On several Memories articles, Tom Carson, a friend and fellow enthusiast of Chattanooga history, has either given me the lead for the story or contributed additional material.
I recently received an e-mail from Tom in which he reported finding some tokens related to a Memories article which included information on the Tony Papa Confectionary . The link to the original article is
http://www.chattanoogan.com/2004/2/15/46825/z/Sports/Schedules-and-Scores.aspx.
The following are Tom's comments on the historic tokens that he purchased.
In about 2010, I purchased a copy of the "Tony Papa, Good for 10 cts with return of bottle" token, Tokens without a city or state are referred to as mavericks.
I did a Google search and found this article by Harmon Jolley.
This identified the token. I did another search and found the grandson of Mr Papa who gave me his grandfather’s phone number. Mr. Papa was in his late 90s and told me a little about his business at that location and told me that somewhere he had a bag of the old tokens.
In the spring of 2014 I got another Tony Papa token and set it aside. The other day I had the opportunity to take a closer look.
The token was a few millimeters smaller and was In Trade. This caused me to search for Mr. Papa and I found that he died on April 3, 2011 at 100 years of age. (token information from Tom Carson tcarson@ewkm.net).
If you have additional information on Tony Papa, please send me an e-mail at jolleyh@bellsouth.net.
It has been a while since I have been by the former Tony Papa Confectionary. Could someone update me on its current owner/tenant? As Tom noted, the building was constructed when Boyce was the name of the lower end of Chestnut Street.