The Missouri Quarter Design Controversy

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This is ninety nine percent invisible I'm Roman Mars This past February, the American New Mismatics Association held its annual convention at the Savannah Convention Center in Savannah, Georgia.ningning six o'clock today. For the uninitiated, New Mismatics is the fancy word for coins and the study of coins Okay, massive room. There are Dozens and dozens and dozens. and dozens of vendors. And that's reporter and novice new myismatist Katie Thorton This was my first time at a coin show, but right away I could tell that this convention was not necessarily catering to the merely coin curious More than anything, this show was for collectors Mly of US coins, with each booth featuring something for which there was some kind of small but extremely avid fandom These gold pieces were made with gold from the California gold rush. We're specialists in what's called three cent silvers or Times. These are half dimes. Have you ever heard of a halftime? I have now There was also a society dedicated to crushed pennies, like when the machines smushed the pennies or as they call them, elongated. Why do we stop on pennies? You give me a foreign currency and we'll smash it and see how lovely the design comes out. But Katie wasn't on the hunt for anything quite so niche. Instead, she was in Savannah to learn about what has to be the most widely collected coin in American history So I'm of the age where my sort of introduction to coine collecting was the stake quarters. Do you have any of could show? Oh, yeah Of course, everyone in America knows about state quarters Chances are you have one hiding in your couch cushion right now F From nineteen ninety nine until two thousand nine. The US Mint issued fifty six special quarter designs, one for each state and territory, and Washington, DC They put billions of these special quarters into circulation On the front, you'll see the classic profile of George Washington, but turn any of them over, and you'll see an engraving of something that some state or territory likes about itself The quarter from my home state of Minnesota features a loon Kansas has a bison And Illinois, well, it couldn't decide. So it has Lincoln kind of framed by the outline of the state with the Sears Twower in the background Somewhat awkwardly, two different state quarters featured the Wright Brothers flyer, because the first modern airplane was built in Ohio, but it was flown in North Carolina The State Quarters series is more than just a bunch of cool designs on the back of some coins Yeah, when they first came out, if you were like me, you probably thought, Hey cute. A fun little thing the government did just for the hell of it that's just not true In reality, just beneath its shiny metal surface, the StakeQarters Initiative was a high stakes government program onene in which coin collecting played a critical role Because it turns out the mint didn't spend all those years creating billions of new coins just for the sake of civic prride Instead, the stake quarters were developed for the express purpose of getting us to collect them and to turn a healthy profit for the U.S. govern Today, the story of how the US makes money off of making money and how it makes even more if you collect In many ways, the Mint State Quarters program is the product of a series of innovations in American currency. Starting with the invention of the quarter itself Because for the first two hundred years of colonial history, America didn't even have a standard system of denomination So the earliest coins that were used in the earliest settlements of what became the United States were literally the coins that settlers brought in their pockets Jesse Kraft is an assistant curator at the American Numismatic Society, not the American Numismatic Association, which put on the coin show a different numismatic group, and he focuses on American coins The first boats that came over actually had a lot of German settlers as well. So there's a good mix of German coins, English coins, of course, Spanish, American coins Soon, coins from all over the world made their way into the colonies. English shillings, Portuguese Joes, German Tllars. It was chaotic It's not like the exchange rate for these things was one to one But Kraft says there is one thing making it easier In those days, coins were made almost entirely of rare precious metals like gold, or more often, silver That meant that no matter what country the coin was from, its value was determined by its metal content. How much gold or silver was in there So each piece was weighed to check its gold weight. And because the different coins had different weights and wore down, even just like a little bit of you know friction on a gold coin would actually affect its value. And if that sounds impractical, well, it often was. Imagine trying to buy a herd of sheep only to find that the precious silver coin you'd had in your satchel this whole time was too worn down to pay for it all Complicating things further, there were never enough of these random worn down coins making their way into the colonies for everyone to use in the first place. So the colonists also had to use something else as money One of the first pieces of money that was like legislated as a legal tender was actually corn Corn, wheat and barley were all literally used as money, with an exchange rate just like any other currency In sixteen thirty one, for example, one buselable corn had the same spending power as six English shillings They even accepted corn for payment and taxes. That's how legal it was. Like this is money. Eventually, though, people got tired of buying their cows with a combination of random European denominations plus a bunch of bulky loose grain. So after the United States won its independence, its leaders finally decided that we might want to make our own standardized monetary system. You know was at that point, Jefferson wrote his now famous notes on coinage. Oh yeah, so famous. You know, V very simple name, but it kind of redefined everything Jefferson basically says, hey, British money is confusing. A pence is one two hundred and fortieth of a pound. A farthing is one nine hundred sixtieth Spanish money, though, it uses easy common sense fractions, Halves, quarters That's what we should do So in seventeen ninety two, the US Mint began making dollar coins, named for the Spanish doolar, as the United States base unit. Just like their Spanish predecessors, dollar coins were made of silver. and early on the mint made gold coins too. They were called eagles. That's literally the name of the coin Silver dollars and gold eagles. An eagle was worth ten dollars So these are half eagles, these five dollar pieces This is Caroline Turko. She is a curator at the American Nneumismatic Association I ran into her at the coin show in Savannah, where she showed me these old gold coins. So it's based on weight. So the dollar Half eagles here are five dollars worth of gold. Give or take a few cents at that time to consider the amount of work and money it took to make it. And then the smaller ones, they're a quarter eagle and they are worth two and a half dollars worth of gold And silver coins worked pretty much the same way, which is to say the way they do today Dollars, half dollars. and of course. Beyond just standardizing the denominations, the early US Mint faced another equally important numismatic task. It had to decide what our coins would look like Only these first designs were nothing like our modern state quarters. Instead of dozens of elaborate variations, early US coins only featured a small number of very simple, some would say, boring motifs Dliberately so That's because the mint is design in part to guard against counterfeiting By making engravings clean, simple and consistent, you could easily spot any deviation One of the reasons why they wanted to keep the designs so similar was if they all had minor minor differences, then a counterfeiter could create another coin with a minor difference that would just kind of be accepted All these counterfeiting countermeasures required that the first US coins all looked pretty much the same. And thanks to our first president, they didn't even have any real faces on them The first U.S Ment, they go to George Washington and they say, sir, we're going to need your bust. to be made so that we can have your face on coins. But He says, absolutely not because that is for a monarchy. And George is like We'd literally just fought a war to get rid of our monarch. How dare you try to make me into that same symbol? And he said, over my dead body. which, by the way, if you've seen a quarter recently awkward But even more than the concern over a counterfeiting, or Washington's living body, it was the technology of the time that limited the design of these early coins Engravers in the nineteenth century had to carve designs by hand into a tiny steel stamp called a die, using even tinier little chisel tools They didn't have electric lights, so they were doing this outside or in a window or straining their eyes in candle light Then they'd have to either put some metal under the die and hammer the image onto the coin to be, or stamp the design onto the coin with a press, powered by human muscle, or horses, or eventually steam Not easy. The first human figure allowed on a US coin was Lady Liberty. But given the technological constraints, the m's engravers quickly discovered there wasn't much you could do with her. Initially, it was mostly her head, her head in profile with flowing hair. Later, her hair was tied up with a ribbon. Eventually they figured out how to get her whole body on there Even so, the coin designs from year to year were pretty bland. Until finally, in nineteen oh four President Theodore Roosevelt said, Hey, our coinage is ugly. He actually described the design of American coins as atrocious, hideousness He was not playing around. And Theodore Roosevelt was like, I want good stuff again Luckily, at some point during Teddy's tantrum, he made a specific demand. The U.S. Mint, he urged, should import a near miraculous new device that had recently been invented in France. It was called the Jeanvier Rduction machine esssentially you could sculpt a large sized coin, you know, sometimes two and three feet in diameter, you know, quote unquote coin And then you could put this design onto the John Ver reduction machine. And they would have this little stylus and just slowly, slowly go over the design and at the same exact time, engrave that design onto a die the actual size of the coin Oh so cool The Jamvier machine allowed the Mint to mass produce coins with a level of detail that would have been impossible before. Suddenly, Lady Liberty could do more things. Starting in the early nineteen hundreds, you got Liberty walking towards a rising sun, Liberty, ascending a mountain with a capital dome in the background Liberty with a winged frryingeian cap, with a beautiful column wrapped in a vining olive plant on the other side This aesthetic revolution in US currency has been termed the American Rnaaissance of coins It even led to an explosion in special commemorative coin designs in the nineteen thirties for things like the Texas Centennial and the opening of the Bay Bridge To the point that the whole thing actually got kinda out of hand There is one commemorative coin that was made to have a living person on it. It was an Alabama senator. Al of the White Because he wanted his face on Acoin But the ability to put almost anything you wanted on a coin was not enough on its own to pave the way for the state quQarters program. For that to happen, US coins would need to undergo one more critical transformation This time to their metal content. Remember, up until this point, silver coins were still made of silver They had that inherent metal value But in the nineteen sixties, that ended. President Lyndon Johnson got rid of all of our pretty shiny silver coins and replaced them with something called clad coins In clad coinage, a piece of low cost, kind of ugly metal is clad in a thin layer of something a little bit prettier It's a much cheaper way to make a coin So in nineteen sixty five, looking for ways to save money, Johnson convinced Congress to stop putting silver in coins. Instead, he had them minted from copper and then covered in nickel. They were nicknamed Johnson Sandwiches Jesse Kraft says that prior to this, if a national government ever debased its currency, they would only dare to do it very gradually, changing the coin's metal contents a little at a time over the course of decades. HeB Jake, God bless him just went ahead and did it all at once You nineteen sixty four, literally, all the coins are silver, nineteen sixty five, none of them are silver. So it kind of like created valuess coins. So it's actually one of the most significant things that's ever happened since pererhaps the beginning of coins themselves and no one seemed to care And it's true. No one really cared Everyone just carried on as if we were all still lugging these little pieces of silver around and continued spending and accepting US coins like nothing had changed But for the Mint, everything had changed. becausecause this strange metallurgical bait and switch meant that suddenly a coin like a quarter cost way less than a quarter to make. And that discrepancy between the production cost of the coin and its face value allowed the Mint to engage in a money making scheme beloved by governments the world over It's called Senior ge Okay, seniorge It's really a simple concept This is Philip Dal. These days he's the president of US. Money Reserve, a coin seller. A few decades ago though, he was director of the US Mint And he says, to understand seniorage, you have to think of the mint as a business, a business whose product is coins And that is like any product in business, You hope to produce it at a cost that is less than what you sell it for So the goal of the Mint is to make coins as cheaply as possible, but to still sell them at their face value so that they can turn a profit, just like any other product And when you do that with coins, that's called Snridich So senior ge is the profit the mint makes from selling a coin for more than a cost to produce it Like Philip said. Simple Now if you're wondering, who would be stupid enough to pay twenty five cents for a coin that only costs a few cents to make, well You are And me too And me, we all end up paying full face value for these coins thanks to a chain of sale that starts with the Mint's largest customer, the indndependent Federal Reserve Bank, which just for clarity, operates independently of the federal government. Federal Reserve, they pay us the face value of the coin And then those coins are distributed to the regional Federal Reserve banks And the regional Federal Reserve banks then take orders from the banking system in the United States and the coins are delivered to the banks Let me translate at the risk of making this part a little too simple The mitt makes coins, again, let's say, quarters as cheaply as it can. The banks then buy those quarters at face value from the mint businesses buy quarters at face value from banks. And when we get change from the cash registers at those businesses, we get those quarters So everyone in that sequence, banks, businesses, people pay twenty five cents for something that the mint originally made for much, much less. Once a quarter gets old and worn out, the US government can end up buying it back and recycling the metal. But that can take a long time Coin might have circulated for thirty years And so for us, the men coin is basically like a thirty year long term loan. interesterest free So in the end, the only one turning a profit is the US government. The truth is this approach only worked well for a little while When the US first started making significant seniorage off of coins in the nineteen sixties, it was a good bet The difference between the production cost and the sales price ensured that the mint made about four and a half cents off of every nickel nine and a half cents off of every dime and twenty four cents off of every quarter Even the penny made a little bit of money. But as the price of metals like copper rose, so did the cost of making coins. As early as nineteen seventy four, the cost of making the penny was already approaching its face value So the mint fudzed with the metal ratios again, just trying to make this thing for even cheaper They upped to the zinc and lowered the copper, which again worked at first, but not for long So when Philip Deal became the director of the US Mint in nineteen ninety four, One of his main goals was to stop and ideally reverse this decline And so when I was the director of the Met, thirty years ago I was the first mint director to recommend the elimination of the penny And it was long overdue then Unfortunately, Philip did not have the necessary sway to kill the penny America would have to wait for someone else to make that one happen But there was another more exciting idea to boost Senior ge that was being bounced around the mint at the same time scheme to increase the sales of one of their biggest earners. quarter And after a couple years, I started thinking about whether or not it was possible. And I became convinced we could do it This timee in the mid nineties, every quarter, thanks to its high face value, was still netting the mint about twenty two cents in seniorage And every year, some of those quarters would fall out of circulation. People lost them, accidentally threw them out, or put them in coin jars in the car Which meant every year, the banks had to ask themand for more quarters to replace all those missing coins, make up the gap, and ensure that the country didn't run out of change That of course was good for the US government because selling more quarters to the banks generated more seniorage for the ment. But what if there was a way to get people to take even more quarters out of circulation every year One way was to convince people to start collecting them Only, the Mint couldn't just rely on hardcore collectors, like the ones I met at the convention to get the job done. The idea was to take billions of dollars worth of quarters out of circulation If it was ever going to do that, the mint would somehow have to convince ordinary people people who rarely even thought about quarters to start collecting them too. And what better way to encourage ordinary Americans to start collecting quarters than by issuing a bunch of special designs? S say fifty of them And so I'm sort of famous there for having created the fifty State Quarters prorogram. Sneaky, perhaps Elaborate, sure. prorofitable definitely The idea had been circling among coin fans for years Canada's Mint had already done something similar, and it made money But Philip couldn't just order the Mint to make a bunch of new designs. After all, the Mint by this point, had been stamping quarters with the same design of George Washington in Profile since nineteen thirty two Making lots of new designs required lots more resources To make the stakeQuarters program happen, the Mint needed an advocate in Washington. So Philip went to a congressman from Delaware, named Mike Castle and laid out his idea I said now, this has tremendous education potential Each one of the fifty states will have designs emblematic of the state. People in the state and students will become excited about it Philip told him there was no way they could do all these coins in one year He was thinking they'd roll them out five a year for a decade. But he didn't just want to release them alphabetically That's boring. We're not teaching anybody anything Instead, Phillips suggested to the conongressmanen from Delaware that they release the coins in the order that the states ratified the Constitution. just so happen Delaware is the first state And I knew that I could sell him on that with that line B And he became such a champion of that And I needed a champion The mint needed the treasury's approval, and the treasury at the time did not like the idea Too many things could go wrong They wanted a study done Everybody in Washington knows that studies are designed to kill proposals It's just always So the treasury ran some numbers. Philip and his colleagues did too how much seniorage each quarter would net the government, and also how many additional quarters they would get to sell to the banks due to people collecting them and taking them out of circulation We looked at what's going to be the incremental increase in demand for quarters from people who want to pull them out of circulation. collect them The models came up with a range of Two point six billion to three point five billion In other words, the amount of quarters people took out and kept in their private collection would generate the government at least two point six billion dollars in profit And the treasury ended up recommending the program. And man was the deputy seecretary, I was at that meeting, and the deputy secretary of the Treasury was hot when his handpicked committee made that recommendation Congress gave the meint the go ahead in late nineteen ninety seven, and just over a year later, in nineteen ninety nine, the state quarters went live Hi H, Kerermit the Frog here, announcing the new fifty state quorters from the United States Men. We importoy Kermit the Frog. I wanted Kermit because he was the perfect spokes frog for our product because the appeal was so broad. Each quarter tells something about the state it represents. This one's New Jersey. It was the first time in decades that there was any significant change made to a US coin. And it was exciting. Incredible bus fifty state corners from United States Men, the most exciting change America's ever seen. Philip and his team had done their research. They knew people loved the treasure hunt aspect of collecting So they worked that into the program All US coins have mint marks, little letters on the front, indicating at which mint the coin was made So they made sure every state quarter bore one of two ment marks. P for the Philadelphia M or D for Denver So people would have Tice as many coins to collect The states especially loved it. Governors got their constituents involved, submitting design concepts and voting on their favorites. That was brilliant marketing mo because Yeah, you got all this free earn. ity as each state's coin was coming up for production, and people would anxiously await the coins release. That is true. If you were around when the state quarters first debuted, like I was, you will remember this. They were like the weather. Everyone talked about them all the time Everyone kids loved it. theirir parents loved it. We figured teenagers wouldn't care a bit. I mean, you know, we were competing with computer games you know, how can coins compete with Hugely successful with teenagers too. In fact, I remember standing in lines of music concerts or restaurants and being around teenagers and young twenty year olds who'd be talking about the quarters. And at times, it seemed like almost everyone collected them, or at least would hold on to a few of their favorites. To this day, I am loathe to part with a Connecticut quarter. I mean, have you seen this thing? It is gorgeous Soon, the private market was cashing in on it too, selling all sorts of accessories Are you like me and my family collecting the new U.S. quarters The Problem is, where do you put those the USA Coin Collection album, You'll receive this unique map which features a face to hold each quarter. Now you can have the perfect way to proudly display your collection with the America's fifty StateQarters wooden frame Due to overwhelming demand for these quarters, this is a limited offer for a limited time. You must act now. but wait, orrder within the next ten minutes and we'll include a special bonus, our fifty state Fsbook filled with exciting information about each day. Call now As planned, the coins rolled out five a year for ten years They made nearly thirty five billion of these quarters Sadly, a stack of thirty five billion quarters is not tall enough to reach the moon. We checked, Sorry, you're just going to imagine a lot of quarters The program was so popular that after a decade of releases, the Mint extended the run an extra a year and added the territories By the end, so many quarters had gone out of circulation that the banking system had to purchase more than twice as many quarters as it had in the ten years before the initiative That increase in demand, netted de meant conservative estimates two point six billion dollars just as Philip's team had originally predicted Am I understanding correctly that that was from the senior age alone Yes Th those quarters Th those circulating quarters were' in huge demand and we're taken out of circulation and that's where that two point six billion dollars come from That money went back into the treasury's generenal fund, which went to lowering the tax burden and paying down the national debt. It was a huge victory. And it turned a whole generation onto the magic of coins including Caroline Turko I remember like when the state quarters came out. I was interested for the very first time And you know, here in this show, I have this is my sixth show And I've never seen the US met this busy. Never In the past year, coins have been in the headlines. The US finally stopped producing the penny, RIP We have new coin designs that honor the US' two hundred fiftieth cooins whose images paint a very specific and perhaps overly generous view of early American history, with designs of pilgrims and the Mayflower These coins will be around for a long time, and loveem or hateem. They're probably gonna get some folks hooked on coin collecting That's good for the mint, but they're not the only ones who want to see the hobby live on Every year, the ANA who puts on the cooin show, encourages collectors to do the apparent opposite of what the men intended and put some of the more unusual coins back into circulation But really it's just their own way of piquking people's interest If you ever come across an old standing Liberty quarter or a wheat penny, there's a good chance you have a collector to thank for it at which point you get to decide What's this coin worth to you Ultimately, the State Qarters program did something similar, just on a much bigger scale. so many of us feeling sentimental about these little hunks of copper and nickel, not just the coin nerds. I didn't have a set of state quarters, but my neighbor did. He had a book and everything. And when I found a state Qarter, I'd gasp, put it in my pocket, and run over to Andy's house to see if he had Wisconsin yet He always had Wisconsin. He always had whatever I found. But together, we took plenty of quarters out of circulation The state quarters turned us all into nismatists. It put the collecting bug in all of us At least a little bit So when I was in Savannah, I bought a coin minted just a stone's thow away from beautiful uptown Oakland, California It's an S San Francisco mintth quarter. so it's never been in circulation. I've learned in the coin world that when people say it's in mint condition, they mean it literally. Like someone got this from the mint and it never made the rounds This one was made in nineteen fifty one. That means it's almost all silver and it has this really nice bright sheen But if you just glanced at this coin casually, there's a good chance you wouldn't think anything of it. I wouldn't have just a few months ago. I think I'd like to get this never circulated one from nineteen fifty one, right Okay. I got this quarter for twenty dollars. That's four dollars over the intrinsic value nineteen dollars seventy five cents over the face value But I'm not planning on holding onto it for long all me a sucker, but I think this coin, this little piece of history deseserves to be out in the wild A' gonna put it in circulation. I'm thinking I might. Okay. J to see if to just think about somebody picking it up down the line. Absolutely. That's cool. Okay, let's do it. All right. It funny question, but do you take cash When we return, the story of one stake quarter that might not have been worth it Ready to give your home a style refresh? Article makes it easy to create a stylish, long lasting home at an unbeatable price. 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That's article d. com slash nine nine for fifty dollars off your first purchase of one hundred dollars or more This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace Squarespace is an all in one website platform that helps you stand out online Whether you're just getting started or growing your business, It's got everything you need from securing your domain to building a professional side and showcasing your work All in one place Bring your vision to life with AI powered design or curated templates, plus flexible editing tools that help you create something that truly reflects your style. No experience needed. Squarespace makes it easy to share your work, book clients, and get paid with built in tools for scheduling, invoicing, and email all in one place. I've had a squarespace site, Roman Mars. com for twelve years or so And the key for me isn't that it was easy to build, although it was, iss that it's easy to maintain. It never gives me any trouble at all. It's great Head to squarespaceot com slash invvisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code invisible to save ten percent off your first purchase of a website or domain The key to running a small business is to be available and reliable A and T Business helps small businesses stay connected with reliable internet built to support daily operations. Connectivity keeps everything moving from communication to transactions to daily workflows. A and T businessusiness is designed to be a reliable provider helping small businesses stay up and running without added stress or disruption Powered by AT andT businessus Built to work Get AT andT business at business. at. com Hiring isn't just about filling a role, it's about finding a teammate you want to be in the trenches with. Indeed sponsored jobs helps you match with candidates who can move your business forward Target candidates by skills, certifications or location. Join the three point three million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results now with Indeed sponsored jobs. listeners of this show We'll get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves and indeed d. com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply Hiring, do it the right way with indeed. So we're back with Katie Thorne. Hey, Katie. Hey, Roman So we talked about how the state Qarters program works and how they made money for the government. but I hear you have a story about design of the quarters. Yes, I have a story of an adventure or maybe a misadventure in state quarter design. But before we get there, I want to just look at all the quarter designs really quick. I send you a link that has all of the special quarters Yes. Okay, I see them all arred in front of me. all fifty. fifty six. fifty six. fifty six. Don't forget DC and the territories. We've got them all. So if you open them up, I mean, do any stick out to you? Let's see. I like I like the bison on Kansas quite a bit. I like the bison. One strong image. Yeah, yeah It's clear that the ones that work the best are kind of trying to put together one cohesive image. like Florida has like a a ship and like the space shuttle and some palm trees and stuff and it just looks like a weird patchwork of clip art, you know, and that is not doing it for me. Yeah, I agree. And I think it sort of makes me think about flag design a little bit in that you know you want to sort of strive for cleanness and simplicity, sort of like communicating a clear message in as few images as you can. Yeah, think there's there's some similarities. I think the differences are that you know, quarters are meant to be enjoyed, you know, looking at up close, engraving is a real fine detailed art form. So yeah, I'm open to these being much more complicated. I do like them to have a kind of cohesive I don't know, composition and feel to them. I think that's the main thing, but like there's just something about them that's just lovely. I agree. Yeah But Roman, I wanted to tell you about one person who I interviewed who really did not like the design of one of these quarters. Missouri. Missouri. Okaykay. okay, let me let me pull up Missouri and see if I can get a gand of Missouri. Yeah, for those of us who are not, you know familiar with the design of the Missouri State quQuarter, do you will you give us a little description? Yeah, short. It has the gateway arch there and has trees. So they're sort of anachronistic combination of the arch and trees. And what it looks like a depiction of the Lewis and Clark expedition. So it looks like that's kind of their claim to fame this quarter is the beginning of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Yeah, right. So it's sort of like a handful of different things that are iconically Missouri. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely not like hideous. No But the person who was really upset about this coin design was the artist who submitted the original design concept. His name is Paul Jackson, and he's a well known watercolor painter in Columbia, Missouri. And here's how he describes that coin My original design was sort of an elegant symbol. It had two people in a canoe and it had the arch, you know, sort of fading into the mist in the background I mean, that sounds like in the spirit of what we're looking at. So what is the problem? like what did they change that he doesn't like? Well, yeah, I mean, the overall design concept stayed the same. But Paul says the devil is in the details, like take the arch, for example In the US Mint version, it looks like it's crossing the river from Illinois to Missouri. and it's shaped like The McDonald's French fry bent over It it's very misshapen Well, I mean, it looks like an arch. But maybe it's not a factually accurate arch. I could understand this is like the issues with depicting things on coins, but does he have other issues with the design Yes, he certainly does Instead of two guys in a canoe it had three, Larry Mo and Curly. They're going downhill upriver and the arch crosses the river U from Illinois to Missouri, pllus the trees are made of broccoli. Plus the trees are made of broccoli. Okay, so he doesn't like the way the trees are drawn, which when you say that they look like broccoli They do look like broccoli. I can see what he's talking about. So you how did these changes get included into the final design based off of his original painting Yeah, so Paul submitted his original design for the Missouri State Quarter contest to the First Lady's office, which was running the competition back in two thousand one He had collected coins as a kid, and he thought his design would be a cool way to honor the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. So he was really stoked when he won. And for a while, not much happened. He says he didn't hear anything. But then in the spring of the following year, he got a message I got the first email from someone in Georgia saying, what do you think about what the U. S Mant did to your state quarter design? And at that point, I had no idea. I didn't know what the US Mint had done to my state quarter design The mint' design looked kind of like Paul's, but Paul and others thought it was just really ugly There was clearly something wrong They dumbed it down to the point where it was unacceptable. It was just unusable. and they misspelled the word bicentennial. Well, they must have fixed that, right? I would hope so, but they did eventually just get rid of that word altogether. Well good. Did they offer any explanation as to why the design changed and like you know what the redesign process was like? Yeah, you know, Paul says he didn't get much from them. The Mint said it was uncoinable and they said that Paul didn't understand like metalflow and things like this. sure And I guess multiple private mints who make, you know special tokens and things like that reached out to him and they were like, oh, this is coinable. We would love to make it.. But Paul says, you know, from the mint, they just sort of sprung these design changes on him. Wow. Paul doesn't seem like he was the person that was gonna let this go. No, he was not going to let this go. He was not going down without a fight. So I gathered a few of my supporters and went to protest. And so I put out the call on AOL and invvited anybody who was upset about it to join me at the State Capitol. and about fifty people showed up. They all had little signs. The US meant lied. They've stolen state pride things like that I love this scene so much, but did the protest like actually accomplish anything Well, it would have been a dud because what Paul didn't realize was that the state legislature wasn't actually in session at the time. But one thing that Paul did at this protest was he took about twenty quarters, just normal quarters because you know at this point, the Missouri State Quarter hadn't actually come out yet. They'd just been publicizing the design, and he printed up some round stickers with his Missouri quuarter design on it And he stuck it on the tail side of these twenty or so quarters And The next morning. I was dead asleep and got a phone call from somebody at the Kansas City star And this reporter said, how it feel to be under seecret Svice investigation for defacing money? And the first word out of my mouth was awesome That's how you felt because I knew at that moment we had gotten traction. So I printed two hundred and fifty thousand more stickers And I put them on the back of two hundred fifty thousand quarters Whoa! Really? I mean, that's Paul's telling of it. That's more than sixty thousand dollars in quarters. Yeah. He said sometimes they would just go to the bank and get rolls of quarters and sticker them up and then return them to the bank. Amazing I mean, he's like, there's quite a lot of dedication here But he didn't just return them all to the bank, like he would also use them to sort of continue his protest, to bring his protest to a broader sphere. So we took the show on the road and went to DC and spent nothing but rolls of stickkered quarters for gas, food and lodging the entire way That is amazing That' amazing. I love that the coin collector types