Iola Old Car Show Find

The annual Iola Old Car Show was held last weekend. The show has a huge flea market called the “swap meet” which requires venders to have a high percentage 90%(?) of automotive related items. This results in slim pickings for us military collectors. It takes the better part of a day to walk the entire swap area plus the mile long walk to and from home. Combine that with the fact that my wife holds her annual garage sale, along with many others in this town during the car show, for which she requires my presence and I haven’t made it to the car show in about five years. This year was different and I actually got to the show Sunday morning. More than half the venders were gone or packing up when I got there but I still got lucky. After the civil war Wisconsin was one of the first places to build a home for disabled veterans in the Milwaukee area. Private funding raised a large portion of the building costs and one of the fund raisers was what was called the “Wisconsin Soldiers’ Home Childrens’ Fund”. This fund sold “shares” for ten cents each. The certificate states that ten cents equals twenty bricks. This certificate must be quite scarce based on the fact that the leading collector of Milwaukee items (not me) has never seen one of these in private hands. I guess the old saying “never say never” applies here.