on when this would have been used. I'd even be grateful for a ballpark (WW1, interwar, WW2, etc).
Thanks!
1
Comments
So tokencatalog.com has six different denominations of this design. One of the contributors there may be able to provide a date range. Good luck. Peace Roy
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Memory may be wrong but,
wasn't Ft. Riley an internment camp for WW2 German prisoners of war?
good luck,
bob
vegas baby!
I think a subsection of Ft Riley was used for POWs, but not the entire installation.
Looks like there's a "dont contact contributors" rule there, but I reached out to the admin to see if there are exceptions. Thanks for the tip.
This is probably early to mid 1970s. Ft. Riley was home to the 1st Armored Division, by the way.
Check out our own military tokens thread if the subject interests you:
https://forums.collectors.com/discussion/978930/military-tokens-thread/p4#latest
Dead Cat Waltz Exonumia
"Coin collecting for outcasts..."
Many military bases had sections for WWII prisoners of war. Ft. Riley was probably one of them.
I was never in the military, and I'm not even American, so I'm happy to have my third-hand information corrected by actual service personnel.
It's my understanding that most of these mess tokens date from the 1960s and 1970s - so, "Vietnam-era" or shortly afterwards. If the series has multiple denominations, those were probably post-1973. Pre-1973, the military establishments generally would have used MPCs and would have had little need for a full series of canteen tokens - but they still needed some tokens back then to use in coin-operated machinery like vending machines, pinball machines etc.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
Apparently I have been awarded the DPOTD twice.
1960s-70s would be my guess.
ANA LM
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