Vintage 1960s-1970s Plorham Park NJ Police 🚔 Tin Litho Special Police Toy Badge Pin Error Misprint New Old Stock Made in Japan

Size: 4 x 2.25 inches ~ New Old Stock, still on its card. They vary a little one to the next.

🚨 There's No Such Place as Plorham Park

Read the top of this button close and something's off. It says PLORHAM PARK. Go ahead, look for it on a map — you won't find it, because there's no such place. There's a Florham Park, New Jersey, over in Morris County, and somewhere along the line the F turned into a P and nobody caught it before it went to press. I've got a little stack of these, and every one of them says PLORHAM, so it's not one unlucky button. I like it better that way. A town that never existed, printed over and over, is a pretty good story. They seldom turn up for sale, carded or loose.

🦅 What's On the Button

Tin litho, ringed in bright red. Inside a black shield outlined in blue, PLORHAM PARK runs across the top in gold, POLICE sits below it, and three little stars line up underneath that. A pink-and-white eagle spreads its wings almost edge to edge across the middle, and on a small blue shield over its chest sits a tiny red house. Gold lightning bolts zigzag down both sides, and N J sits at the bottom.

🏡 The Real Florham Park

That little red house isn't just filler — it's the Little Red Schoolhouse, built in 1866, and it's still the town's icon today: it's on the borough flag, the letterhead, the website, even the first-responder trucks. Whoever drew this button knew the town's symbol, even if they botched the town's name.

Florham Park itself was incorporated March 9, 1899, carved out of Chatham Township, and the name is a Gilded Age mashup of two big estates. "Florham" came from Florence and Hamilton Twombly — Florence Adele Vanderbilt Twombly, a granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and her husband Hamilton McKown Twombly — who smashed their first names together for their 840-acre place. Next door sat Brooklake Park, 1,000 acres belonging to Leslie Ward, one of the founders of Prudential Insurance. Squash those two estates together and you get the borough's name. These days Fairleigh Dickinson University's Florham campus sits on part of that old estate ground, and since 2008 the New York Jets have run their headquarters and training camp out of Florham Park too. Not bad company for a button that can't spell the place.

🗓️ When These Were Made

Nothing on this card prints a year, but the family it belongs to tells on itself. The same card in my shop turns up with a New York button copying the NYPD patch that was adopted July 1, 1971, and a San Francisco button copying the SFPD patch added around 1970 — so this whole run was on the racks in the 1970s. The card itself is yellow with a red SPECIAL POLICE BADGE banner up top, and a cartoon motorcycle cop fills the rest: white cap, big goggles, gloved hands on the handlebars, a city skyline behind him. JAPAN is printed small in the corner. It's still sealed in its poly sleeve, just like it came off the rack.

👮 A Badge in a Kid's Pocket

Badges like this one weren't just toys sitting on a shelf. Sheriffs handed tin badges just like this out as prizes in their youth programs. Police departments have been putting real belts and real badges on schoolkids since the 1920s too, backing school safety patrols at crosswalks all over the country. This one came from a Japanese tin shop for the dime-store rack, not a supply closet — but it still lived in that same world, the one where a kid wearing a badge on his shirt felt like he'd been trusted with something.