There is a scene in this movie where Mr. Joad goes into a diner to buy a loaf of bread.
While he is in there, some truckers pay up and leave.
However, apparently they did not pay with “real money.”
What kind of “fake money” did people use in the 30’s and 40’s? It wasn’t paper money, but some kind of “coins.”
Interesting. I always thought you Got No Bread with One Meat Ball.
During the 1930s, one of the Roosevelt relief programs involved issuing “scrip,” the forerunner of today’s food stamps. This must have been what the truckers were using.
Unless they were just Mercury dimes and Buffalo nickels, and they looked funny for that reason.
Uke
If the coins appeared to be oversized, they could have been silver dollars and/or half dollars. I can’t recall the last time I got a half dollar in change, but they were significantly bigger than a quarter, and the dollars were even bigger than that.
The “Ike” dollar was the same size as the original silver dollars. Since it was a clad coin (non-precious silver over a copper-zinc core) it was heavy and didn’t have the saving grace of being inherently valuable (unlike the silver dollars).
When the Susan B. Anthony dollar came along, it was smaller than the previous dollar and even smaller than the half-dollar. It was barely larger than a quarter and you couldn’t tell it from one by touch alone, unless you were very, very good at that sort of thing.
Although there are some who say it failed because a chauvanistic nation couldn’t bear to use a coin with a feminist icon on its face, I suspect most people avoided the coin because it was just too easy to confuse with a quarter. More than once I jammed a soda machine’s coin slot with a Susan B. I was not only out a dollar, but I couldn’t get any product and no-one else could get a soda either.
The next American dollar coin will be released in March 2000. It will be golden in color and feature Sacajawea on the front. I hope it’s bigger than the Susan B. coin was, or we’ll have some of the same problems we had with it.
–Baloo
I once lost my corkscrew and had to live on food and water for several days
-W.C. Fields
http://members.tripod.com/~Bob_Baloo/index.htm
If my memory serves me right… and I make no guarantees…, there used to be a federal law which prohibted the photographing or filming of money. Therefore, fake money was used. I’ve seen fake money used in a lot of old movies and if fact, can not recall an old movie which used real U.S. coin or currency.
terggie