A Richmond, Va. Found US Buckle

[relichound]

This one was purchased long ago from Fred Morgan, an early Richmond area Civil War relic hunter,
and later dealer. See the notes on the buckle? These were added with first aid adhesive tape by Mr. Morgan.
He even added these notes to some dropped bullets and many types of relics. He sold items in the early 1960s.
I was a kid when I started collecting, and thanks go to Fred Morgan, a father himself, for inspiring me.
How much did a US buckle, like this cost maybe in 1962? $6.50.

Oh, see on the back of the buckle "XATH"? This was a dealer's code to tell him how much he
paid for it. Some antique dealers even today use such a code in case they receive an offer
on an item then they will know how much they paid for it. As I said... some antique dealers still use such a code, but not many!

 

[lelliott19]

So he paid $1.28 for it when he bought it?
If X = 0 or blank, A= 1 (1st letter of the alphabet), T =20 (20th letter of the alphabet) and H = 8 (8th letter of the alphabet)

 

[Patrick H]

In the 60s, as a high school kid, I worked in a retail drug store. My very first day at work, the owner told me that every retail business had a wholesale code and then he told me the one for our store. One of my jobs was to unpack shipments that came to us daily, mark them off the invoice, record the wholesale price on each package in our wholesale code, and then figure and mark the retail price at our standard mark up. That was common procedure then. I expect every retail business had a wholesale code. Ours was a substitution cypher. We used a ten-letter word (which I still won't reveal) in which no letter appeared more than one time. The number "1" was represented by the first letter of our code word, and so on through the letters and numbers. Zero was our last letter. And when we needed to record the same number two consecutive times, we'd substitute an "X" for the second number.

"XATH" is probably a wholesale code, but it does not work with the code word I just described.

 

[relichound]

Thank you, Laura and Patrick. When in high school I had a friend who claimed that he figured out
the code, and he told me, but I no longer have any idea what it was.

 

[MRB1863]

Nice piece! Here's a ten letter code that will work for me: SENDITHERE

 

[Patrick H]

Laura has at least one likely hunch in her interpretation of the wholesale code on the belt buckle. The "X" appearing at the start of the code would be most unusual, unless it represented a blank or a zero. As in the case of the code I learned, it might have also represented a repeat numeral. (In other words, an all-purpose code letter). Relichound recalls buying the buckle for $6.50 retail. Suppose the seller passed the item through to Relichound at his own cost. But, suppose the seller wouldn't have been so generous to a different buyer. Suppose the seller wanted to imply with his code that the wholesale figure was $10 or above? He might well have used the "X" to add a bogus, blank digit to his code.

You code breakers out there: Work on a substitution cypher which includes the letters "ATH" in any order. The cypher word must have ten letters, and the numeric value can run from zero to 9, or from 1 through 9 and then zero. There can't be any repeated letters in the word.

I'll bet someone figures this out for sure (or provides a very likely hunch) before the end of the week!

 

[Vicksburger]

Laura, I hope you will consider going to work for our Intelligence agencies!

 

[Frederick14Va]

Not uncommon to find various Federal items around Richmond... US forces occupied the city environs for several years post war.

I remember as a kid when I found my first Confederate 12lb case shot artillery round... its market value at that time was $8.00......

 

[relichound]

Thanks to you all. Actually though I do not recall the exact price of this US buckle.
I did buy one for $6.50 about 1962, but it was a different buckle. The exact price
and date that I bought this one is now lost to my memory. But it may not
make much difference anyway.

 

[E_just_E]

Really nice puppy paws buckle. $6.50 in 1962 is about $50-60 now, which is a fraction of its worth...