Note: This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul

I was recently researching an obscure topic and stumbled across something interesting in my Google search results: a website called TokenCatalog.com, which attempts to document the seemingly limitless world of tokens.

Nowadays, of course, the term “token” often refers to the digital world — crypto tokens, AI tokens, security tokens, that sort of thing. But TokenCatalog.com is about physical tokens — coin-like items that can be used in lieu of cash. Some are issued by private businesses (a “Good for One Drink” chit at a local bar, or scrip to be used at the company store), others by governmental agencies (subway tokens). TokenCatalog.com claims to have photos of over 600,000 of them.

I’d never much thought about tokens as collectibles until I came across the TokenCatalog.com site, but a quick check of eBay revealed that token collecting is definitely a thing. I wanted to know more, so I contacted the site’s founder, Richard Greever, and asked if I could interview him. Here’s the transcript of a Zoom call we recently had, edited for length and clarity.

Inconspicuous Consumption: Please tell me a little bit about yourself. How old are you, where do you live, and what do you do for a living?

Richard Greever: I’m 68 years old. I’m currently back in California, although I lived in Hawaii for the past 15 years or so. And I’m retired from a career as a software engineer — embedded systems, telecommunication systems for corporate systems, working on their software.

IC: Do you collect anything besides tokens?

Greever: Not really. I collected coins as a kid, sort of lost interest in that over the years, and then started picking that up again. But then prices of everything went crazy and around 2000 or so, so my wife said, “You should try tokens. They’re cheap.”

IC: So that’s when you got bitten by the token bug, so to speak?

Greever: Yeah. I bought a bunch of them from Fred Holabird, this well-known Western Americana dealer in Nevada. He had an auction and I said to him, “Can I buy all the unsold lots?” So I got about 150 tokens from Oregon. I knew nothing about them and they were all different. It was cool.

IC: So you started out with 150 tokens. How many do you have now?

Greever: Probably 10,000.

IC: Whoa! So your wife really didn’t know what she was getting into there, right?

Greever: Yeah, she’s scratching her head like, “That wasn’t what was supposed to happen.”

IC: Well, at least it’s 10,000 of something that’s fairly small. Speaking of which, how do you have them arranged or displayed or stored?

Greever: They’re not really displayed except for on the website. The bulk of them are Oregon state tokens, because of that first group of them I got. That’s how I collected coins as a kid — you fill up the penny book until you’ve filled in every hole. It took a long time for me to figure out that with tokens, you can’t fill in every hole. You’re never finished. There are always new ones turning up, being found.

I still focus on specific areas. I do Oregon, I do Hawaii trade tokens, and I did Santa Clara County in California. And I used to have a collection of California saloon tokens, but I sold that a bunch of years ago. Anyway, that’s how I sort of organize things — by where they’re from, by town and by state.

IC: Do you have them in drawers?

Greever: Mostly in boxes, in 2x2 flips organized in boxes at home, a couple hundred pieces stacked on top of each other. And some are in binders.

IC: Obviously, I realized there are people who collect things like coins and stamps, but I was not really familiar with the idea of collecting tokens until I stumbled across your website. And I was like, “Oooh, this is a whole niche I hadn’t been aware of!” Is there a particularly large or robust community of token collectors out there?

Greever: It’s a struggling hobby, I guess is what I would say. There’s a National Token Collectors Association. Around 2000, they had 500 members; I think they’re down to 300 now. And there’s the Token and Medal Society, which spans tokens and larger commemorative pieces. There’s also Numista — they do something similar to our website, but it’s not organized the same way. I think the population is just aging. I’m frustrated by how many notices I get about people who’ve passed away every year.

IC: In the same way that you specialize in certain areas of origin, like Oregon or Hawaii or whatever it might be, I assume there are lots of other subcategories that a collector might specialize in, like tokens from a particular business or industry, or tokens made of a certain material, or whatever, yes? Looking at your website, the number of potential sub-niches seems almost limitless.

Greever: Yeah, there are definitely people who collect only transportation tokens, only car wash tokens, only saloon tokens. As far as materials, a lot of people won’t have anything to do with plastic tokens.

IC: But that opens up a possibility for the people who like plastic tokens!

Greever: Yeah, there are people who specialize in them. Yeah. And there are people who collect wooden nickels.

IC: When did you launch the website?

Greever: I think it was 2006. I’d been collecting for a number of years, and I was frustrated because I couldn’t find any information about the tokens I had. Like, what is this design? How many were made? Here’s one that has a big hole in the center — were they all that way, or was that a mistake?

So I created the website and started cataloging my collection as I acquired more tokens and adding whatever information I could about them.

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IC: I like that you call it TokenCatalog. I actually collect catalogs, among other things, so that appeals to me. But we could also say it’s a database or a digital archive, right?

Greever: Yeah. I bristle a little bit about calling it a database. I mean, that’s what it is, it’s true, but lot of the old-time token collectors just sort of dismissed it when they heard that term. Like, “It’s just a spreadsheet, it’s not of interest.” So I try to avoid that term, even though it is truly a database.

IC: So your goal was to create the most comprehensive token library, database, catalog, whatever you want to call it, as possible?

Greever: My goal was to create a tool that would enable that to happen. When I started working on the website, I had several thousand Oregon tokens — I was just buying everything Oregon. And then I thought, oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I entered all mine and you entered all yours and everybody entered all of theirs, then there would be this massive database. You’d see all different wear, different varieties.

Greever [continued]: And then, after spending a year of entering tokens onto the database as pretty much a full-time job, I realized nobody else in their right mind will ever do this. So it was never my intent to be the one to catalog everything. It was more to make a tool so others could do the same thing I was trying to do. And then what gets displayed to the public is a union of everything that’s been put in.

IC: You just said no one else in their right mind would do this, but lots of people actually have done it. It has become a crowdsourced project, so to speak, right?

Greever: Yeah. There are definitely people who help research stuff on the site. There are certain personalities that I think are addicted to what I created — and I’m one of them! I mean, I’m on the site every day, playing around. What I’m trying to do is just find more information about what’s already there. Ideally, I’d like to know who made every token, who the vendor was and when.

IC: You said you founded the site in 2006, so this is your 20th-anniversary year. Are you happy with how it’s evolved?

Greever: Yes. There are some things I wish were better — better documentation, for one thing — but I’m mostly happy with it. One thing I’ve had in the back of my mind is, who can take this over?

IC: I was going to ask if you about that. I mean, you’re 68, you’ve got plenty of years ahead of you, but I was wondering if you had a succession plan or a protégé or something like that.

Greever: Not specifically. I’ve reached out to several people who could do it. They just don’t have the time, the bandwidth, that kind of thing. I’ve approached the Token and Medal Society, and there’s some interest there, but it’s unclear whether they have the right skill set.

IC: Your homepage says the site currently has over 600,000 images of tokens. I assume many of those were taken by site contributors, not by you..?

Greever: Yes.

IC: Let’s say you see a token on eBay that you’ve never encountered before, so you want to add it to the website. But for whatever reason — whether because of the price or the condition or whatever — you don’t want to buy it; you just want to document it. Would you take the photo from the eBay listing and add it to your website?

Greever: Yes, but I request permission from the eBay seller. When I first started out, we were freely taking images off of eBay — like, it’s out there, it’s public, we figured there’d be no problem. But it just takes one person to complain. And so we had to remove about 2,000 images.

IC: So now you ask the seller. Has anyone ever said no?

Greever: Out of about 2,000 people, maybe 10 have said no.

IC: Let’s talk a bit about tokens in general. Is there an accepted definition in the hobby of what does or doesn’t qualify as a token?

Greever: I don’t really have a strict definition. There are too many weird edges and exceptions. There’s some things I can tell you aren’t tokens — a medal commemorating George Washington’s presidency is not a token, that’s a medal.

IC: Is there any category that’s controversial, where some people would say, “Oh, yeah, that’s a token,” and other people would say, “That’s not a token.”

Greever: I’m sure there are. I don’t look at it that way.

IC: Are there some designers or manufacturers that are known for producing particularly attractive or sought-after tokens?

Greever: Not specifically. There are Civil War tokens, but that gets back further [in time] than I’m usually interested in. They’re considered tokens. Some of them are pretty.

IC: And what were those used for? A Civil War token for what?

Greever: They were replacing currency. Small change was short during the Civil War, so they minted copper. Businesses had copper tokens made with their name on it and would accept them as a penny. The whole town would accept them as a penny. A lot of tokens arise that way.

IC: What about casino chips? Are they considered tokens?

Greever: They are not.

IC: Even though you can cash them in?

Greever: They’re their own category. Most people who collect trade tokens and stuff won’t have anything to do with casino chips.

IC: A lot of the token categories on your site had me scratching my head a bit. What, for example, is a coal token?

Greever: So coal companies, lumber companies, they had workers that shopped at the company store, ate at the company canteen, got paid in company scrip. And you couldn’t really use them when you went to town, so you didn’t go to town.

IC: What about exploder tokens?

Greever: Those are tokens that were used during mining to control access to explosives. So they’re good for a four sticks of dynamite, or a plastic cap, that kind of thing. Only authorized people would be carrying those. Like, you’re going to go set off some explosives in a mine to make it deeper. And then you get the specific tokens you need for the necessary amount of dynamite. That way, nobody had access to, say, 16 sticks of dynamite when they only needed four.

IC: Obviously, we currently live in an increasingly digital age, which I gather is bad for tokens. As a New Yorker, I’m of course familiar with subway tokens [which were phased out in the 1990s], and I know bars use drink tokens, and I suppose I’ve seen laundromats where the washing machines take tokens. What else are tokens currently used for in modern contemporary life?

Greever: Amusement tokens, like at an arcade. Not a whole lot else.

IC: Getting back to your collection, do you have any personal white whales, so to speak? Tokens you’ve been trying to track down for many years?

Greever: Not specifically, just partly because I’ve evolved from the wanting to fill every hole.

IC: What’s the most you ever spent on a token?

Greever: Probably $800. Maybe once I spent a thousand dollars. But 10 to 20 bucks is more typical.

IC: What do your friends and family think of this passion of yours?

Greever: My wife thinks it keeps me mostly out of trouble. My family thinks it’s this weird thing that I do — they don’t quite get it. Most people don’t. I’ve taken a pocket full of tokens to parties and been like, “This is what I collect and do.” And people will look and say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” But they don’t really get it.

And there you have it. Big thanks to Richard for introducing me to this collecting niche, and for sharing his story with us.

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. He also writes Uni Watch, which is sort of like Inconspicuous Consumption for sports. You can contact him here.

Note: This post includes some video clips that are essential to the story, so I strongly recommend that you read the web version, not the emailed version. Enjoy! — Paul

It all started when my friend Liz sent me a text, asking, “Is there a special name for that one-handle-drive USPS cart? I picture it having one — you know, like the ‘Robinson Cart’ or something like that.”

I knew what she was referring to, of course — the familiar pushcart that U.S. Postal Service letter carriers use to tote the mail when making their daily rounds. But I didn’t know its name, so I figured I’d look it up. And that’s when I made a key error: The pushcart has four wheels, but I mistakenly thought it had only three (my mind’s eye had collapsed the two small front wheels into a single wheel), so I Googled “three-wheeled letter carrier’s cart.” And that’s when a wondrous chapter in postal history opened up to me.

Instead of telling me about the pushcart, Google gave me a series of links about a three-wheeled fiberglass buggy that letter carriers drove on their routes during the 1950s and ’60s. As you can see in the photo above, it had a great-looking design. It also had an irresistible name: the Mailster.1

I love mail and I love midcentury design, but the Mailster was new to me. According to this article on the National Postal Museum’s website (entitled “Mail on Three Wheels,” so it was at the top of my search results), Mailsters were first road-tested by the Postal Service in 1950, with about 5,000 of them in service by that decade’s end. They were made by seven different manufacturers, which resulted in some design variations. The one shown at the top of this page, for example, has a sort of minivan-ish silhouette, but there was an earlier version with more of a cab-and-trailer profile:

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As many of you know, I have a longstanding fascination with bread clips (or, as they’re officially known, Kwik Loks). So you can imagine how I felt when IC reader David Chelsea, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, recently contacted me with the following message:

I have this vague childhood memory — this would have been around 1968 — of a local brand of sliced bread with a name like Animal Farm, which was advertised with animated commercials featuring a cast of barnyard animals — chickens, pigs, cows, and the like. But as I recall it, there was also one non-animal character: “Kwikky Kwik Lok,” who was a cartoon bread clip.

I realized that this could make me sound delusional, so I appealed for help on a Portland-centric Facebook group, and someone came back with this:

It seems Kwikky is the farmer, and the brand was called Funny Farm (not Animal Farm, as I had recalled). This brand was sold at Fred Meyer, a local grocery chain in Portland. The Kwik Lok connection is an unusual bit of corporate synergy, but Kwik Lok is based in Yakima, Washington, not far from Portland, so it makes a kind of sense.

Whoa — a bread wrapper design featuring an anthropomorphized bread tag! How great is that? And how had I never been aware of it until now? (Obviously, the “Funny Farm” brand name is unfortunate, but we already knew that the late 1960s weren’t exactly the most enlightened era regarding mental illness.)

The image that David shared with me looked like it had been taken from a newspaper ad, so I went to newspapers.com and was able to find the full, uncropped version of the Fred Meyer ad, which ran in an Oregon newspaper called The Statesman Journal on April 30th, 1969:

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Most of you are probably at least somewhat familiar with Minuteman Press, the franchised chain of business-to-business print shops. Founded on Long Island in 1973, they now have over 1,000 outlets scattered across the United States and in several other countries. Although Minuteman’s business has evolved over the years — in addition to printing, they currently offer a wide range of design, promotion, sign-making, and merchandising services — there’s been one constant: the company’s clock-headed mascot character, a visual play on the “Minuteman” brand name.

I’ve seen that clock-headed guy countless times over the years. But when I recently walked by a Minuteman Press shop in New Jersey and saw the mascot standing watch on the front door (as seen in the photo above), it felt like the first time I’d really seen him, and he suddenly struck me as an underappreciated mini-masterpiece. Sure, there are plenty of other characters and performers who have large, round objects for heads — think Mr. Met, the Nedicks logo guy, Mayor McCheese, pumpkin-head scarecrows, and even the Residents — but those other examples all have human-seeming faces (or, in the case of the Residents, at least an eyeball), whereas the Minuteman guy can’t make eye contact, wink, smile, smirk, raise his eyebrows, or execute any of the other facial maneuvers that usually define a character’s personality. Yet something about him has always felt friendly and professional, which is a testament to the character’s physical charisma.

As I looked at the character on the New Jersey shop’s door, I was also intrigued by the time shown on his face. Most clocks and watches shown in advertising and in retail display cases are set to 10:10, in part because the minute and hour hands create an aesthetically pleasing “smiley face” effect. But the Minuteman mascot’s face was set to 11:22. I figured the company founder’s birthday must have been November 22nd, or something like that.

When I got home, I did a bit of poking around on the internet and learned that the clock-headed character is literally called Clock Head — that’s his official moniker. (I assumed he was called the Minute Man or something along those lines.) I also found that he has a whole portfolio of poses:

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Before MP3 files, before CDs, before LPs, 45s, and 78s, there were Edison cylinders, the original commercial medium for recorded music. I used to have a couple of them, just because I thought they were interesting novelties (I don’t recall what happened to them), but I’ve never collected them or been particularly well-versed in the nuances of their history.

That probably explains why I was so wowed by the Edison cylinder I recently encountered at a yard sale (see above). All the previous Edisons I’d seen were black, but this one was blue. I had no idea they came in any color other than black! The saturated blue hue made the cylinder seem simultaneously old-timey and modern. I found it so captivating that I went ahead and bought the cylinder ($10), even though I have nothing to play it on.

Here’s a video clip that provides a full view of the cylinder’s container, complete with Thomas Edison’s portrait on the far side:

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Unless you live in New Jersey — the only state where self-serve gasoline remains illegal — you’re probably used to pumping your own gas. But in the 1970s, when I was growing up, the self-serve format was just starting to gain widespread traction around the country. It was mainly a way for the petroleum industry to save on labor costs, of course, but 10-year-old me didn’t know or care about that. As a kid who was obsessed with industrial gadgetry and anything that seemed “official,” I thought getting to pump your own gas seemed like the coolest thing ever, and I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to do it myself. (Tom Sawyer probably would have had a field day with me.)

But there’s one aspect of the 1970s self-serve experience that I have no memory of — something I’d never even heard of until last week. Ladies and gents, I give you the Gas-n-Toss (see above).

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If you’ve ever received an email from me, you may have noticed something a bit unusual: I routinely style the text in the subject line as all-lowercase (as shown above).

I’ve been doing this for over 30 years now, and I honestly can’t say why. I mean, it’s not like I have any deep-seated antipathy toward capital letters or anything like that. (On the contrary, I find it annoying when other people use all-lowercase for the body of an email, or even for texting.) But when I got my first email account in 1995, that’s just how I chose to style the subject line, and the habit stuck.

Some of you may be thinking, “Oh, that Lukas — always has to be different, always has to turn everything into some sort of statement or performance.” And while I suppose that could be accurately said about some of my peculiarities (I always make a point of tooting my car horn while crossing a state border, for instance), believe me when I say that’s definitely not the case here. I don’t think there’s anything better about an all-lowercase subject line; it’s just a random stylistic tic that I fell into when I started using email.

Three decades later, I’ve found it a surprisingly difficult habit to break, even as an exercise. If I capitalize the first word of the subject line, it suddenly looks and feels like, well, like someone else’s email. I realize that must sound ridiculous (probably because it is ridiculous), and yet it still feels palpably real to me. This occasionally leads to an internal conflict if I’m typing a subject line that includes a proper noun, like a person’s name or a movie title. If the email is “high-stakes” — a story pitch to an editor, say, or a note to someone whose approval is important to me — I’ll usually grit my teeth and use the capital letters, just so the person receiving the email doesn’t think I’m hopelessly pretentious. But for normal, low-stakes emails with friends and acquaintances, I’ll go with my usual all-lowercase.

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Note: This post is not paywalled. It includes some video footage that’s important to the story, so I recommend that you read the web version, not the emailed version. Enjoy! — Paul

A few months ago I wrote about how I went to Manhattan’s Garment District to take a tour of America’s last remaining fabric flower manufacturer. I recently returned to that neighborhood to tour another super-specialized fabric operation: Tom’s Sons International Pleating, which creates pleated fabric for some of the world’s top apparel brands, including Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, and many more.

I first heard of Tom’s Sons a few months ago, when I checked out a sensational exhibit of photos shot in factories, called “Made in America” (still up through late September at the Cooper Hewitt national design museum in Manhattan — highly recommended). It included a photo of Tom’s Sons founder Leon Kalajian holding a huge cardboard pleating mold (see above). Obviously, it’s a gorgeous photo, but it also got me thinking. Pleating — that is, the systematic folding of fabric — barely exists in menswear, so I’d never given much thought to how it’s created. Maybe with an iron..? In any case, I definitely didn’t realize it was done with cardboard molds! And the mold looked like a piece of art in its own right, like Ruth Asawa’s folded paper sculptures.

I was intrigued, so I made a note and later looked up the Tom’s Sons website, whose home page features another impressive photo of Leon, this time apparently removing pleated fabric from that same mold:

Now I was really intrigued. So when I saw that Tom’s Sons (the name refers to Leon’s father, Thomas) was offering a June tour of their Manhattan facility, I tried to sign up for it. Unfortunately, it was already sold out, so I contacted Tom’s Sons and asked if they could squeeze in one more person. They said no, but after some haggling and cajoling (read: I showed them my article about the fabric flower tour), they agreed to let me come on a different day for a separate visit by myself, which I figured was even better than being part of a big group.

So with a photographer friend in tow, I recently paid a visit to Tom’s Sons, where I learned that Leon Kalajian died in 2023 (there’s a nice obituary here). The business is run these days by his son George Kalajian, who greeted us while wearing a vest with, appropriately, an elaborately pleated back.

It soon became apparent that George is a very special character. At heart, he’s a master artisan who works with his hands, but he’s also an engineer, a designer, a historian, a writer, a savvy businessman, a philanthropic do-gooder, and, as we quickly learned, an extremely gracious host. He explained that his family specialized in pleating for several generations in their native Lebanon. But after the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975, Leon took his wife and sons — including a very young George — to New York, where he established a pleating-centric apparel brand called Pierre Labiche. (The brand’s namesake, like many fashion brand identities, was fictitious. The product line’s actual designer was Leon.)

By now you may be wondering, “What’s the big deal about pleating?” That’s understandable if you’re a guy, because there’s a good chance that the only pleats you routinely encounter are on the front of your pants, the back of your shirt, and your sleeve cuffs. Those pleats are fairly minor and extremely localized, and as such are all created as part of the garment’s sewing process. Or to put it another way, they are pleats, but they are not pleating.

Womenswear, by contrast, often involves fully pleated garments that shimmer, undulate, and sway as they move. A good example is the “Angel Dress” conceived by the child prodigy couture designer Max Alexander, who worked with George to create that dress, as seen in this video (which originally appeared on Instagram, but I shot a video of the video so I could embed it here):

Pleats like those are not created as the garment is being sewn together. Instead, the fabric is pleated before the garment is sewn. Apparel companies don’t do that themselves; they outsource the work to specialists. That’s pleating — and that’s where Tom’s Sons comes in.

“My father was a pioneer, really a genius,” George told us, describing the company’s work. “He created pleating techniques and innovations that no other company does — things I can’t let you photograph, things we don’t even let some of our employees see.”

I was curious about the cardboard molds, which George was willing to let me photograph. Here’s a video clip of him explaining how the fabric is put in a mold to create a pleated pattern (you may have to turn up the volume a bit to hear him clearly), followed by two photos that provide a closer look at the mold he’s handling in the video:

Isn’t that amazing? So geometric! I asked George who produces the molds and he said, “We make them ourselves.” When I asked how, he smiled, shook his head, and said that was a trade secret.

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In a different part of the factory, we saw another mold, called a sunburst mold. It was large and semicircular, like a giant version of an old-fashioned handheld fan. The bottom part had been spread out on a work table, where a semicircle of white fabric had been laid over it.

We watched as two employees put the top piece of the mold over the fabric. Then they carefully folded up the mold, with the fabric still inside — closing the giant fan, so to speak.

The compressed mold — with the fabric still sandwiched between the top and bottom layers — would then be, as George likes to say, “cooked in the Instant Pot,” which is an industrial-grade steam cabinet that makes the pleats permanent. George would not discuss any details of that process, nor would he let me photograph the steamer.

The sheer number and variety of cardboard molds on hand was mind-blowing. They seemed to be everywhere — on shelves, peeking out of cabinets, and so on. Here are some photos I took:

George explained that the pleats made by the mold in that last photo are the smallest ones that can be mold-made. For even smaller pleats, the factory has a special machine, which George demonstrated for us by running a dollar bill through it. I got the impression that this is one of his favorite party tricks for visitors.

George’s knowledge of all this stuff is so encyclopedic, you might say he wrote the book on pleating. And he did — literally: He and Leon co-authored Pleating: Fundamentals for Fashion Design, a 2017 book that took about four years to put together. It’s considered the definitive reference for commercial pleating.

But George’s authoritative knowledge is leavened by endearing bits of playfulness. Photos on the internet show him wearing a T-shirt that reads “For Pleat’s Sake” (a phrase I stole for the headline of this article); one of his websites prominently states, “MUST LOVE PLEATS”; and his email signature features a simple but clever combination of forward slashes and backslashes to create a pleating symbol.

George is in his mid-50s — young enough to keep Tom’s Sons going for a while longer, but old enough to be thinking about a succession plan. He takes his family’s textile legacy very seriously, but he doesn’t have kids of his own and his only sibling opted to pursue a different career path, so he’s accepted the reality that the business will probably not remain in the family. He’s considered mentoring an employee to become his protégé but has found it difficult to find the time.

One possible solution is Project Golden Bear, a nonprofit initiative that George launched in 2024. The program allows young people to develop into artisans by apprenticing at Tom’s Sons and using scrap pleated fabric to create teddy bears that will be given to terminally ill children. Ideally, one of the apprentices will fall in love with pleating, stay on as a full-time employee, and, in a best-case scenario, one day take over the company.

But that outcome, if it happens, is still a long way down the road. For now, George is still busy doing contract pleating work for various fashion houses and running Project Golden Bear. He’s also revived his father’s old Pierre Labiche label and is designing all the apparel for that line.

We ended up spending about two and a half hours at Tom’s Sons. Along the way, we met George’s mother (she stops by the factory almost every day) and were invited to join a little going-away party that had been convened to mark an employee’s final day on the job. By the time we left, we felt like honorary members of the family. “Come back anytime,” said George. “Don’t be strangers.”

You can learn more about Tom’s Sons on their website, and there’s also lots of fun stuff on their Instagram page. (George’s handsome greyhound, Rags, who is sometimes at the factory but wasn’t there on the day I visited, is on Instagram too.)

Between the fabric flowers tour in March and now the commercial pleating tour, I feel like I’ve gotten to experience two very specialized and super-inconspicuous manufacturing operations. They say good things come in threes, so here’s hoping that means there’s another esoteric factory tour in my near future.

(Special thanks to Patricia Clark for the teddy bear photo and invaluable editorial feedback.)

Inconspicuous News Roundup

• U.S. 20, the longest highway in America, stretches 3,365 miles from Newport, Oregon, to Boston. There are signs at the eastern and western termini, indicating the full distance to the other end of the road. And yes, I enjoy having an excuse to say “termini.” (From Erik Bredberg)

• Wegmans appears to have a font-chaos problem. (From Patricia Clark)

• Can’t believe I didn’t know until now that there’s an online museum devoted to moist towelettes. (From The Art of Noticing’s Rob Walker)

• Number progressions usually run from the smallest number to the largest, so it’s a bit odd that this sign at New York City’s Grand Central Terminal directs travelers to “tracks 21 to 11” (from Ben Wright):

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. He also writes Uni Watch, which is sort of like Inconspicuous Consumption for sports. You can contact him here.

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Hello! Last month I announced an Inconspicuous Consumption T-shirt challenge. Just to refresh your memory, here’s how I laid it out:

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about Inconspicuous Consumption’s shorthand abbreviation — IC. If you say it out loud, it sounds like “I see.” That feels right, because Inconspicuous Consumption is often about seeing small details, seeing things that other people miss, the surprise of discovery, and so on. You see? IC!

I’ve been thinking that the resonance between “IC” and “I see” might make the basis for a good logo or T-shirt. For a while I tinkered with a lowercase “i” dotted with an eyeball, like this:

But I couldn’t find a way to integrate that into a larger concept that really communicated the “IC”/“I see” connection. So today I’m issuing a call for entries: Let’s come up with an Inconspicuous Consumption graphic that riffs on the connection between “IC” and “I see.”

I received lots of submissions (thank you!), but one of them immediately stood out as the best. Behold:

Isn’t that great? It’s from IC reader Jonathan Lawrence, a professional graphic designer based in Atlanta, and I love it — so simple, so playful, and it really gets at the connection between “IC” and “I see.” Plus it feels rooted in classic graphic design history, because reminds me of Paul Rand’s famous IBM rebus and also echoes all the great eyeball-themed Bauhaus posters.

I told Jonathan that I thought it would be fun to have other eye colors available, so he added brown and green to the mix:

These light-colored shirts, with the black “IC” lettering, are available in a bunch of colors and styles, depending on the eye color. Here’s a sampling:

For darker shirt colors, we have the “IC” lettering in white — again, with all three eye colors available. Here’s a sampling of those designs:

I realize that it can look a bit odd for the “whites” of the eyes to be black, navy, brown, or whatever the shirt color happens to be. Jonathan and I played around with various ways of making that part of the eyeball white, regardless of the shirt color, but we agreed that those solutions all made the eye feel less naturalistic within the “C,” so we ultimately decided to let the shirt color serve as the “whites” of the eyes. (Of course, you can solve this issue by getting white or off-white as your shirt color.)

We also considered putting “Inconspicuous Consumption” on the back of the shirt — sort of an answer key to the inevitable “What does ‘IC’ stand for?” query — but that would have raised the shirt price by at least $4, plus we kinda like the idea of letting the logo speak for itself. If you know, you know; if you don’t know, maybe you’ll ask and find out!

So there are six separate versions of the shirt (each with multiple color and style options). Here are the ordering pages for each of them:

• Black lettering, blue eye

• Black lettering, brown eye

• Black lettering, green eye

• White lettering, blue eye

• White lettering, brown eye

• White lettering, green eye

If you’re interested in a combination of lettering color, shirt color, and eye color that you don’t see listed, let me know and I’ll try to set it up for you.

I’ve also used put the new logo on coffee mugs — again, in all three eye colors:

And since coffee mugs are white, the whites of the eyes are also white! Here are the ordering pages for the coffee mugs, broken down by eye color: blue, brown, and green.

I may end up using the “IC” mark in additional contexts — we’ll see.

I’m super-thankful to Jonathan Lawrence for coming up with this great design, and for working with me to refine it. As he explained to me, “I’ve always been a graphic designer but didn’t always know that’s what it was called. Looking back, my fascinations with color, packaging, and letterforms all make so much sense.” You can learn more about him on his website, and fans of vintage typography should definitely check out his fantastic Typehunting site.

Jonathan also tells me he spent a lot of time during his childhood drawing logos for imaginary sports teams, so we may be seeing more of him over on Uni Watch. Stay tuned.

Big Brannock News

The great design podcast 99% Invisible recently launched a project called “A History of the United States in 100 Objects.” Happily, they had the wisdom to include the eternal Brannock Device as one of the 100 objects profiled in the series. As a longtime Brannock evangelist, I was excited and honored to be interviewed at length for this episode, much of which is basically a conversation between myself and 99PI host/founder Roman Mars. The whole process was a blast.

The episode is now available to SiriusXM subscribers, and it will go public for everyone else on Friday. I hope you’ll check it out!

A Special Interaction

I recently posted a link to a bunch of stuff I’m selling on eBay. One of those items —a vintage price sign for horse meat from a French butcher shop — sold a few days after I posted the link, and the buyer sent me a very sweet note after making the purchase:

Hi Paul,

I bought the horse meat sign because I shoplifted your book in 1997 when I was a teenage clerk at Waldenbooks. I’m sorry.

Unfortunately, I went on to study the liberal arts and am thus unable to calculate the appropriate compound interest to make you whole in this case. I hope this purchase provides some small compensation and closure for us both and that we are able to move forward in a spirit of reconciliation.

In all seriousness, thank you for the many inconspicuous marvels you’ve helped me notice these past 30 years. My wife plans to use the sign at dinner parties.

Best,
[name redacted]

Isn’t that great? It’s worth noting that the real victim of the book theft was not me but the bookstore — in this case, Waldenbooks. They went bankrupt in 2011, and now we know why.

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Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. He also writes Uni Watch, which is sort of like Inconspicuous Consumption for sports. You can contact him here.

Note: Inconspicuous Consumption reader Norb Rozek recently posted on social media about the street signs in his hometown of Green Bay, Wisconsin. His manifesto was so squarely in the IC wheelhouse that I asked him if we could adapt it into a guest-written IC post, and he graciously agreed.

This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul

By Norb Rozek

Slipshod street signs have long been a source of annoyance for me. I think this might stem from when I was four and we moved to a suburb where a street not far from ours had signs that variously read “Kalb Street,” “Kolb Street,” and “Colb Street.” This street was maybe a mile long. How exactly can one wind up with three different spellings of the same street name? How do the signs get left like that? Does nobody notice? Does nobody care? Seemed weird to me, even as a little kid.

I now live in Green Bay, Wisconsin, which has the most pathetic excuses for street signs of any city I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to quite a few. There’s no standardization, no quality control, no attempt whatsoever to pretend that anyone really cares — just a bizarre mish-mosh of whatever letters were lying around that day, I guess.

In an attempt to document this sorry phenomenon, I recently walked down a roughly half-mile stretch of Washington St., a major artery that runs through downtown. Here’s a map of the span I traversed:

I began at the north end of that route and walked south. As you can see on the map, my path included nine intersections. Here are the street signs I encountered along the way, beginning with…

North Washington St. and Main St.

All the text appears to be set in something fairly equivalent to Franklin Gothic Heavy (“Washington” is more like Franklin Gothic Heavy Condensed, because it’s longer, but that’s fine). Well, heck, that doesn’t look too bad. Nice and bold, right?

Now let’s go one block south to…

North Washington St. and City Deck Ct.

Wait, now the text is in something more akin to Franklin Gothic Demi or Book -- certainly not the same big, chunky letters from the first sign, except for the block number of City Deck Ct., which is still Franklin Gothic Heavy Condensed. Also, there is now a period after the “N” for “North.” Hmm.

Let’s continue down Washington to the next intersection, which is…

North Washington St. and Northland Ave.

This sign uses a completely different font. I don’t know what it’s called but I think it’s used only on street signs, so I’ll call it “Street Sign font.” In any event, this is a complete departure from the first two signs.

Let’s go down another block to…

North Washington St. and Pine St.

Here we have a sign that almost matches the sign at City Deck Ct., except that the “St” for “Street” looks like it’s in Street Sign font, while most of the rest of the sign is set in Franklin Gothic book/demi/regular (except for the Pine Street block number, which is set in Franklin Gothic Heavy Condensed).

Moving one block down, we come to…

North Washington St. and Cherry St.

They’ve used such an absurdly oversized “W” that there’s no room for the usual “N” to designate “North.” Also, the Washington Street block number is now Franklin Gothic Heavy Condensed to match the Cherry Street block number, despite the fact that the Washington block number had been Franklin Gothic regular for the previous few signs.

Moving on, in another block we come to…

North Washington St. and Walnut St.

Here the street signs are suspended over the intersection instead of being mounted on poles. In light of the different signage format, I’d be inclined to give them a pass for using Street Sign font, except that the nearby intersection of Broadway and Walnut, which also has the signs suspended over the intersection, use Franklin Gothic Heavy. I didn’t get a photo of that, but you can see it in this Google Street View shot:

As we cross Walnut St., North Washington becomes South Washington, leading us to…

South Washington St. and Doty St.

Here we have one sign in Franklin Gothic regular and the other in Street Sign font, which is not a good look for anyone.

Moving on, we arrive at…

South Washington St. and Stuart St.

This is almost a match with our first sign at Washington and Main — except that first sign had “Washington” in Franklin Gothic Heavy Condensed, and here it’s just regular Franklin Gothic Heavy. As Maxwell Smart used to say, “Missed it by that much!”

A block down from that, we come to…

South Washington St. and Admiral Flatley Ct.

“Washington” has reverted to Franklin Gothic regular, while “Adm. Flatley” is in Franklin Gothic Heavy. I stopped after that because I got bored documenting the carnage.

Just to be clear, I wasn’t combing through all of downtown to find boo-boos or inconsistencies in the street signs. THESE ARE NINE INTERSECTIONS IN A ROW, ON A MAIN THOROUGHFARE, THAT I HAPPENED TO WALK PAST, AND NONE OF THEIR SIGNS MATCH. If I live to be a million, I will never understand how grown adults sign off on such slop. Who okayed this?

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Paul here. Big thanks to Norb for his eagle eye and uncompromising typographic rigor. Here’s a gallery of all nine of his sign pics, just so you can see them all at once (you can click on the images to enlarge):

All kidding aside, most municipalities have style guides to cover this sort of thing. And while changing graphics standards occasionally lead to a certain degree of inconsistency (many cities, including mine, have slowly been replacing all-caps signs with title case, for example), Green Bay’s lack of uniformity does seem a bit extreme.

Oh, and I should add that what Norb refers to as “Street Sign font” is actually Highway Gothic. I didn’t change it in his text because I thought his nomenclature was amusing.

An appreciation for the finer points of street signage runs in Norb’s family. As you may recall, his brother, Kurt Rozek, was a longtime employee of the Street Department in the Green Bay suburb of Allouez. He recently retired, but shortly before that he spotted a new street sign that was due to be installed but was missing the dot over an “i” (sometimes referred to as a tittle), so he used some reflective tape to create a DIY dot for the sign. The tape he used was silver while the rest of the sign lettering was white, creating an endearingly inconspicuous anomaly.

Kurt didn’t remain on the job long enough to see his DIY-dotted sign installed on the street, but he recently had a dental appointment in Allouez, so he drove by and saw his silver-dotted sign in the wild:

So even though Kurt no longer works in Allouez, he’s left his mark on the town — literally.

Unless anyone can provide evidence to the contrary, I think we can safely say that the Rozek brothers take the prize for being IC’s most sign-obsessed siblings. I mentioned this to Norb, who wrote back:

My one experience similar to my brother’s dotting of the “i” was when I had a janitorial gig at an office complex in the ’80s. My boss had had some signs made up that I was supposed to go around affixing. They read “NO PARKING — VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED AT OWNER’S EXPENCE.” I was flabbergasted that no one caught “EXPENCE” at any step of the process.

After informing my supervisor of the error, I was told to go put the signs up anyway. My reward for pointing out the spelling mistake was to go back around to all the signs the next day with a bunch of little cover-up “S” stickers that they made to fix the problem. I put one of the stickers upside-down as some manner of statement or protest or something. Needless to say, no one caught it.

I will add one last thought here: I am not a fan of municipalities putting their town logo (or tourism logo, or whatever) on the left side of their street signs, as both Green Bay and Allouez have done. I’m not sure when this trend began, but there’s something about it that makes the sign feel more promotional than informational. How do you people feel about this?

And Speaking of Road Signs…

You may recall that my friend Liz Clayton was visiting family last year in Michigan City, Indiana, and sent us this photo of an unusually growth-stunted Stop sign, using her four-foot-tall daughter for scale:

Liz was recently back in Michigan City and saw that the Stop sign is still very short, but with a new twist:

As Liz put it when texting me the new photo, “This stop sign just can’t win!”

Inconspicuous News Roundup

• I’ve written before about artists who specialize in miniatures. If you liked those posts, you’ll love this article about photographer David Gilliver, who creates some really clever scenes out of tiny elements.

• Really fun development on the stationery front: envelopes made from old U.S. Geological Survey maps! (From Jason Hillyer)

• Nice, thoughtful review of a new book featuring photos of abandoned houses in and around Baltimore. (Another one from Jason Hillyer)

• Size matters: The famous Oscar Mayer weinermobile got stuck in a tunnel! (From Adriene Zepka)

• Here’s a faaaascinating piece on the newest movie craze: collectible popcorn buckets. That article is both informative and very entertainingly written — highly recommended!

• It’s been so hot in Japan that they had to come up with a new word for it.

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Meanwhile, in Case You Hadn’t Heard…

I think most of you know this by now, but just in case: I recently announced that the Uni Watch blog will go dark at the end of July, but that will not be the end of Uni Watch, because I’m moving the operations over to Substack, where I’ll be posting about uni-related items now and then. You can see my introductory post here. I’ll be publishing a new article early next week; you can make sure that you see it by subscribing. (It’s free for now, but I may be adding a paywall soon-ish.)

Inconspicuous Consumption is still my main priority, but I’m happy to keep Uni Watch going, even if at a much slower pace than in the past. Thanks to everyone who’s already subscribed!

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

When I’m in a vintage clothing shop, I don’t just look at the clothes. I also like to examine the labels, which comprise their own branch of retro design. So when I was in a vintage shop the other day and saw the rack of old white shirts shown above, I instinctively glanced at the label of the first shirt. It turned out to be a beauty:

Oh, man — the turquoise lettering, the orange horizontal stripes, the black drop-shadow on the crown. It’s a mini-masterpiece!

I beckoned to a friend who had accompanied me to the shop and showed her the label. She looked at it, nodded appreciatively, and then quietly uttered the word at the bottom of the label: “Sanforized.”

That word hadn’t initially registered with me, in part because I’d been so entranced by the rest of the label design but also because I’ve seen “Sanforized” countless times on other vintage clothing labels. It’s one of those things that’s so omnipresent that you (or at least I) essentially stop noticing it.

But that got me thinking, so I looked at the next shirt on the rack. It too was “Sanforized”:

I checked the next shirt. Sure enough, it was “Sanforized” — and this time the word was rendered in the same typography as on the previous label, with little dots or bullets on either side of the italic lettering and the oddly stylized “S”:

I went through the entire rack. There were 29 shirts, 13 of which were labeled as “Sanforized” — including one that was “Sanforized Plus”! Of those 13, 11 had the pair of bullets framing the italic lettering. Here are the remaining examples (you can click the images to see larger versions):

Despite the ubiquity of “Sanforized,” I’d never noticed that the word was essentially a logotype. Moreover, despite being a professionally curious person who’s spent a lot of time looking at vintage clothing, I suddenly realized that I didn’t even know what “Sanforized” meant! I knew it signified, uh, something fabric-related, but I wasn’t sure what that something was. This felt like an embarrassing gap in my knowledge — one that needed to be remedied.

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Note: This article is a updated version of a piece I originally wrote in 2014 for the now-dormant design website re:Form. A dozen years later, it still resonates as a fun discussion of a classically inconspicuous phenomenon, so I’ve decided to reproduce it here on IC. It does not have a paywall. Enjoy! — Paul

We’re often told that urban streets conceal a hidden subterranean world of water mains, sewer lines, electrical wiring, and more. That’s true enough, but the surface of the urban roadway — the blacktop that we navigate each day by car, bike, and foot — presents a complex world of its own. Where the untrained eye may see only pavement, lane markers, and crosswalks, a person who knows how to “read the street” will see a detailed system of painted codes and symbols, markings on manhole covers and storm drains, and small but telling records of construction work, all of which combine to form a language that tells the street’s story.

In New York, where I live, that language includes a particularly intriguing element: a series of circular plastic markers embedded in the roadway, each measuring an inch and a half across. Appearing in a variety of colors and stamped with a jumble of words and numbers, they have a bit of Pop Art feel, sort of like poker chips.

Once you start noticing them, you can’t stop — they appear on virtually every city block. At first glance they seem to be randomly distributed, but upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that they appear only on asphalt patches — spots where the roadway has been torn up by a utility or contractor and then repaved.

These markers are called A-tags (short for asphalt tags). They’re often used in other municipalities as “Call Before You Dig” warning markers, but in New York they’ve been adapted to create a recordkeeping and accountability system. When a utility or contractor is issued a permit to excavate a hole or trench in the roadway — something that happens hundreds of thousands of times a year in New York — the asphalt patch that’s applied at the end of the job must include an embedded A-tag. Each tag has three anchor legs, which, along with a bit of epoxy and a finishing back-and-forth by the guy operating the steamroller, help keep the tag in place.

Each tag carries a number indicating the year that the asphalt was patched (“18” for 2018, “23” for 2023, etc.), each broad contracting category has its own color, and each individual contractor or utility is identified either by name or by a unique five-digit number. All of this allows city officials to identify who worked on a given patch, which comes in handy if, say, the patch is starting to sink or buckle and the contractor needs to come back and fix it, or if someone is suing the city after a street-related accident and wants to know the names of everyone who worked on a particular block in the past five years.

“Before the A-tags, we used painted marks,” says Joseph Yacca, Director of Operations for the New York City Department of Transportation, who helped initiate New York’s A-tag program in 2006. “But the painted marks were just color-coded — they didn’t identify the individual user. For example, every plumber was green, so if you found a green marker, you knew you were looking for a plumber, but you didn’t know who. So we used to have to pull all the old permits and so on. Now we can pinpoint it much faster.”

Yacca says contractors like the A-tags, too. “There was initially some resistance, because they viewed it as another annoying regulation, but now they’ve seen the value of it,” he says. “Let’s say three or four contractors have been working on a new row of townhouses. There may have been violations issued to the wrong person because they were in the same area. This new system solves that problem.”

A-tags also allow laypeople and inconspicuists to have a greater understanding of their surroundings. Once you know the system, you can start to fit the pieces together: “Oh, here’s where they put in a gas line for that new house. And this is where they connected the sewer line. And this must be from when they installed that new traffic light.” And so on.

A-tags were patented in 1991 (the official invention name on the patent application was “utility cut patch identification tag”) and brought to market by a Minnesota-based company called Rhino Markers. Rhino was later acquired by Texas-based Trident Solutions, which continues to sell A-tags today (as do several other vendors). Tom Preston, a Rhino executive, describes the little markers with a mix of nonchalance and pride. “You know that little plastic thing that holds up the center of a pizza box? It’s basically a glorified version of that,” he says. “But it’s been a really good success story — we solved a problem for New York City.”

Indeed, New York’s A-tag experience has been so positive that Boston officials started a similar program for their own streets in 2011. “It started when the mayor at the time [Thomas Menino] drove over a patch that had settled, and he wanted it fixed,” says Mark Cardarelli, Supervisor of Utility Coordination and Compliance at the Boston Public Works Department. “He called our department and we couldn’t identify who had done the patch. I checked with all the utilities, and they all said, ‘It wasn’t us!’ So I went online and saw that New York City was using these color-coded tags. I gotta give them credit for coming up with that.”

Paul here. When I originally wrote that article in 2014, New York and Boston were the only major municipalities using A-tags. In the dozen years since then, several more cities have gotten on board, including Denver; New Orleans; Pittsburgh; Scranton, Pennsylvania; and Syracuse, New York. There’s no central A-tag registry, but I have a strong hunch that the markers have spread to other cities as well. (If you have more info on this, you know what to do.)

Meanwhile, speaking of colored dots and hidden street-level codes, it’s fairly common here in New York to see storm drains adorned with a series of colored dots. They look sort of like a Morse code version of graffiti:

The dots are actually part of the city’s effort to combat mosquitoes. Beneath each drain is a catch basin that helps to prevent drain clogs by sifting debris the storm water. These moist, cozy catch basins are ideal breeding grounds for mosquitos, so the city workers routinely treat them with larvicide. The dots are a color-coded protocol that indicates when the drain was last treated. San Francisco has a similar system.

Do you know of other street-level codes or design systems hiding in plain sight? If so, do tell.

After Looking Down, Try Looking Up

I was at the beach the other day and saw several airplanes towing ad banners (including the one shown above). That’s not a new thing, of course, but it got me thinking. Here are a few musings that crossed my mind:

• In our increasingly digitized, internet-driven, and AI-infested world, there’s something endearingly dorky, or maybe even miraculous, about ads still being towed by airplanes.

• Related to the above: In a world where an increasing share of the advertising we see is algorithmically micro-targeted to match what we’re interested in (or at least what the algorithm thinks we’re interested in), it’s kinda wild to see that some advertisers are willing to just toss out a message to the undifferentiated mass of people on a beach.

• This form of aerial advertising was pioneered in the 1920s and really hit its stride in the 1940s after the introduction of the Piper Cub airplane. In those days, it was a new and modern form of advertising; today it’s old-fashioned. Yet its sense of novelty persists.

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Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

Note: This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul.

For the past year or so I’ve been conducting raffles with an unusual stipulation: To enter, you have to mail me a handwritten letter in a hand-addressed envelope. This has led to some interesting missives, including the one shown above, which I recently received from reader Mark Smith.

As you can see, Mark’s raffle entry was written on letterhead from the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (which I’d never heard of before, although it’s been in existence since 1901). Mark referenced the letterhead in his note, writing, “My grandfather kept this stationery from his work in the 1950s.”

Naturally, I was intrigued, so I contacted Mark and asked about his grandfather (while resisting the urge to mention how he’d written his letter in purple ink, presumably just to fuck with me). That kicked off a good back-and-forth that resulted in a really interesting piece that Mark has guest-written for us today. Enjoy!

My Grandfather’s Elite Washington DC Ticket Collection

By Mark Smith

You wouldn’t typically describe someone with a 57-year Senate career as “inconspicuous,” but that’s the case with my grandfather, J. Mark Trice, who served in the Senate in various administrative capacities. He began as a 14-year-old page in 1916, retired as Republican party secretary in 1973, and had several additional jobs and titles in between. But while he was well-known in the halls of the Capitol, he was largely unknown to the general public.

I suspect that was just the way he liked it. Despite his close association with powerful people and institutions, he did not often speak about his work. After he retired, the Senate Historical Society repeatedly attempted to interview him, but he consistently refused. He likely heeded the advice given by Senator Matthew Quay to Carl Loeffler, whose own 50-year Senate career followed a career arc similar to my grandfather’s: “My boy, if you wish to succeed, keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.”

My grandfather did, however, save numerous mementos of his long and distinguished career. Many of them are tickets, passes, and other credentials that provided entry to various events or spaces. Taken together, they provide a sense of the rarefied access that my grandfather had, and how so much of Washington runs on that kind of access.

For example, Trice was working as a deputy in the Senate Sergeant at Arms office in early 1933. When the Sergeant at Arms was removed for disparaging comments he made about the Senate in a newspaper article, Trice was made Acting Sergeant at Arms, which put him on the committee to plan president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inauguration. That marked the start of Trice’s long connection to presidential inaugurations. Here are some tickets from various inaugural ceremonies he arranged and attended:

As the Executive Secretary of the Joint Congressional Inaugural Committees, Trice also had access to all sorts of parking passes for different types of attendees. Here’s a representative sampling:

Some officials working at the inaugurations were required to wear badges or ribbons. Here’s one worn by a doorkeeper at Eisenhower’s 1957 ceremony, with the manufacturer’s promotional literature still attached to it:

Trice’s duties also involved arranging funerals. After a rash of deaths in the 1940s, he standardized the funeral procedures that were followed after the death of a sitting Senator. And funerals, like inaugurations, require tickets:

Trice’s work in the Senate also led to invitations to other events around Washington. These too required tickets or passes:

The collection also includes some head-scratchers. For example, my mother was a teacher, and here is a pass signed by Maryland Senator James G. Beall (more commonly known as J. Glenn Beall), admitting her and her students to the Senate chamber. The pass has a preprinted date of 1953, but my mother and her class didn’t take that field trip until the spring of 1968, which would have been after Beall was defeated in 1964, but before Beall’s son J. Glenn Beall Jr. won the seat in 1970:

As a history teacher myself, I have made use of some of my grandfather’s mementos in my classes. In so doing, I’m trying to follow the advice of historical anthropologist James Deetz, who wrote the following his influential 1977 book, In Small Things Forgotten:

For in the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime, the essence of our existence is captured. We must remember these bits and pieces, and we must use them in new and imaginative ways so that a different appreciation for what life is today, and was in the past, can be achieved.

Paul here. I love all of this so much — a fascinating peek into a world that most of us will never get to experience. Big thanks to Mark Smith for sharing all of it with us.

It’s worth pointing out that we wouldn’t have learned any of this if I had run a conventional raffle with emailed entries. Insisting on snail-mailed entries cuts down on participation but sometimes pays off with special results like this one. That’s part of what makes regular mail so much fun!

Meanwhile: Mark Trice saved lots of things besides tickets and credentials, so we may follow up with a subsequent post at some point down the road — stay tuned.

Inconspicuous News Roundup

• The white line on the edge of a roadway, as seen in the photo above, may seem eternal, but it wasn’t pioneered until the 1950s. Here’s a really, really good article about the guy who came up with it, and why it was such a key road-safety innovation. IC’s highest rating! (From Rich Kronenberg)

• The logo for Udi’s, a brand that specializes in gluten-free baked goods, includes a mark that doubles as an apostrophe and the dot above the “i.” (From Nathan Haas)

• Reader David Zwiep briefly got excited when he saw a sign promoting an upcoming “I.C. Festival,” but in this case the abbreviation did not stand for “Inconspicuous Consumption”:

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Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

Note: This post is being published simultaneously on Inconspicuous Consumption and on Uni Watch. It is not paywalled. — Paul

I recently published an Inconspicuous Consumption article about JFK half-dollars. That prompted an interesting email from reader Dave Truman, as follows:

I spent about 15 years as a lacrosse referee in St. Louis, and they always taught the new guys to use half-dollars for the coin toss. (The logic was probably connected to the size of the coins: easy to flip, easy to catch, easier to find in the grass if you dropped it, etc.) … Usually I had to go get them at a bank, but on the rare occasions when I got one as change, I made sure to put it into my equipment bag.

That got me thinking: What do other referees use for coin tosses? I figured I probably have plenty of readers besides Dave who’ve done some sports officiating, so I invited Uni Watch readers and Inconspicuous Consumption readers to share any noteworthy stories they might have about coin tosses.

I got lots of responses (thank you!), some of which veered off into fun non-sports directions. Here are the most interesting ones:

Skyler Archibald

I typically use a coin provided by our officiating association. I have a few of them (see above) that I’ve collected over the years as a part of different associations or have acquired as a result of officiating at some state tournaments.

One cool tradition I’ve seen was in Washington State. The officials for some playoff games are from all different associations or regions around the state, so each official would bring something from their “home” association — often a coin — for the other officials, and then you’d share those things with the crew before the game. Kinda fun to see what other associations are using.

The coin toss procedures for youth or middle school football games are often a bit less structured. Depending on the weather, the officials might be wearing shorts, which is less friendly for carrying a coin during the game. So the officials often skip the coin and have the captains do “Rock, paper, scissors” instead, which is really fun.

Some referees like to catch the coin, some like to let it hit the ground. The best referees will indicate beforehand how they’ll be handling it. I’ve had many a chuckle over referees who try to catch it and drop it, which happens often.

Randy McCallum

To supplement my income when I was in the Army, I would umpire games in the leagues of whatever post I was at. If I was new to the post, I’d use the challenge coin from the highest-ranking person at my last post (see photo above). Whenever I got a new challenge coin from a new base, I would start using that and then upgrade every time I got another challenge coin from a higher-ranking person.

Now I umpire a sober league, so I use my 10-year coin for games.

Mike Styczen

I’m not a ref but I’m a curler. We do our own coin toss for hammer (i.e., who gets “last licks”) at the beginning of every game. I’ve kept the same toonie (shown above) in the zippered back pocket of my curling pants for a decade. I don’t even take it out when I wash the pants, so there’s always a coin.

But when there’s no coin for whatever reason, we use the stopwatch app on someone’s phone and play “odd/even.” You start the timer, one team calls “odd” or “even,” you stop the timer, and the last hundredths digit of the timer determines the winner.

Joe Lombardo

My son played flag football until he was 14. Instead of a coin, they did “laces or no laces”: The ref (usually a 19-year-old kid working for the YMCA) would throw the ball in the air, and you’d win or loss depending on whether it came to rest with the laces facing up or down

My son also played high school tennis, which had no officials — the boys always officiated themselves and were on their honor. But the players still had to decide who served first, and no 17-year-old kid is carrying pocket change on the court, so they’d flip a racket, and you’d call something, like the “W” on a Wilson racket facing up or down, something like that. I remember this clearly, because I cringed every time the $350 racket that I bought for him got thrown.

Christopher Carvalho

I’m a high school rugby ref out here in Connecticut. My old boys’ rugby team had challenge coins made up for when we traveled and went to tournaments, so I use that (shown above). The “heads” design has our insignia — an hourglass — and “tails” has the logos or insignia of our five “feeder” clubs.

It’s nice and heavy and easy to spot on the pitch. When I’m not reffing, I make sure to have it on me at the drink-up or I’m buying a round for whoever catches me without it!

Brad Evers

Soccer ref here. I opt for a half-dollar. I know some refs use commemorative coins from tournaments they’ve worked in the past, but the half-dollar is great for me, especially when the grass is long and a quarter won’t land nicely. Even if I choose to catch the coin in that situation, the half-dollar is easy to see.

R. Scott Rogers

Curling games begin with a coin flip, and it’s quite common for neither of the designated coin-tossers to have a coin on hand. I’ve seen people resort to flipping wildly inappropriate things like gloves or gripper pads. So when I curled, I took to carrying a 2007 Madison dollar in my curling vest pocket, just in case nobody else had a coin. I chose the James Madison coin because the Madison Curling Club was my home club, which made the coin a good conversation starter. On home ice, folks would think it was neat; at out-of-town tournaments, it would get people asking about the Madison club.

Joe Jordan

I’m an athletics administrator for a Division III athletics program. I had the privilege to use this Keith Jackson challenge coin (shown above) as the coin-flip tiebreaker to decide the designated home team in the 2024 NCAA DIII Baseball regionals. Our team won the flip but lost the game.

The coin was given to me by a dear friend who knows I love the Rose Bowl and Keith Jackson! When not in use at baseball games, I keep the coin on display in my office and refer often to Keith’s Nine Core Values.

Whoa, Nelly!

Eric Bangeman

When I refereed rugby, I used a 1921 Morgan silver dollar for coin tosses. I was a coin collector, and this was a “pocket piece,” as it was a duplicate and not in great condition. Usually one of the captains would comment on it during the coin toss, and sometimes I’d give a very brief numismatic or history lesson.

Unfortunately, the coin fell out of my pocket during a match and I was unable to locate it on the pitch afterwards. After that, I used a USA Rugby coin for tosses.

Amer Shamaa

I’m a licensed official in four sports here in Indiana. I’m not senior enough to do a coin flip for football (that’s usually reserved for ref), but I used to keep a quarter or at least a nickel on hand for basketball in the case of tournament play or where there wasn’t a visible possession arrow visible. I’d switch pockets to keep track of possession. I did that until I switched to doing the same thing with a backup whistle.

Jay Roddy

As a baseball umpire, I don’t normally need a coin. But in travel tournaments, and occasionally in youth ball, it’s not always clear which team is the home team, so I try to be prepared with a quarter. If I forget or am surprised by the question at the pregame plate conference, we’ll flip a ball/strike indicator (i.e., the clicker). Typically, the team that has traveled farthest gets to call it. Heads is the side with the numbers; the plain side is tails.

Joe Bailey

I’m going into my 26th year of officiating high school football. When I started, 2001, I went on eBay and found a commemorative Cleveland Browns coin marking their return to the NFL in ’99 (shown above). I’m predominantly an umpire at the varsity level, so we don’t use my coin for those games. But I’m sometimes the referee for JV and youth games. I tell the captains, “The helmet is heads and the writing is tails.” (Oh, the Browns went 2-14 that season.)

In addition to that, my chapter of the NYS Football Officials created a coin for our members to use, which is much more traditional:

Matt Maldre

In my house, there are often disputes over who picks what to watch on TV, who gets to sit in the front seat, and so on. We resolve these disputes by using an official family coin — a French Piastre from 1908 (shown above). I originally got it mostly because I wanted to own something from 1908 when the Cubs last won the World Series, just so I could hold something in my hand that physically existed from that time period. (There’s more information about the coin and its role in our family here.)

Curt Rogers

I’ve been a soccer referee for 36 years. Leagues and tournaments will often given out special coins to use. One annual tourney in particular gave out a commemorative coin with a slightly different design each year, usually incorporating the tournament logo (see above). The thing I remember about those in particular is that they were heavy — much heavier than a normal coin, so you really had to put some oomph into it when you flipped it. My favorite version of the coin was the year they made it square, which I thought was really unique.

Derek Linn

I refereed soccer from 2011-2022. I almost always used an Eisenhower silver dollar for high school games and I used the NISOA coin (shown above) for college games. When I used the Eisenhower coin, I would always ask the captains who the silhouette was, and I don’t think anyone ever got it correct.

Anonymous

I’m not a referee, but in 2023 I took my son to an Indoor Football League game, and the head referee gave him the coin used for the opening coin toss (shown above) — a very cool move.

The “coin” is plastic and appears to be more of a customized poker chip than a traditional coin, though it has enough heft that some metal may be inside. The obverse features the IFL logo, while the reverse includes the logos of 12 IFL teams. Interestingly, there are 12 team logos, which appears to correspond with the IFL’s 2021 season; they were up to 14 teams in 2023, when my son received the coin.

Gabe Cornwall

My mother officiated D1 and WUSA soccer and college basketball for more than 20 years. She kept a 1921 Peace silver dollar for coin-flipping purposes. Her husband in those days — my late stepfather — was an enthusiastic numismatist, so I’m sure that had plenty to do with which coin she chose. My mother still has his coin collection, which includes the 1921 dollar.

Jeff Economy

This is not about refereeing exactly, but the coin toss conversation immediately reminded me of the 1971 Australian film Wake in Fright. If you’ve not seen it, you’re in for a wild ride. It has been synopsized thusly: “After a bad gambling bet, a schoolteacher is marooned in a town full of crazy, drunk, violent men who threaten to make him just as crazy, drunk, and violent.” The gambling debt has to do with a coin toss game, and although I don’t think using half-dollars would have affected the outcome, it does make me wonder how a small-town American version of the same concept would play out if centered around the saintly profile of the fallen JFK.

———

Paul here. Good stuff! Big thanks to everyone for sharing your stories, and doubleplusthanks to Dave Truman for getting the ball rolling on this one.

Incidentally, the road that led to this post began nearly a month ago, when I published an article about receiving a buffalo nickel as change. That led to the post about about the stationery shop in Maine that gives out half-dollars as change, which ultimately led to all of these coin-flip stories. I love it when one topic begets another, and another. It’s like an IC perpetual-motion machine!

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

I recently wrote about receiving a 1928 buffalo nickel as change. That article prompted a comment from reader Frank Boscoe, who wrote, “Every so often I get some half-dollars from the bank and put them back into circulation. They make good conversation pieces.”

That got my attention because I’m a longtime fan of the Kennedy half-dollar. For starters, it’s clearly our best-looking coin: the fine-grained swoop of JFK’s hair, the wide-spaced ʟ ɪ ʙ ᴇ ʀ ᴛ ʏ lettering, the handsome eagle on the reverse — it’s a beauty. I also like its size and weight, which make other coins seem like mere tokens by comparison. A half-dollar feels substantial and tactile in the hand and has a resonant ring when hitting a countertop or table. A very satisfying physical object.

Despite these aesthetic and material pleasures, the JFK half-dollar’s public profile these days is essentially nil. The U.S. Mint produced 34 million of them last year, which might sound like a lot until you realize that they also produced 1.3 billion pennies in 2025, along with 1.04 billion nickels, 1.38 billion dimes, and 697 million quarters. Vending machines and other coin-operated gadgets don’t take half-dollars, retailers don’t keep them in their cash registers, and even banks sometimes don’t have any on hand. Although JFKs have been circulating for more than 60 years, there’s a decent chance you’ve never spent one or gotten one back as change.

How did this attractive coin end up becoming so inconspicuous? I looked into that question myself in a 1997 magazine article (later reprinted in issue No. 8 of my zine, Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption). Here’s a key passage:

One frequently cited reason for [the JFK half-dollar’s relative obscurity] is its considerable heft, which some find unwieldy. But Tim Sanford, editor of the trade journal Vending Times, points out that the JFK is precisely the same size and weight as its predecessor, the Franklin half-dollar, which was minted from 1948 through 1963. “Nobody used to say the Franklins were too big,” says Sanford. “They used them! For some reason, something happened in the public mind when the JFK was introduced. The 1960s saw the 50-cent piece slide right off the boat.”

James C. Benfield, Executive Director of a Washington lobbying group called the Coin Coalition, thinks he knows why. First, he explains, the year that the JFK was introduced — 1964 — was the last year when dimes, quarters, and half-dollars were still 90% silver, which led to a rash of hoarding in the mid-’60s. (The silver content was reduced to 40% in 1965 and eliminated altogether in 1971. The current composition for all three coins is 92% copper and 8% nickel.) Since all Franklin half-dollars were minted during the 90% silver era, they disappeared from circulation almost immediately. Meanwhile, with the new half-dollar rushed into production just months after Kennedy’s death, grief-stricken Americans held onto the JFK instead of spending it. The large, good-looking 50-cent piece essentially became a commemorative keepsake instead of a circulating coin. “So Franklin gets hoarded because he’s silver,” Benfield summarizes, “and Kennedy gets hoarded because he’s popular. So you had double-hoarding, and it killed the 50-cent denomination.”

Still, as the price of candy bars and soda rose to 50 cents and beyond, you’d think the half-dollar would’ve been a natural for vending machines. But that didn’t happen either. Why? Quoting again from that same 1997 article:

Early vending machines were never tooled to accept half-dollars because most vended products at the time cost only a nickel or dime anyway. By the time inflation made the JFK viable for coin-op purchases, the country had basically stopped using it [due to the double-hoarding phenomenon just described]. “Vending is a demand-driven industry,” says Sanford, the Vending Times editor. “I assure you that if people were saying, ‘Gee, it would really be convenient if I could use a 50-cent piece in this machine,’ the industry would start thinking seriously about it. But the coin has just dropped off everyone’s radar.”

All of which brings us back to IC reader Frank Boscoe and his comment about getting half-dollars from the bank and putting them into circulation. When I contacted him off-site to learn more, he said the story really begins with his son, Keenan, who runs a small shop in Camden, Maine, that sells stationery and maps. “He gives half-dollars as change to the right type of customer,” said Frank.

So I recently arranged a Zoom call with Keenan and Frank. Here’s a transcript, edited for length and clarity:

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Note: This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul

Earlier this week I wrote about an old receipt that my grandmother saved. Today I want to follow up with another story related to her — one that I’m pretty certain many of you can relate to.

Here’s the deal: Shortly before my father died in 2009, he gave me his childhood stamp collection. He had kept the collection in an album that his parents gave to him as a Chanukah present in 1935, when he was 11 years old. I know that’s when they gave it to him because of this inscription on the first page:

Yes, my father’s name was Irwin. But I’m more interested in the other two names: “Dad” and, especially, “Mommy.”

My paternal grandparents’ names were Charles and Fannie, but of course I never knew them by those names. In fact, I didn’t know my grandfather at all — he died in 1966, when I was a toddler (and my other grandfather died long before I was born). But my grandmother — the same one who saved the refrigerator receipt — was a big part of my life until her death when I was 16, and I knew her as Nanny. That’s what my parents always called her, and that’s how my mom still refers to her when she comes up in conversation. I’ve always known that she was my father’s mother, of course, but I still find it a bit jarring to see that she signed the stamp album as “Mommy,” because I never knew her in that role.

And that’t the thing: “Mommy” and “Nanny” aren’t just names, they’re roles, and grandparents end up playing both of them.

My other grandmother — my mom’s mom — went by Nana. So we had Nanny and Nana, which could occasionally be confusing when they were both in the same room. I recently asked my mother how these two nicknames were chosen. She said she wasn’t sure, but she thinks my grandparents were consulted about what they wanted to be called, and those were the names they chose.

My two brothers and I all opted not to have kids of our own, so we never had to address the issue of generational nicknames. Or to put it another way, I’m very ignorant on this topic. So here are some questions (feel free to post your responses in the comments):

• If your grandparents were alive when you were growing up, what did you call them? Do you know how those names were chosen?

• If you have kids, what do they call their grandparents (i.e., your parents and in-laws), and how were those names arrived at?

• If you are a grandparent, what do your grandchildren call you, how was that name chosen, and how do you feel about it? Also, does it ever feel weird for your nickname to toggle back and forth (between “Dad” and Grandpa,” say), depending on which generation you’re interacting with?

• If you think you’ll probably become a grandparent, have you thought about what you’d like to be called?

• Any related issues worth addressing?

Again, I realize this is probably basic stuff for most families, but not so much for mine. Thanks in advance for educating me on this topic!

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

I was recently helping my mom clean out a dresser drawer, which was filled with jewelry she no longer wears and other detritus. At the back of the drawer was an unremarkable-looking women’s wallet, which Mom said she didn’t recognize. It had a few zippered compartments, one of which contained the slip of paper shown above — a receipt for a two-door Hotpoint refrigerator delivered to a Mrs. Lewkowitz in the Long Island town of Patchogue on August 7th, 1975.

Mrs. Lewkowitz was my grandmother — my father’s mother1 — and Patchogue Gardens was the apartment complex where she lived when I was growing up, so the wallet must have belonged to her. She died in the fall of 1980, five years after the refrigerator delivery. My parents must have thought that my mom might one day use the wallet, so they apparently stowed it in the back of the drawer with the jewelry and other accessories, where it remained for another 46 years. During that time, my parents moved to a retirement community (2004), my father died (2009), my mom moved to a smaller retirement apartment (2010), and then she moved again to assisted living (2015). Each time, the dresser moved with her; each time, the wallet was inside the dresser drawer and the fridge receipt was inside the wallet, waiting to be discovered.

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A recent Inconspicuous News Roundup included an item about a guy who works at a bookstore and collects the improvised bookmarks that people have left in the used books that pass through his shop. That prompted a comment from reader Peter K., who mentioned that he had a whole rotation of improvised bookmarks.

I followed up off-list with Peter, who said:

I have always been a collector of miscellaneous debris — ticket stubs, stickers, shirt tags — and enjoy using them as bookmarks. This is better for the miscellaneous items (instead of being stashed in a junk drawer or decaying in a landfill, they get to have a continued purpose), and I also find it more satisfying than using conventional bookmarks that don’t have a backstory.

You can see a bunch of Peter’s improvised bookmarks in the photo above. At my request, he explained the significance of some of these items (the numbers in the photo correspond to the following paragraph numbers):

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Last month I wrote about a great piece of mail that I received from an IC reader. That prompted a comment from another reader, named Matt Douma, who wrote:

[This] reminds me of a show I saw at the San Francisco Public Library years ago of postcards and letters that a stamp collector mailed to himself, with his name and address hand-lettered to reflect the design of the stamps. I stumbled across it by accident, and it was one of the best displays of art I've ever seen. I highly recommend this video about the project.

The video is about 10 minutes long, and it took me a few days before I got around to watching it. But once I did, I was completely blown away, just as Matt was. After digging a bit deeper and learning more, I’m not so sure I’d go so far as to call it one of the best displays of art I’ve ever seen, but it’s definitely one of the best long-term art projects I’ve ever seen.

Here’s the story: In 1968, a guy in San Francisco named Alan Blackman began mailing letters to himself, a habit he maintained for 36 years. These were all first-day covers, meaning that he mailed the letters using stamps that had just been released that day, so the stamps received a special “First Day of Issue” cancellation mark. (More on this in a minute.) Blackman was a calligrapher, and at some point he began matching the lettering style of his name and address on the envelopes to the visual style and/or thematic content of the stamps. For example, when a new Uncle Sam stamp was issued in 1998, Blackman styled his address like a flag-themed top hat (as seen in the photo at the top of this page).

Sometimes Blackman’s lettering designs depicted figures or characters, as in the case of the address accompanying these 1997 Bug Bunny stamps:

Since Blackman mailed these letters to himself, he was able to maintain a collection of all the designs. In 2015, the San Francisco Public Library hosted an exhibit featuring some of his most notable envelopes. That show, called “Letters to Myself: The Calligraphic First Day Covers of Alan A. Blackman,” is the one that reader Matt Douma was referring to in his recent comment, and the video that Matt linked to is an overview of the exhibit. Here are some screen shots from that video, showing the depth and breadth of Blackman’s front-of-the-envelope creativity:

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Like most people, I don’t use cash as much as I used to. But when I do use it, I’m sometimes reminded of the pleasures that only a cash transaction can provide.

The most recent instance of this happened the other day when I bought a few items at my local bodega. The total came to $14.90, so I paid with a $20 bill and received a fiver and two nickels as change. I don’t know why the shopkeeper gave me two nickels instead of a dime, but I’m glad he did, because one of them, as you can see above, was a 1928 buffalo nickel! I’ve seen them before, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve received one as change. This one is nearly 100 years old, so it’s fun to think of all the pockets it’s been in, the places it’s gone, the commerce it’s been part of, the stories it could tell.

Despite its age, this nickel not particularly valuable. My amateur assessment is that it’s in “VG” condition, which according to various online price guides means it’s worth somewhere between $1.75 and $3.50. This isn’t surprising when you consider that 1928 nickels aren’t exactly scarce (the Philadelphia mint made over 23.4 million of them), plus nickel isn’t a precious metal (a 1928 quarter in comparable condition is worth $12 to $15, mainly because it’s made of silver).

But while this buffalo nickel may not have much monetary value, it nonetheless ended up sending me down a fun rabbit hole. For starters, some of you may be thinking, “Wait a minute, where’s the buffalo?” That’s because the titular animal (which is actually a bison, not a buffalo) appears on the back of the coin. The front, or obverse, shows a profile view of a Native American — a composite of several men, according to the coin’s designer, James Earle Fraser — so I’ve never understood why these are typically called “buffalo nickels” instead of “Indian head nickels.” I mean, we don’t call the current five-cent coin a “Monticello nickel,” right? Are any other American coins commonly referred to by what’s on the back?

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