money

Chris Knight's avatar

I knew it!  I just knew that I hadn’t imagined this.  A cartoon from 37 years that I saw only once ago and I still remember it!

Around the mid-Eighties there was an animated series based on the beloved Berenstain Bears children’s books.  The show ran on Saturday mornings on CBS.  It was pretty good as I seem to recall.  And often quite humorous.

Well, the other day one of the episodes sprang to mind as I was reading the news about the latest attempt to avoid a government shutdown.  It involved the Bear kiddies learning all about money.  How those little green pieces of paper don’t have value on their own.  Instead they must be backed up by something with real tangible worth.  In the bears’ world this happens to be the purest honey in existence.  Without that backing, as the kids’ father puts it there would be total ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

See
this?  It’s an enlargement.  The originals are about the size of modern printed currency…

 

I first saw this at a Boy Scout camporee in September of 1985.  I
was a brand new full Boy Scout.  They were handing out life-size copies
of this: A ten shilling note used during the Siege of Mafeking during the Boer War in South Africa.

It dates back to 1900.  Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, who later started the entire Scouting movement, had these
printed up and used in place of scarce real currency.  After the siege was
lifted and true money started flowing again these were redeemable for
actual ten shilling coins.

My friend and grandfather figure Doc Lewis told me about all that.  The “shillings” they were handing out during the camping event were
copies of an actual siege note that our local Boy Scout council had in its possession.

I’ve
been ...

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