Luckily for scholars, Luther Gulick was an avid accumulator — the files bulge with his saved drafts, correspondence, travel itineraries, expense accounts and souvenirs from a lifetime (close to a century, amazingly) in the public sector.

So, of course, when he heard that cities across the nation were issuing their own currency called scrip during monetary shortages in the Great Depression, he set about collecting that too.

Scrip has a long history but it was notably used in mining towns and other remote communities far from banks, notoriously as a way of keeping workers indebted to company stores. Scrip is everywhere in Las Vegas — you’ve heard of chips.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip

In 1934, the Municipal Finance Officers Association wrote Gulick with a description of the kinds of scrip being issued.

Intrigued, he started collecting samples. At least once — possibly short of change himself — Gulick offered to pay with…stamps!

Gulick’s efforts paid off. Here are samples of scrip he assembled:

(And don’t the miss the digs at would-be Socialist Governor Upton Sinclair of California — scrip dollars of “The Red Currency”…”good only in California or Russia.”)