Thanks to a blog written by an ANA member on 10 March, 2018
I was inspired to look for a token from my hometown. Low and behold, I found
one while searching a Civil War Token Society seller. It was priced very
reasonably, so I closed the deal. Had to wait a while as he was out of town but
got it in the mail within a day or two of his return. I happen to be from what
used to be a small, sleepy college town in the northern part of CA., Palo Alto.
The college is Stanford University and it is anything but small now. Somehow
Silicon Valley has swallowed it up. I couldn't
afford to live there if I wanted to. Anyway, we are talking about the 50's and 60's in my
case. It was a nice time to grow up if you didn't count the Russian ICBM and nuclear
bomb drills. Who would have thought that ducking under your desk while indoors
or dropping down alongside a street curb would protect you from the blast and radiation?
That's what we were taught! It doesn't sound like they were such a big deal
back then. So when my friend Greg and I were not "duck and covering", we often
went to the movies. My mom was kind enough to buy us both summer passes for all
the kid movies that were shown. I'm sure getting us gone for a few hours had
nothing to do with it. The theater we went to was called The Varsity. My mom
would generally drive us there and we would spend the day watching everything
on the screen. It didn't matter if they showed the same movie a couple of
times. In those days there was generally two features shown. So we would sit
there and get wired on Pixie Sticks, look it up, and all kinds of candy. We
were given a small stipend to stay away. After the shows were over and the
Varsity closed we would just walk home. You could do that back then.