TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER... Or at Least Your Personal Banker

Long before the Banks & Savings & Loans almost collapsed our economy, they used to give us things; vaguely useful things.  Unbelievable, yet true.

Who’s mother or grandmother didn’t have a shiny chrome toaster she received for opening a new savings account---  from a Bank which has now been turned over more times than Pamela Anderson?!  (Yes, that's a question.)  

For decade, the Art Deco Chrome Toaster was the #1 Bank Premium Give-A-Way.  Why, even today when I think of savings, I think of toast— my bread going up in smoke.

This 1950’s Flying Saucer Bank Premium is an inter-galactic rarity. Manufactured in a molded metal for the Exchange National Bank of Colorado Springs, it is a highly detailed, mechanically intricate… and the perfect inaugural OBJECT & OBJECTION to begin our lost journey.

To operate, one puts a coin in the side of the Flying Saucer, cocks the lever atop the bank then pushes the center hard plastic ball where the alien sits; this action releases the coin which then flies inside the disk, viewed through six die-cut holes.

(Please feel free to re-arrange any of the above words to create your own pornography!)

But what makes the piece so spectacularly strange is the embossed writing on the bottom of the disk, which states:

“Flying Saucer Bank.  This coin bank is our conception of the Flying Saucer and was designed only after careful research. Hundreds of reports from various people, photographs & drawings were referred to.”  Duro-Mold Mfg., Inc., Detroit, Mich. 1956.”

Is this the ever-allusive ALIEN SMOKING GUN?  Perhaps proof that aliens do exist—and that most of them are working as domestic help for Republican Bank Lobbyists?

Or was this Saucer created just to cash in on the U.F.O. scare of the late 1940's & 50's. 

Or maybe Flying Saucers and Aliens were just good for bank business-- as long as they didn’t probe anyone you claimed on your tax return.

Only after the Roswell incident did we realize our own government was the real Alien probe we all had feared. 

But what of Bankers & Aliens?  Can they truly be one?

Sadly, yes. If you don’t make timely deposits, they take it out of you anyway.

D.A. 

Copyright WDMS 2011