Channel 6 EA$Y MONEY Wooden Nickel (When and where does it come from?!)

Am I for real right now?! Two updates in a single day?! What is this madness?!?! I’m lucky if I get two updates up in a single month anymore, but two in a day? Pure craziness!

Actually, this second update isn’t going to be very long at all, because to be perfectly frank, I know almost nothing about the subject. As such, this will be less of a post and more of a plea for info. Do I expect anything to come of it? Not really, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Dig this [presumably vintage] wooden nickel:

See it? Okay then, you now know about as much I do.

I don’t buy a ton of them, but I can be a real sucker for old advertising wooden nickels. Occasionally I’ll scour sales online just to see what examples I can turn up (it’s not like they weren’t/aren’t uncommon), and that was the situation I found myself in when I stumbled upon this. It sure looked old, and the price was incredibly cheap, so a short hit to my credit card later and it was secured.

What was Easy Money (or rather, Ea$y Money)? And whose channel 6? I have absolutely no idea whatsoever. There was a CW series by that name back in ’08, but I really don’t think this pertains to that; I’d imagine a mention of CW would be on the nickel if that were so. And I don’t even have to look to figure there are more than a few channel 6’s across the country.

So who/what/where/when/how was all this? I can’t even begin to say. I’m guessing this was a live local 1950s or 1960s show in which viewers could win some, say it with me, EASY MONEY, somehow. While that’s a pretty safe assumption, I could still be all sorts of wrong there. Internet searches haven’t turned up anything useful, mainly because I don’t have any specifics (say, a callsign) to enter, and what I have here doesn’t exactly make for a short set of results. And the seller I got this from? They sold stuff from all over, so I can’t even figure on this being from their area originally.

The back of the nickel is pretty standard stuff, so much so that I didn’t even bother snapping a picture of it. It just has the expected Native American image with “Don’t take wooden nickels – for real money turn over” wording, which again, doesn’t help narrow things down at all. Unless those designs changed drastically over the years? Maybe a wooden nickel expert (are there wooden nickel experts?) could narrow things down from that, in which case I’ll gladly add an addendum to this post. But, I’m not counting on that happening. Like I said though, I’d love to be proven wrong.

My hope is this is for some Dialing for Dollars type show, again a pretty safe guess, but for all I know, this nickel may not even be that old. Wooden nickels tend to age well; what I mean by that is some I’ve seen appeared older than they really were, whereas some older ones looked newer to me at first glance. My gut tells me this is an oldie, but that’s all that is, a gut feeling.

So, any of you old television experts out there in internet land have any ideas? Hit up the comments, please!