They are on
eBay and I’m eyeballing them.
From my internet sleuthing, it references The 40/8, aka The Forty and Eight, aka The Society of Forty Men and Eight Horses. This is a shortened reference and translation of the French “La Societe des Quarante Hommes et Huit Chevaux”, which was an “honor society” of sorts for leaders of the American Legion formed in 1920 after World War I, and continued adding members through WW II and beyond.
Although American war veterans, they used (and still use) French in their formal society name and officer titles to reference their time serving overseas there. The name “Forty and Eight” comes from what was emblazoned (in French) on the side of the rail cars that took the soldiers to the battlefront and indicated their capacity—each rail car could hold 40 men and 8 horses.
In keeping within the theme, the various local groups of the 40/8 around the US again referenced the French rail cars, calling their local groups “voitures” instead of “posts”— voiture is the French word for car.
So these chips apparently came from Voiture 418 of the 40/8, and I know lots of these war service organizations had big card playing “clubs”. I’ve got an email into the 40/8 to ask where this voiture was located as it’s not currently listed on their site, and likely is shut down or renumbered when the 40/8 split from the American Legion in 1959. The seller bought them at an estate sale and knows no history, not even what I dug up.
Interestingly, the 40/8 worked to ensure that WW II servicemen had playing cards to help pass the time on transport ships (their equivalent to rail cars) and eventually distributed more than 4 million decks by the end of the war!
