I pulled these 4 wheats out of a bucket of wheats. Looks to me like it’s a fountain pen so probably WWII or earlier. Looking for any thoughts on what they might mean. Appears to me to be written by the same person. 1918-D Martin 1930-D Robbins 1932-D Murphree (?) 1933-D Winn Nothing written on reverse. Any thoughts are appreciated.
Yes, it does appear to have been written by the same person. Maybe the author was trying to see "what goes around may come around." Just a thought, good luck.
Maybe family members' birth years. I'd leave them as-is as that might be kind of neat or maybe a dunk as Sal suggests.
I'm guessing that acetone would remove it, but leave a negative image where the ink protected the copper from further toning. I'd leave them as-is.
Interesting. I'd say they're worth more as curiosities as they would be just being common Wheats with a minor issue. The graffiti is kind of a plus in a weird way. My speculation is that they were used to draw lots. Thrown in a hat with the people's names written on them, and pulled out to select the winner (or loser) of whatever they were drawing lots for. It's interesting how they've stayed together all these years. Whatever source your Wheat bucket came from must not have been picked over or dispersed much in over a long period. The 1938-D "Winn" piece looks high grade, and the fact that they're all prewar dates (including some scarcer Depression-era dates) leads me to believe that whatever these folks were drawing lots for, they were doing it around the WW2 era, or not much later.
Imagine this scenario. It is WW2 and a bunch of bored GIs are aboard a ship in the Pacific. To while away the hours with some low-stakes gambling, everyone antes up a penny, and they have someone write everybody's name on each cent in India ink. After the ink dries, the cents go into a helmet, and one is withdrawn. The winning name was Robbins, let's say. Robbins didn't spend the cents on his next liberty, but instead kept them all as mementos of his shipmates, some of whom might not have survived the battle they were sailing toward. Robbins lived to a ripe old age and died, and his bag of marked cents got dumped back into circulation (or more likely, taken in bulk to a coin dealer) by his heirs, only to be sold in a bulk bag of Wheaties, where you found four of them. Originally there would have been many more in the lot.
Maybe it was a pact to meet up a certain number of years later, similar to people cutting a piece of currency into sections with a promise to put the bill back together in 10 or 20 years.
Well, 65 years ago in HS shop , we used permanent ink ( seemed always black back then) to write our initials and chair #on copper tubing and put in ferric chloride solution so we could ID our pieces soldered. Some made art, some made stills. We did rinse the acid off at the end. The Good Old Days. Jim
