Ah, what we all could use are some jingling hi-jinks to roll out this year of 2009 and wipe that dour expression off its face full of grump. What do you say?

Any old-time local metals designers with a sense of whimsy interested in creating modern-day Hard Times tokens, in the style of famous predecessors? Any metals producers willing to stamp them?

That's what the private minting facility of H.M. & E.I. Richards of this city did way back when, at another time when the country's financial system started to turn screwy.

President Andrew Jackson in 1832 launched a one-man coup on the semi-private Bank of the United States, rescinding its charter because he did not like so much power being vested in one institution, and scooping up Treasury money to parcel out to local banks.

BUS went under, credit collapsed. The country was actually flush at the time, say historians (that didn't last; paper money flourished, un-backed by sufficient gold and silver, leading to inflation and depression), but Jackson's antic caused hoarding of standard-issue coinage known then as specie. Hard Times copper tokens, unofficial, often satirical currency about the size of today's one-cent piece and inscribed with merchant advertising and political motifs, were subsequently struck and issued by East Coast metals merchants as an antidote to the shortage.

The tokens are now considered a numismatist's delight; one just showed up on eBay, one side inscribed, "Lafayette A Friend to Freedom, Died May 20, 1834; the other, H.M. & E.I. Richards, Manufacturers of Jewelry near the Union House Attleboro Mass."

Russell Rulau, author of the book "Hard Times Tokens 1832 - 1844," the recognized bible on the subject, reports that the company used the services of Edward Hulseman, the engraver at Robinson's Jones & Co. in the same city. Imagine the history - ah, if coins could squawk - of that eBay Hard Times token. Into whose hands did it first fall, what was its subsequent 175-year journey to an online auction site in the year 2009?

The specimen, since last week perhaps plucked by a buyer, was listed as copper "about 28mm, xf, flatly struck obverse, partial wood grain planchet common to the variety, one slightly darker spot on the reverse." (A planchet is the blank onto which a coin is struck.)

How did that spot come to be? Was it created during handling over time or was it produced by a single incident of corrosion or oxidation?

The gentleman to whom that Richards token is dedicated was Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier Lafayette, the French military officer who became a general in the American Revolutionary War and a recognized friend to the United States.

This new year is, as you know, forecast to be difficult. Some merchants not only lost sales this season, but may lose their shirts. We consumers have our own misgivings about banks and credit - even without Old Hickory Jackson to muck around with things.

But pessimism and foul moods are poor traveling companions. A tongue-in-cheek 2009 Hard Times token, struck in the jewelry capital of the world with tributes to colorful characters (the late Larry Fitton, town crier, springs to mind) would make some of us feel merrier, sillier, richer. Sell the tokens to benefit the library, literacy programs or zoo.

Any takers?

BETSY SHEA-TAYLOR, a former editor and writer with The Sun Chronicle, is a freelance writer. She can be reached at prosewing@aol.com.