And the puzzles just keep on coming …

The latest unusual coin found among my mother-in-law‘s things was the non-metallic object below, about 3/8″ in diameter, with the letters OPA RED POINT and a large number 1 on it. Those of you of a certain age—plus those who managed to get a better education than I got—might be able to identify it immediately.

But as for me, I had to rely on my old friend Google to figure out what this was.

Somehow, even though billions of these tokens had been made—at least according to this site—I made it this far in life without ever having seen or even heard of them before.

I knew about the ration books used during World War II to parcel out meat, sugar, gas, and so on, but what I never knew was that people who used their stamps were then given coins in either blue or red for change. They were issued by the Office of Price Administration between 1942 and 1945, and those letters in the middle on either side of the number were apparently meaningless.

As for the approximate current value to a collector today, a minimum of 65 years later?

Forty cents.

But it’ll look quite nice up on the shelf next to my anarchist collectable.