This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.
Commemorative coins exist in a strange twilight of monetary policy. Three committees of Congress oversee the decisions for whom and what gets commemorated, namely, the Committee on Housing, Banking, and Urban Affairs; the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the House; and the Citizens’ Coin Advisory Committee. One can well imagine the kinds of spirited debates that take place as everybody pushes their own pet project.
2009 Louis Braille Bicentennial Dollar
In the first place, it’s a United States coin commemorating a teacher and inventor who lived and died in France, with no connections to the United States. Certainly, his accomplishments for blind people throughout history are worthy of honoring, but it’s kind of arbitrary for a US coin to make this point, as if it behooved us to issue coins to commemorate Mahatma Gandhi and Isaac Newton as well.
But most remarkably, it is the first US coin to feature readable Braille (what took them so long?), the dots on the reverse spelling out ‘BRI’ as short for Braille.
2007 Little Rock Central High School Desegregation Dollar
The ruling of the 1954 case “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas” stands as a landmark in United States Civil Rights; for the first time, segregating schools by race was ruled to be unconstitutional. Many people today would be shocked that such a matter-of-fact policy was set in law so recently. Barack Obama would only be born thirteen years after this event.
This coin is notable not only for commemorating this event, but for its striking design, showing those triumphant feet marching along on the path to integrated education.
1936 San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge Opening Half Dollar
This is one of the few commemorative coins issued to honor not a person, not even an event, but a structure. Designed local San Francisco talent Jacques Schnier, the coin has the big bridge on the reverse and a rather imposing bear on the obverse. And non-natives tend to get it mixed up; this is the Bay Bridge, not the Golden Gate Bridge, which wasn’t completed until six months later.
Now maybe every run-of-the-mill bridge doesn’t get its own coin, but this is San Francisco we’re talking about. They have a mint, they can design any coin they want.
1936 Bridgeport, Connecticut Centennial Half Dollar
This coin commemorates the 100th anniversary of the incorporation of the town of Bridgeport, Connecticut. The coin is singly unremarkable until one gets a gander at the person depicted on the obverse: That man is none other than P.T. Barnum, Bridgeport’s most famous resident and circus magnate extraordinaire. As in the saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Now, his chuckling, arrogant presence graces the face of money itself, for which many a collector has payed to acquire. Lest we forget. Even the space-age Art Deco eagle on the reverse seems to echo the cynicism.
1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition Fifty Dollar Gold Piece
Gold commemoratives are an unusual product, silver being more the norm. And then again, a whole series of commemoratives in denominations of half-dollar, dollar, quarter eagle, and fifty dollar gold piece, all devoted to one event, is almost unfathomable. So the rarest of the rare is the fifty dollar piece, with the lowest mintage of any US commemorative. The MS-65 version can easily fetch $200K. Beside that point, it was minted in both round and octagonal shapes.
But the design takes the prize for uniqueness, being the helmeted figure of Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom, and the reverse chose to depict not an eagle, nor even a turkey, but an owl. Oh, with dolphins swimming around the rim. Seriously, this coin has more classic design going into it than some Eastern European cathedrals. And all this over the Panama Canal, an achievement so important that we would eventually shrug ‘meh’ and sell it to Panama in 1977.
What coins! What stories! What a country!
