My heart’s aflutter! And to think I’ve never even been to Vandalia! I am one impactful SOB. 
But it appears that Archway Skydiving is closed because of one too many impacts. 
If I had a $2 bill for every military town I’ve heard that story told about…
Why would paying in $2 bills be any harder than paying in $100 bills? You just pre-wrap them in stacks of 50, and it’s the same thing.
Because the pay officer has to count the bills out, not simply hand over a stack of money.
It certainly sounds plausible.
The military have a habit of believing themselves to be better than everyone else. So, when they don’t get the respect that they think they deserve, they pull a nasty little stunt. On the one hand, it rubs everyone’s nose in “what we do for you.” On the other hand they pay in a currency that causes the maximum amount of inconvienience for the greatest number of people.
And then they wonder why nobody in town likes them. :rolleyes:
Yeah, this story has ‘military’ written all over it.
No, it doesn’t.
Actually, that post has “bull” written all over it.
According to legend, my dad’s first payment from the Navy was a 5 dollar bill (the flying 5) – which they immediately collected in exchange for a shaving kit etc, which included cigarettes as change – to round the cost up to $5.
I think my pay packets in the 80’s would have been too thick if they had been made up only from $2 bills. Either the army was getting paid a lot less in the 50’s (plausible), in which case making up the pay packets with 2’s would not have been much more difficult, or else they could have just added some 2’s to every packet, perhaps replacing some 1’s and 5’s, or the last 10.
From a similar question elsewhere online in 2012: “An amusing and perhaps apocryphal story regarding two dollar bills being paid to military servicemen has circulated intermittently in American public consciousness over the years. This story being constantly retold reflects how some Americans view the two dollar bill.
The basic premise is as follows: a coastal town somewhere has a business district that, while successful financially, is plagued by uncouth Navy servicemen on shore leave. They come in, make a ruckus, get drunk, and generally upset the town’s otherwise quiet atmosphere. The locals, who do not appreciate the intrusion, finally get together and lodge a formal complaint with the Navy.
The Navy, in response, decides to teach the arrogant town a lesson in economics and pays a substantial portion of its servicemen’s following months’ salary in two dollar bills. When the sailors subsequently descend on the town to spend their wages, the local businesses are inundated with two dollar bills; in fact, they realize that they have more two dollar bills than anything else, which certainly grabs their attention.
The message, of course, is that the Navy servicemen on shore leave might very well be boorish and intrusive, but the money they spend represents the livelihood of the store owners responsible for the letter of complaint. Needless to say, they were more patient with the sailors thenceforth.
The fact that this tactic worked, of course, is entirely a result of the two dollar bill’s rarity. One dollar bills or five dollar bills would not have been so readily noticed. Two dollar bills drive the point home; there is no way they can be ignored, given that they are almost never seen.”
Military people ARE superior to virtually everyone else. They have sworn to sacrifice their
lives to protect others. How many other professions can say the same?
Retired military here to tell you that is utter bullshit.
I can think of two off-hand. I’d be stunned if you haven’t a clue as to what those two are.
Mountain rescue and the fire brigade?
I completely forgot about the first one. The second one, we Americans refer to as the fire department. The other one I was thinking of is the police.
What about lifeboat people?
What do you call them, btw? Over here we call them the coastguard, but that means something totally different in USA, right?
The $2 bill story also pops up in at least one novel that I’m aware of: “The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen.”
The background is that there’s a major crash at a US Air Force base, near the surrounding town, with serious loss of life and property damage. The town folk start to talk about how the base should be closed, or moved farther from the town. The base responds by including $2 bills in the pay packets.
The book came out in 1963. Don’t know if it was re-telling a story that was already current, or maybe was the source of the idea?
Here’s a newspaper article that refers to the Farleigh Dickinson story
“LOCAL lore has it that the last time residents of this tree-lined suburb questioned the benefit of having a college campus in town, the president of Fairleigh Dickinson University paid the employees’ salaries in silver dollars. Shortly afterward, many of the coins began to appear in local merchants’ cash registers, a subtle but convincing reminder that the school was indeed a good neighbor.”
I lived on a US DOD base in England in the early 80’s. The base bank had a ton of 2 dollar bills, none of which made it to the local English because they only accepted pounds at their stores.
I don’t know why the base bank had so many 2 dollar bills but I assume that the Department of Treasury dumped them on the DOD for some reason.
I have been working on an oral history of military aviators in Alabama and Florida. I have heard this story first hand from them.
The U.S. Coast Guard resulted from the 1915 merger of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service, (responsible for patrolling against smuggling and similar crimes), and the U.S. Life-Saving Service, (responsible for “lifeboat” rescues), and the USCG has continued with both duties ever since.
When my brother’s kids were preschoolers, he got a bundle of $2 bills from the bank, and that was their Tooth Fairy money. 
One company in my old town always gave out rolls of Sacajawea dollars as part of their Christmas bonus, and one of the arcades always did booming business for a while because you could get extra plays on some of the machines if you used one of those, instead of quarters.
My college bookstore bought back books with 20’s and 2 dollar bills. They did it because it was fast and they didn’t have to have a lot of different denomination on hand. The trick is to get consecutively numbered packs so you can count them by doing the math with the serial numbers. With stiff new bills you can fan through them with your thumb like you were shuffling cards then you just stop on the right serial number and hand over a chunk of bills. I could definitely see the military doing that.