1.            This is a personal collection. A very few of the match books were given to me by friends, but I have visited about 99% of the places that distributed them, and picked up the matches myself.

2.            I bought the patches from shops near bases where I had been stationed (years earlier – – I was in the service in the 1960s but my first purchases were decades later). Note that many of the patches are for units or events in the past, prior to the year of purchase, and that some of the patches are for units on bases far from the shop that sold them. I imagine that those patches are leftovers from orders by unit members visiting the bases near the shops.

3.            The big exception is the patches from the World War II era. They were collected at that time by my father. One patch is his from the Civilian Conservation Corps, which he joined in the 1930s. He was in the Navy during the war.

4.     Run the cursor over the  main menus “Patches”, “Matches” and “Coasters, Tickets, etc.” to see the drop-down menu for particular military bases and geographic locations. Note that the drop-down menu for “Matches” is long, so you cannot see all of it unless you scroll down the entire page a bit using the right-hand scroll bar.

5.  If you have a slow connection, when you click on a page or a sub-page it may take 20-30 seconds for the images to load, and a minute or so for the really long pages. Please be patient.

6.            You can contact me at anselmo@mindspring.com