The Recorder – Texas man has Orange National Bank token he found in Iowa decades ago

ORANGE — Theodore Frelinghuysen Seward published “The Don’t Worry Philosophy” in the 1890s to help fellow Christians cast aside their anxieties and live more harmonious lives.

This spawned The Don’t Worry Club, and banks and businesses — usually in small towns — across the United States capitalized on the ensuing popularity and issued good-luck tokens as advertisements until roughly the 1920s. In fact, the now-defunct Orange National Bank produced one in 1910 to mark the town’s centennial. So, how did one of those tokens wind up in an alleyway in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about four decades later?

That’s one of the mysteries Texas resident Jeffery Stepp would love to figure out. He was in the fourth grade when he spotted the token behind his home.

“I thought it was money and I’ve had it ever since,” he told the Greenfield Recorder on Friday.

One side of the token notes the bank offered safe deposit boxes and presented the items for the town’s centennial. The flipside reads “MEMBERSHIP EMBLEM OF THE DON’T WORRY CLUB” and features a swastika meant as good luck. (It should be noted that the swastika dates back thousands of years and has been used as a symbol of good fortune by cultures around the world. According to the BBC, the symbol means “well-being” in the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit and has been used in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. It was not associated with Nazism until Adolph Hitler commandeered it in 1920.)

“The Nazi use of the swastika stems from the work of 19th-century German scholars translating old Indian texts, who noticed similarities between their own language and Sanskrit,” the BBC reported in 2014. “They concluded that Indians and Germans must have had a shared ancestry and imagined a race of white god-like warriors they called Aryans.”

Stepp, 68, said his father died when he was 8 months old and his mother eventually moved the family from Volga, Iowa, to Cedar Rapids to take a job caring for a man’s children. Stepp, who moved to Brownsboro, Texas, in 1980, said his family lived in the bottom half of the big two-story house owned by his mother’s employer. He found the token while playing in the alleyway and has kept it in an old bank bag for many years. He said he has always wondered how it got from Massachusetts to Iowa.

“You just never know,” he said.

Various “Don’t Worry Club” tokens can be researched and purchased online.

According to a brochure produced in 2020 through a collaboration of the Orange Revitalization Partnership, the Orange Historical Society and the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, Orange National Bank was incorporated at 12 North Main St. (now the home of the Quabbin Harvest Food Co-op) in May 1875. It was originally a Victorian-style building with a pitched roof and apartments on the second floor, and offered safe deposit boxes, supported war efforts and printed national currency. It appears the bank became the Franklin County Trust Co. circa 1970.

According to Beatrice M. Miner’s “History of Orange, 1753 to 1976,” the bank had seven presidents from January 1878 to 1976. Four of these men served until their death. Buildings were removed in 1946 to make a parking lot, and a large illuminated exterior chime clock was added after the town clock was destroyed by a fire.

Orange Historical Society President Kathy Schiappa and her husband, Frank Schiappa, who also belongs to the society, said they found a 1967 Orange National Bank pocket calendar, a coin commemorating anniversaries of the bank and the town, and an Orange National Bank cloth money bag and napkin.

Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or
413-772-0261, ext. 262.