50 Cents Arlington Hall Station

Arlington Hall Station in Arlington, Virginia was a former girls' school requisitioned by the U.S. Army in 1942 and subsequently home to signals intelligence operations — most famously the SIGINT work that fed into the Venona project, the decades-long effort to decrypt Soviet communications. The NCO Open Mess scrip issued here was internal currency for the enlisted club, a common arrangement on U.S. military installations during the postwar decades to control spending and restrict cash use to base facilities.

Yellow paper scrip of this type was not tracked by federal banking authorities and survives largely by accident — discarded, forgotten in wallets, or kept as curiosities by departing servicemen.