How a Challenge Coin Made Its Way Back Home to Cobb County

It wasn’t supposed to end up in Hamburg, New York.

But there it was — a 75th anniversary Cobb County Police Department challenge coin, buried among a handful of local keepsakes in a plastic bag at a garage sale just south of Buffalo. Most were tied to nearby towns. This one wasn’t. It didn’t belong. And that’s what made it worth noticing.

Kevin Banks, a retired man with a habit of weekend garage-sale hopping, paid a dollar for the whole bag. “A few weeks back,” he wrote in a letter addressed to Lt. McCloskey of the Cobb County Police Department, “I found a small bag of commemorative coins (mostly local), but this one stuck out.”

It was struck in 1999 to mark 75 years of the department’s history. Eagle on the front. Cobb County Police across the bottom. The kind of challenge coin typically passed between officers, given at retirement, or traded at conferences. Designed to mean something to someone.

Banks didn’t have any connection to Cobb County. But the coin caught his attention, so he held onto it.

“I got Cobb County’s address and am returning this coin to its home,” he wrote. “My wife thinks that I’m an idiot, but I get (got) a chuckle out of it.”

The letter is handwritten. The tone’s dry, unfussy. He’s not asking for credit. He just thought someone might want it back.

Challenge coins are easy to lose track of. They’re handed off in ceremonies, pocketed after shift changes, left behind in drawers, or passed down without context. They don’t always stay where they started.

But this one did. Eventually. Not because it was valuable — but because someone paid attention.

That’s not a grand gesture. It’s just a decision. And sometimes, that’s all history needs to survive.