Vintage 1970s Florida Highway Patrol 🍊 Special Police Toy Badge Pin NOS Carded Tin Litho Made in Japan

Remember Florida Highway Patrol Toy Badges? 🚔 A Toy Badge Off the Dime-Store Rack

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

This is a 1970s tin litho toy badge, still sealed to its original card the way it hung on the rack. The card is yellow, with a red banner across the top reading SPECIAL POLICE BADGE and a cartoon motorcycle cop leaning over his handlebars in a white cap and a pair of big goggles, a city skyline sketched in behind him. Down in the corner, small, it just says JAPAN. That's where these little tin badges were made, for the American dime-store trade. After World War II, Japan's toy makers were put back to work turning out the cheap, labor-heavy goods American companies wanted to import and sell, and by the end of the 1950s Japan was a tin-toy powerhouse. The story that's traveled with these badges for years is that they started out as one of General MacArthur's rebuilding projects, a little American goodwill stamped out in tin during the occupation. And there's something to it: the occupation government Douglas MacArthur ran lined up subsidized American steel for Japan's tin toy makers, and The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, has a Japanese tin Special Police badge from about 1950 that it points to as one of the country's first export toys. The occupation wrapped up in 1952, a couple of decades before this card hung on a rack, but it was the same trade still rolling. Plastic took over most of the toy aisle in the '60s, but little tin badges like this one kept right on coming. And they're rare - carded or loose, a Florida Highway Patrol one just doesn't come up for sale.

The button itself is round tin: a bright yellow ring around a navy field, HIGHWAY arcing over the top and PATROL along the bottom in yellow letters, and right in the center a red-orange orange with a couple of green leaves, FLORIDA lettered straight across the fruit. It's a toy, made for a kid's shirt pocket, and it plays that part well.

🍊 Why There's an Orange on a Police Badge

That orange in the middle is right at home. The real Florida Highway Patrol has worn orange since its very first day - orange bands on the troopers' gray Stetsons and an orange-and-blue patch on the shoulder - and in the state that grows them, what else would you put on the badge? By 1943 the patch on a trooper's left shoulder was an orange emblem with the word Florida spelled out - the very thing this little button carries front and center.

🚓 The Real Florida Highway Patrol

The badge on this button is a toy, but the agency it copies is real. The Florida Legislature created the Florida Highway Patrol in 1939, under a new Department of Public Safety. W.F. Reid came on as director on October 1, H.N. Kirkman was made captain of the patrol - he led it until he retired in 1970, and troopers still call him its father - and on November 1 the first training school opened in Bradenton with 40 students at the Manavista Hotel. On December 6, 1939, Secretary of State R.A. Gray swore in the 32 who graduated. Kirkman - Colonel H. Neil Kirkman, in full - was an old Army man who had first gone in as a private in 1917. In 1945 he was elected director of the whole Department of Public Safety and held that job for 24 years, and I like this detail: the day he retired, February 11, 1970, happened to be his 78th birthday. Their uniform was forest green whipcord, with orange bands on a gray Stetson campaign hat and a black Sam Browne belt, plus an orange-and-blue shoulder patch, FHP lettered on the left lapel and a winged wheel on the right. That original wheel had a broken spoke in it, which is where the Patrol's own Broken Spoke Club got its name. The whole look was patterned after the New York State Police.

🗓️ When These Were Made

There's no date printed on the card, but the family it belongs to gives it away. The same card design turns up with a New York City button copying the NYPD patch adopted in July 1971, and a San Francisco button copying the patch the SFPD added around 1970 - so these were on the racks in the 1970s. 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. The button itself runs about an inch and a half across; the card is 4 by 2.25 inches.

🚔 The Real Junior Programs Behind Badges Like This

There is a real history standing behind every toy badge like this one. This was the era of the junior deputy and the school safety patrol: sheriffs' offices swore children in as honorary junior deputies at fairs and school assemblies, safety patrol programs — running strong since the 1920s — pinned badges on generations of schoolchildren, and a visit from an officer with badges to hand out was a fixture of American civic childhood. Sheriffs gave tin badges just like this one out as prizes in their youth programs, too. A Florida Highway Patrol badge belonged to that world. When a child pinned one on, the game borrowed its seriousness from programs that were entirely real — and that is part of the history a survivor like this one still carries.