The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here

Bandon, Oregon is one of my favorite coastal cities. It is also a favorite of many tourists, some of whom come from father away than the few hours drive I have to drive to reach the community. So what I am going to tell you shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. When made a purchase I got a dollar bill in change that had traveled 685 miles in four days and 44 minutes.

How do I know this? The dollar bill I received had a rubber stamped message asking me to trace its whereabouts. All I had to do was to call up the website www.wheresgeorge.com to discover that some guy named Ed who was headed for California picked up the bill from a Wells Fargo

Bank in Coralville, Iowa on Sept. 28 and it traveled with him and his wife, Tracey, to Coos Bay, Oregon. From there it made its way the Bandon where I received it in change when I purchased a book in Old Town Bandon.

I was familiar with the old World War II “Short Snorters” bills which became a military tradition as a drinking game and a status symbol. The word “snort” was slang for a stiff drink and “short” for less than full measure. When servicemen were out drinking together, they would challenge each other to produce their Short Snorters, currency signed by other snorters. Anyone who failed to do so was obliged to buy a round of drinks.

Some of those bills became real collector’s items because of the famous names signed on them, including one signed by Winston Churchill. The tradition more or less died out after the war, but it was revived in the 1960s when America entered the space age and astronauts carried into space $1 bills signed by their fellow crew members.

Until I got the Bandon bill, I had not heard of “Where’s George,” web site but my reporter instinct caused me investigate. I learned that the “Where’s George” site has been in existence since Dec. 23, 1998. Thousands of dollars have been registered by individuals all over the country and are being traced on their monetary travels.

The site is a free tracing service of U.S. Currrency whose members log the serial numbers of bills. The rubber stamp listing the website allows the recipient of the bill to trace its travels after it has been registered. The members who sign up for the program are called “Georgers,” and they can get e-mail alerts on where the bill has been. However, there is no reference to how the bill was spent.

The program even has a “Friends of Where’s George” club. It became so popular in the United States that a similar program called “Where’s Willy” was started in Canada to traces is dollars, except Canada’s paper money starts with its $5 bill. Any thing lower is in coinage. The name “Willy,” refers to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the first French Canadian Prime Minister, whose portrait appears on the Canadian five-dollar bill. The program also has a website, www.whereswilly.com and is a free tracking service.

As an interesting side effect of this currency traveling project, researchers studying pandemics have use the tracking sites to plot human travel patterns and used it recently in a study to find clues on how to combat the spread of diseases.

In my own experience I recall a time during World War II while I was stationed with the Marines in the military the town where the townfolks complained about the Marines and sailors and even posted signs in the parks that said: “Sailors, dogs and Marines, keep off the grass.” I never quite understood the animosity especially why the Marines were listed after the dogs, but the military went into combat mode and paid its personnel, even the civilian workers with cash — $2 bills. It didn’t take long for the merchants to understand on which side of their bread was buttered.

It would be interesting to know, if George ever traced those $2 bills.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.