Hello everyone, hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Now in this blog I wanted to talk about one of my first real cherry picks. At the age of fourteen I bought the pictured Series 1935 A Silver Certificate, Hawaiian emergency note issue. I had heard about this WWII-related banknote beforehand and since had wanted to own a specimen. So I looked around in my local coin store and finally found a small pile of them for sale. They are fairly pricey compared to normal issue silver certificates and so I just wanted to purchase the cheapest one I could find.

Now before I go any further, a Hawaii note was a series of paper money issued by the US government during the second world war. These were issued after the US response to the recent attacks on Pearl harbor. The idea was that if the US issued notes with "HAWAII" stamped all over them, and have the color Orange instead of the usual blue-sealed silver certificates, that if the Japanese Empire was to capture the state of Hawaii then those notes would become void of value, and therefore useless to the Japanese. Sort of like a scorched earth policy.

The note that I specifically bought at the price of fourteen dollars had some sort of signatures all over it. At the time I didn't understand it completely and just believed that someone just wrote names all over it. I could make out an "A.H. Valerie, Gail G. Selles, Andy L., Chase Peters" and several other signatures. Even with the note being "damaged" I still found satisfaction in the fact that I finally owned one.

A few months later, I came across an Instagram post where someone had a note very similar to mine. Somewhere in the caption they had described it as a short-snorter. Somewhat entertained by its name, I searched online for the name and there it was. Many images of notes with signatures on them. After more research, it turns out that what I had purchased was most likely signed by stationed soldiers of the US military.

As it turns out, a short snorter is a piece of paper currency (doesn't even have to be US issued!) that was signed by soldiers as something of a souvenir, something like a baseball signed by members of a baseball team. This tradition is believed to have been started by Alaskan pilots in the 1920's. Short snorters are a remarkable piece of history that makes it even easier to see how numismatics plays to history. I am very happy to call one of these pieces my own.

I used my general knowledge for this blog, but if you really want to see more for yourself then please visit http://shortsnorter.org/ to see more for yourself!