The coin that began my 70+-year numismatic journey was a circulated half dime I found in a scarf that had belonged to one of my mother’s aunts. I have no memory of the grade or value of the coin, although I’m sure it wasn’t worth much in the early 1950s. Nowadays, there are many online sites I could visit that would provide at least an approximate value of such a coin. Such sites did not exist in the 1950s, and to try to find out what the coin was worth, my father and I went to the city’s main library downtown. There, my father found a coin value book that told us that the coin indeed wasn’t worth much. My mother subsequently lost the half dime, but that’s another story.
For the purpose of this article, I’ll address both new collectors and more experienced ones. Let’s assume that you’ve just recently gotten interested in U.S. coin collecting. Perhaps you’ve put together a set of Washington quarters honoring the 50 states. Or, maybe you’ve been attracted to the set of famous American women on quarters. You may have even noticed that the portrait of George Washington on the latter coin is not the same as the one on the State quarters. If so, you may wonder who designed this “new” version of Washington. Notice that “new” is in quotes, as the Washington bust on the American Women quarters was created at the same time as that on the earlier quarters. Why wasn’t it adopted earlier? One possibility is that the designer was a woman.
