Vintage 1970s Abilene Police Special Police Toy Badge 🦅 Tin Litho Pin-Back Button NOS Japan Card

Remember Abilene Police Toy Badges? 🦅 An Eagle Standing Guard for Abilene

Size: 4" x 2 1/4" ~ New Old Stock, still on its card.

Here's a little 1970s tin litho pinback that means business. Black field, a red ring border, about an inch and a half across, and right in the middle a gold-and-red eagle with its wings thrown wide, standing over an open book with a sword and a quill laid across the pages. ABILENE arcs across the top in red, POLICE sits along the bottom. It's still pinned to its yellow card and sealed in its original sleeve, exactly the way it hung on the rack. It's a toy, made for a kid's shirt pocket, and it doesn't apologize for it. They seldom turn up for sale, carded or loose.

The card carries the rest of the show. A cartoon motorcycle officer fills the left side: white peaked cap, big motorcycle goggles, gloved hands wrapped around the handlebars, a city skyline behind him, all under a red banner reading SPECIAL POLICE BADGE. Down in the corner, small and plain, it says JAPAN. That's where these were pressed and printed, tin lithographed for the American dime-store trade. Japan's tin toys had been getting to American kids that way since the years after the war, off the five-and-dime counters at Woolworth's, W.T. Grant, Ben Franklin, J.J. Newberry, G.C. Murphy and McCrory's.

That one little word has a story of its own. During the Allied Occupation, goods coming out of Japan could be marked "Occupied Japan" or "Made in Occupied Japan," and U.S. Customs let plain "Japan" and "Made in Japan" through as well. The Occupation ended when the peace treaty took effect in April 1952, the "Occupied" went away for good, and plain JAPAN is what those factories kept right on printing, just like it is on this card.

🤠 Abilene, Texas

The eagle-over-a-book design on this button matches the shoulder patch Abilene, Texas police officers actually wore, so that's the town this little badge is pointing at. Abilene got its start in 1881, when cattlemen laid it out as a stock-shipping point on the Texas and Pacific Railway and incorporated it that same year, borrowing the name from Abilene, Kansas, the old end of the Chisholm Trail. That Kansas namesake has a lawman story that suits a police badge: Wild Bill Hickok was hired as its town marshal in April 1871, its last big year as a cattle town. On October 5 of that year he shot it out in the street with a saloon owner named Phil Coe, and when another armed man came running up in the middle of it, Hickok couldn't tell who it was and fired on him too. It was his own deputy and friend, Mike Williams, coming to help him. Williams died that night, Coe a few days later, and Hickok was out of the job that December. As it happens, the Kansas Abilene is also where Dwight Eisenhower grew up - and Ike was a Texan by birth, born in Denison in 1890 before his family moved up to Abilene in 1892. His presidential library and museum is there today, and so is his grave. Back in Texas, the new Abilene picked up two nicknames along the way, "The Key City" and "The Friendly Frontier," and it grew into a real West Texas hub - Dyess Air Force Base went up with the town's own fundraising behind it and is still the biggest employer around, and Abilene is a three-college town: Hardin-Simmons (1891), Abilene Christian (1906), and McMurry (1923). There's even a book on the department itself, Gunfire on South Front: History of the Abilene Police Department, 1881-1993.

⚖️ What the Eagle Carries

Look close and this design is doing more than filling space. The eagle isn't perched on a shield - it's standing on an open book, with a sword and a quill crossed over the pages. Authority next to the written law, enforcement and record side by side. It's one of the sharper designs in this card family, and whoever drew it knew what they were doing.

🗓️ When These Were Made

There's no date printed on the card, but the family it belongs to gives it away. The same yellow card carries a New York City button copying the NYPD patch adopted July 1, 1971, and a San Francisco button copying the patch the SFPD added around 1970 - so these were hanging on the racks in the 1970s. Two more things agree: a Tennessee sheriff's button on the same card is printed 1776-1976 for the Bicentennial, and loose buttons from the series have a cream plastic back moulded MADE IN JAPAN and PAT. NO. 1196679, a Japanese utility-model registration filed in November 1972 and granted in 1977.

🚔 Badges and Kids

Badges like this one had a real life outside the toy aisle, too. Sheriffs handed out tin badges just like this as prizes in their own youth programs, and police departments have backed school safety patrols since the 1920s, putting real belts and badges on schoolchildren all over the country. A kid pinning this one to his shirt was playing at something departments really did put in kids' hands. That's a good bit of history for a five-and-dime toy to carry along.