• Seattle Post-Intelligencer , Wednesday, December 24, 2008 10:30 AM

P-I columnist Bill Virgin shouts out 50th birthday greetings to BankAmericard, and 40th salutations to Visa, which was cobbled together in 1968 by BankAmericard franchisee institutions trying to fix problems in the system. Although BankAmericard wasn't the first credit card, its growth led to a personal-finance world far different than there had been before.

"Blaming the credit card for the debt burdens consumers now carry is a little like blaming the hammer when someone flattens a thumb instead of striking the nail," Virgin writes. His column reminded me of a piece I wrote about Diner's Club, which was the first credit card, when it celebrated its 40th birthday in 1990. In it, press agent Matty Simmons (who later produced the National Lampoon series of movies, among other things) reveals that he made up the story about how the idea for the credit card came about. No, there was not a "Eureka!" moment when an embarrassed businessman realized there was no cash in his wallet -- a story that's still circulating. In fact, he says, in inventing the category, Diners Club marketers basically "made things up as we went along."

Virgin credits Joseph Nocera's "terrific" 1995 book, A Piece of the Action, for much of the historical information in the column. It "explains how the credit card, the mutual fund and the money-market account allowed, as the book's subtitle puts it, the middle class to join the money class." I haven't read the book, but I'm a fan of anything Nocera writes .

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