Ma Combers Tokens - Article

Ma Comber's Tokens
By

Dewey Maggard


While vacationing in Oregon recently, we saw a large wooden sign hanging on the wall of a local restaurant. This nostalgic piece of wood conveyed pleasant memories. It had the audacity to offer full course dinners from 30 to 45 cents. Of course, the sign was faded and a reminder of yesteryear. Painful as it is, I can remember thinking of high school days and nickel hamburgers and double dipped ice cream cones. It was during this golden era when I was introduced to my first encounter with existence of taxation in the form of TOKENS.
Across the street from my high school was at lunchtime probably the most popular place in town. I am speaking of a one high-school town of about 300 students. These charming lunchtime hangouts had a great magnetic force at work. Ma Comber knew how to co-operate with this force. She knew how to hit the taste buds with her touch on the hamburgers and the malted milk shakes. And, all for Twenty Cents for this meal. Only fifteen cents if you skipped the malt in your milk shake.
It was during that first year of high school, near the end severe depression times when the State decided to come out with this consumer sales tax. Our common name for it then was 'mill tax'. We students were asking, "what on earth is mill tax for?' Well, some had the opportunity to brush up on their math in thinking in terms of a tenth of a cent. One mill for every dime spent -that is on certain items. I do not recall which items were exempt at Ma's place but it sure caused a ruckus with the students. This one mill token was in the form of a round aluminum quarter sized piece with a hole in the center. Then there was a brass 5-mill piece same size to be used with each quarter spent. This piece then was worth the whole sum of one Half Cent.
You can imagine, there was considerable confusion and rebellion of some of the students it was not always easy to obtain these aluminum or brass disks especially for students. We soon noticed a difference in Ma's disposition. She began to get cranky with the students. They would order their usual hamburgers or other sandwich, but when it came time to pay up, they would not have the two mill tokens for their Twenty Cent purchase. Ma began to really grumble. This was not the sweet little Ma the kids always had known. This tax thing was becoming an ugly beast. You see, Ma was a widow lady, and this lunch castle was her only means of support. She had always been conscientious wanting to set good examples. She was frustrated to tears in some instances. Now, she had to absorb the extra costs of taxes without student support. This became a matter of principle with her as she constantly reminded the kids to bring their mill taxes. (These dumb tokens) In spite of all the grumbling, the kids would forget. Of course in her mind, there was simply no excuse for high school students to be forgetful. Something would have to be done. The imposition of this tax was extremely painful to her and the students were not taking it serious. Their selfish reasoning was that Ma would not lose a sale over two lousy mill tax tokens. There were enough students who did cooperate that Ma had to devise a way to keep track of her sales.
The cash registers in those days were ornate brass mechanical contraptions with a drawer of compartments for change and bills. The drawer would fly open when a lever with numerals was pressed. There was no means of segregating taxable or non-taxable items. Further, there was no way of telling how much mill tax was due at the end of the day except by laboriously adding up all your sales tags. Obviously, you would have to pick the tags showing mill tax. Well, all this separating and adding was simply too much for Ma. She solved her problem by cutting a slot in the lid of a one-gallon pickle jar. When ringing up a sale, the cash register got the change and the pickle jar got the tokens when the student had them. When the cash register companies manufactured these contraptions, they were not thinking of tokens or a place to put these tax pieces, simply because sales taxes had not previously existed at least in that form.
Back to Ma Comber's problem; there had been such a fuss over the mill tax, the student body had begun to have compassion and grasped her feelings. However not before Ma had gone to the Superintendent of our school lamenting the problem to him. She would say to him how she loved everyone of these kids-but she could not persuade enough of them to pay up their mill tax and she wished above all else to have their good will but she could not afford to pay the differences—It was the principle of the thing.
Well, Mr. Staib was a prudent thoughtful man inspite of what some of the students may have thought. He called the Student Body Officers to his office and told them they must solve this problem for Ma. The officers in turn had their own meeting and came up with a beautiful solution.
This inspired group decided to appeal to each class in our school to begin taking a collection for a few weeks until homecoming football game. We all know how important homecoming games are. But this approach would give the entire student body something else to look forward to. Each class, every student was admonished and sworn to secrecy to this plan.
The plan was that in General Assembly, on the day of the big game, two of the football players and a couple cheerleaders were elected to go to Ma's place and bring her to the assembly. We all know about homecoming assemblies—a lot of cheering a lot of talk and get the old winning spirit fired up.
During the weeks after the plan had been formulated, every day students were bringing one and five mill tokens to school and dropping them in a one gallon pickle jar in the principal's office until the jar was full.
On the big day, ribbons of the school colors of purple and white were neatly tied around the jar. After all the regular cheer sessions the designated students had brought Ma to the Assembly and she was promptly called to come up front. Mr. Staib and the Senior Class student body president made a few well-chosen remarks,
The class president made a touching speech; "On behalf of all us who have welched on the mill tax and all of us who love you Ma, we present you with these tokens of our affection." Mr. Staib, the Superintendent handed her a bouquet of roses and designated a student to carry the jar for Ma. With tears streaming down her face,she blew a kiss to all directions of the students as she walked off the stage, saying," You are a great bunch of kids and I love you!". Needless to say, this was the last any of us heard about the missing tokens. There wasn't anyone in our school who would dare go into Ma Comber's place without these mysterious tokens' symbols of much worse to come, as we would learn later in our lives.
Dear collector friends, now you know why some people must collect tokens. .