The senior citizen who shared his coin collection with me has quite a few one dollar coins. I took a photo of six of them showing six different designs on the back.
One dollar coins, back side
United States One Dollar Coins, Front Side
The coins are all United States one dollar coins. During my conversation with the Iowa coin collector, I didn’t take good notes about the coins themselves as I was most interested in the history of the man’s interest in coin collecting.
But when I was back at Elder Concern’s office looking at the photos of the coins, I became interested in the coins themselves. We have an intern this year from Drake University, Katie, and she looked up the coins on Wikipedia and other sites for me. Thus I will try to paraphrase her research using Wikipedia as the basis for my information. As I am not a coin expert and neither is Kattie, we do not know if the information that we found was 100% accurate. If one is interested in learning more about these coins, I would suggest talking with your local public librarian to ask about “official” sources of information on coins.
Thus as far as I know, the coins on the top row are referred to Eisenhower Dollars. The Eisenhower Dollar on the left is called the 1976 Bicentennial Commemorative Design and is designed by Dennis R. Williams. Mr. Williams was 21 years of age at the time and the youngest person to ever design a US coin. The design had been created for a college art class and he submitted it for the US Mint competition in the early 1970’s. The Eisenhower Dollar on the right has a back side to commemorate the Apollo 11 moon landing and was designed by Frank Gasparro.
The dollar coins in the middle row are called Morgan Dollars. These were composed of 90% silver and 10% copper and “were struck between 1878 and 1904 with a final minting in 1921 ” according to Wikipedia. The designer was George T. Morgan.
The last row contains dollars called Peace Dollars. It is also made of 90% silver and 10% copper. It was designed by Anthony De Francisci to commemorate the Allied signing of the peace treaty with Germany and Austria after WWI. They were minted between 1922 and 1928 and again between 1934 and 1936. Minting was halted between 1928 and 1934 due to The Great Depression.
I will post more photos of this senior citizen’s coin collection in the coming days.
Our Thoughts 