{"product_id":"vintage-1970s-wyoming-special-police-toy-badge-pair-sheridan-chief-and-highway-patrol-bison-tin-litho-nos-on-original-cards-made-in-japan","title":"Vintage 1970s Wyoming Special Police Toy Badge Pair 🦬 Sheridan Chief \u0026 Highway Patrol Bison, Tin Litho NOS on Original Cards, Made in Japan","description":"\u003ch2\u003eEver Want to Be Police Chief in Sheridan, Wyoming? 🦅 Or Ride With the Highway Patrol Bison?\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e Badges 1 1\/2\" ~ Cards 4\" x 2 1\/4\" each ~ New Old Stock, still on their cards\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eYou get two vintage 1970s tin litho Special Police toy badges here, both from Wyoming. Each one is still pinned to its yellow dime-store card and sealed in its poly sleeve, the way it hung on the rack. The first is a Chief's badge for the police of Sheridan, with the State of Wyoming seal squeezed into the middle of it. The second is a Wyoming Highway Patrol button with a white bison walking across it. One state, two badges: a town chief and the state's own troopers. New Old Stock, never worn, never once pinned to a shirt.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eI always get a kick out of these. They were toys, made for kids, and good-looking ones, the kind of thing that made a kid stop at the counter. Tin litho means the picture was printed on flat sheet tin before the button was pressed into shape, and these have kept their colour beautifully. The bison button especially is bold and simple, and it reads instantly from across a store shelf.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏍️ The Motorcycle Cop on the Cards\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHonestly, I like the cards as much as the buttons. Both badges ride on the same card: a red banner reading SPECIAL POLICE BADGE, and under it a cartoon motorcycle officer in a white peaked cap and big goggles, gloved hand on the bars, city skyline behind him. He has the set jaw of a man who has already written your ticket. Pin the button on, and for an afternoon you were him. Down in the corner, in small letters, it says JAPAN.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🌏 That Little Word, JAPAN\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat one word is the country of origin, and there's a story behind it. After the war, under the American occupation, manufacturers in Japan were given the right to start production back up. The idea was for Japan to take on the low-profit, labor-heavy manufacturing while American companies sold what came in, and it worked better than anybody expected: by the end of the 1950s Japan was a tin toy powerhouse. From February 1947 the occupation made exporters mark their goods MADE IN OCCUPIED JAPAN; in 1949 the rule eased and plain JAPAN was allowed again, and the occupation itself wrapped up in April 1952. So the word tells you where these came from. For when, you look to the rest of the family.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🗓️ When These Were Made\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere's no date on either card, but the relatives give it away. This same yellow card was printed for a whole run of towns and departments. One version carries an NYPD button that copies the shoulder patch New York's police adopted on July 1, 1971. Another copies the San Francisco patch that went onto SFPD uniforms in 1970. A Tennessee sheriff's button on the very same card is printed 1776-1976 for the Bicentennial. And loose buttons from the run have a cream plastic back moulded MADE IN JAPAN and PAT. NO. 1196679, a Japanese utility model filed in November 1972 and registered in 1977. Every clue lands in the 1970s. You won't find a maker or an importer named anywhere on the cards or the buttons; whoever made them never signed their work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏔️ Sheridan, Under the Bighorns\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSheridan sits in the Goose Creek valley in north-central Wyoming, tucked right up against the Bighorn Mountains, and I love how it got started. A Civil War veteran named John D. Loucks paid a trapper, George Mandel, fifty dollars for his forty-acre claim. One evening in the spring of 1882 Loucks sat on a hill above Goose Creek, pictured a town in the valley below him, then went back to his cabin and sketched it out, and the story goes that he drew the plat on a sheet of wrapping paper. He hired Jack Dow of Big Horn to survey it and named it for General Philip Sheridan, the Union general he had served under. Loucks was the town's first postmaster, and when Sheridan incorporated in 1884 he took office as its first mayor. In 1888 the territorial legislature carved Sheridan County out of Johnson County, named it for the same general, and Sheridan became the county seat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTheodore Roosevelt came through that country in 1884. He rode out from his ranch on the Little Missouri in the Dakota Badlands on a long swing through the cattle country of southeastern Montana and northern Wyoming, and went up into the Bighorns after elk and bear. Under the big pines he trailed a grizzly he reckoned at about twelve hundred pounds, and the whole hunt went into his book Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, out the next year.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen the Burlington and Missouri Railroad pulled in, in November 1892, and the town never looked back. Local business did so much railroad trade that first month that it paid off thirty thousand dollars in bank loans. Coal mines opened at Dietz, Monarch and Acme along Goose Creek and in the Tongue River valley, drawing dozens of families from the highland villages near Istebna in south-central Poland, and between 1900 and 1910 the population jumped from 1,559 to 8,408. By the 1910s Sheridan had the only long-distance electric trolley line in Wyoming, running out to the coal camps.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🎩 Buffalo Bill's Hotel\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Sheridan Inn opened in 1893, and folks called it the finest hotel between Chicago and San Francisco. Buffalo Bill Cody put money into it and made it his headquarters for Wild West show tryouts, and the favorite local story has him auditioning acts right off the big front porch, with folks coming in on the train seeing a crowd on the porch and lawn watching the hopefuls. Local cowboys and cowgirls tried out for his European tours, George Gardner and Tode Bard went to Europe with the show, and a ranch kid named Paul Case joined up when Cody came recruiting; as the youngest in the troupe he was \"Kid Case\". Over the years the Inn's guest book ran to Will Rogers, Ernest Hemingway and President Calvin Coolidge. One of Sheridan's own cattlemen, John B. Kendrick, won the governor's race in 1914 and then sat in the US Senate from 1917 until his death in 1933. And Sheridan still has its own police department, on the job today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🦬 The Seal on the Chief's Badge\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat little seal in the middle of the Sheridan button is Wyoming's real Great Seal, adopted in 1893 and revised in 1921. On the full-size version a draped woman holds a staff flying a banner that reads EQUAL RIGHTS, for the vote Wyoming Territory gave women in 1869, the first place in the country to do it. The two men beside her stand for livestock and mining, a star carries the number 44 because Wyoming came in as the 44th state, lamps on two pillars stand for the light of knowledge, and scrolls read Oil, Mines, Livestock and Grain. Shrunk to button size the words disappear, but the figures are still there if you lean in. Quite a lot of seal to shrink onto an inch-and-a-half button, and whoever ran that litho press pulled it off.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🤠 Why a Bison? The Wyoming Highway Patrol\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat bison isn't a made-up mascot. The real Wyoming Highway Patrol has worn one since its very first year. Wyoming used to have a Department of Law Enforcement whose whole job was enforcing Prohibition, and when the Legislature repealed the state's prohibition laws, that department was disbanded. The Highway Patrol was authorized to take over the roads, effective June 1, 1933. On May 23 the Highway Commission had already named Captain George \"Red\" Smith to lead it, and he and six newly trained patrolmen got cars from the state and a whole state to cover, nearly 98,000 square miles of it. The first divisions were Lovell, Laramie, Basin, Gillette, Green River and Casper. Their job was motor vehicle registration and licensing, the rules of the road, and, as the law put it, \"all laws for the protection of the highways.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe California Highway Patrol, founded in 1929, was the model for the western states, and a CHP man, Inspector William White, ran that first Wyoming recruit class. The six were picked from the fourteen who finished it. Training lasted three weeks, and every recruit paid his own expenses to get through it. The pay was $175 a month for a patrolman and $200 for the captain. In their first two and a half years the average patrolman put in about 67 hours and 570 miles a week. In January 1935 the House passed the bill that made the Patrol official, and by that year it was up to thirteen men. Smith pushed for a state speed limit and a driver licensing law years before either arrived, and the first speed limit, 60 miles an hour, finally came in May 1938. In 1954 troopers started experimenting with radar on US 30 between Cheyenne and Laramie, and those first units only worked with the patrol car standing still.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePicture those first troopers: forest green military coats, oak brown breeches and caps, Sam Browne belts and brown riding boots, with a buffalo and a winged wheel worn on the arm. The buffalo stuck, and it's still the Patrol's emblem today. The Patrol adopted its current shoulder patch in 1976, the bison rode again on its 75th and 90th anniversary patches and plates, and today the troopers call themselves the Guardians of the Cowboy State.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e⭐ Real Badges, and the Kids Who Got Them\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eReal police badges came out of American badge shops, and they were a whole different animal from these. Blackinton opened its doors in Attleboro Falls, Massachusetts in 1852, making ladies' buckles, cuff links and hair ornaments, made military insignia during the Civil War, and turned to badges for police and fire departments after it. They still make a sunburst badge with an eagle on top and a round center panel, the very look the Sheridan button wears. Out West there was Ed Jones in Oakland, who learned the engraving trade at Irvine and Jachens in San Francisco and was stamping badges with his own name by 1898, and Sun Badge in Southern California, today out of Ontario.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKids got real badges from the law, too. Sheriffs' junior deputy leagues swore youngsters in as honorary deputies and pinned badges on them. School safety patrols started in 1920, when the St. Paul police and the Chicago Motor Club each began one; St. Paul's Sergeant Frank Hetznecker ran the program there, its first student crossing guards went out in February 1921, and the Sam Browne belt and badge he gave them became the look of the school patrol. Omaha followed in 1923 and Seattle in 1928, and with AAA behind it the patrol has put its belt and badge on millions of children since. Beginning in Chicago in 1966, the Officer Friendly program sent police officers into early-grade classrooms, and with the Sears-Roebuck Foundation behind it, it had reached 233 communities by 1979, the very years these cards were hanging in the stores. Police departments handed out badges at parades, fairs and classroom visits as a matter of civic routine. And sheriffs handed out tin badges just like these as prizes in the youth programs they ran. Next to all that, a dime-store button was the pocket-change way in: the badge a kid could pick out and pay for himself. A kid who couldn't get the real thing could still buy one of these and pin it on.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🗝️ Two Badges, One State\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNew Old Stock: made for sale, never sold, never pinned on, still sealed on their cards. Everything here is kept in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, so these will reach you just as described. Nobody is printing these cards again, and once the last of the carded ones are gone into collections, they'll be very difficult to acquire.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"relatedBlock\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 More From The Vintage \u0026amp; Antique Gifts Archive\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-sheridan-wyoming-chief-police-tin-litho-toy-badge-japan\"\u003eVintage 1970s Sheridan Wyoming Chief Special Police 🦅 Tin Litho Toy Badge Original NOS Card Japan\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-wyoming-highway-patrol-tin-litho-toy-badge-japan\"\u003eVintage 1970s Wyoming Highway Patrol 🦬 Special Police Tin Litho Toy Badge New Old Stock Original Card Made in Japan\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-florida-highway-patrol-tin-litho-toy-badge-japan\"\u003eVintage 1970s Florida Highway Patrol 🍊 Special Police Toy Badge Pin NOS Carded Tin Litho Made in Japan\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":68081297326312,"sku":"VAG-15417002885352","price":31.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/2718\/4037\/files\/il_fullxfull.8829095481_cau5.jpg?v=1793576551","url":"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-1970s-wyoming-special-police-toy-badge-pair-sheridan-chief-and-highway-patrol-bison-tin-litho-nos-on-original-cards-made-in-japan","provider":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","version":"1.0","type":"link"}