One Thinner Dime

There used to be an old woman who stood every day in the center of the sidewalk on the north side of 42nd Street west of Grand Central in New York City.

“Coins,” she would say, every few seconds, over and over. “Coins. Coins. Coins.”

Her voice was slightly plaintive, but not so much that she would think of herself or want you to think of her as a beggar. I know nothing else about her. There was once a story about her in one of the tabloids. It suggested that she lived in a nice house in one of the outer boroughs. I believe it included her name. My chief memory was that it had been more fun to speculate about her. The story itself seemed a little sketchy.

She comes to mind whenever I see a newly designed coin. She has come to mind a lot lately.

Have you seen the new dimes?

I’ve seen two of them. I got both in change at Aldi, which strangely seems to be where the government releases coins. I have never gotten change there that has shown the slightest evidence of use.

In both cases I noticed the dimes because at first they seemed to be foreign coins. They felt funny. They are too thin. If their diameter were only slightly larger you’d be able to bend them between your fingers, no tools needed. You might be able to even if they weren’t any thinner. They seem cheap.

I wondered if they would work in vending machines, but then I remembered that you can’t really buy anything for a dime anymore. Maybe a gumball, put in the machine in the barber shop sometime in the 1960s. No, those were a penny. We have now decided that pennies are to be driven to extinction — Aldi, the de facto arbiter of American coinage in circulation, won’t accept them at all anymore.

We’ve endured a lot of change — unintended pun happily accepted — in our coins in living memory. There are people alive today who saw Standing Liberty quarters (1916-1930) and Walking Liberty half dollars (1916-1947) in circulation before the unexpectedly fragile dates had worn off. They were minted because the head of the U.S. Mint in 1915, one Robert W. Woolley, dreamt up the erroneous notion that coin designs were required by law to be changed every 25 years. There are even living souls who remember when the half dollar was in common circulation. There’s no reason why it isn’t regularly used today, but when was the last time you got one? Beginning in 1948 the half dollar depicted a bust of Benjamin Franklin in silhouette and in 1964, in a renaming-redesign frenzy unsurpassed until the arrival of Donald Trump, it became a bust of the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy. (The quarter changed to a bust of George Washington in 1932.) Woolley wasn’t done — he also introduced the Mercury dime in 1916. It remained until 1946, when a bust of recently deceased Franklin D. Roosevelt replaced it.

Our silver coins had intrinsic value until 1964, when they were replaced with “sandwich coins” — made of non-precious metal, copper and nickel stacked in a way that sensors in vending machines didn’t reject them as slugs. It was noted at the time that silver coins jingled in one’s pocket and the new coins didn’t, they kind of clacked. Also, people began to hoard the silver coins. They didn’t trust the government. (They were right.)

It’s worth mentioning that it wasn’t that long ago that you could go into any bank, plop down a dollar bill, and leave with a silver dollar. I don’t mean just a dollar coin but a dollar coin made of 90 percent silver. But then the value of their silver content came to far exceed their face value, as is true of all U.S. dimes, quarters, and half dollars produced before 1964.

There have been various sandwich dollars made, but they have never been in wide circulation. Inflation made it such that for them to be useful one would have to pull a little cart full of them. There was the Eisenhower dollar, followed by a range of weird, smaller, brass-colored coins that have been used primarily in gambling casinos (though I did once make a purchase from a vending machine that accepted currency and, as change, I received about a pound of brassy dollar coins depicting the then-trendy []{#anchor}Sacagawea, who assisted the Lewis and Clark expedition and whose name I have heard pronounced as “Sasquatch”). The Susan B. Anthony dollar, which was small and was never mentioned except as a punchline, came along at some point. If you saw any, it was likely as change in a highway toll booth. The various post-silver dollar coins have been such a failure that the mint still has more than two-thirds of a billion dollars of them stockpiled in case you want many tons of undesirable coins. (No, the U.S. Mint won’t be holding a sale.)

Our coins were messed around with during the bicentennial. Then there were the state quarters, which offered all kinds of marketing opportunities — “Collect the entire set!” Then came the orange presidential dollars. Beginning in 2007, the mint released four dollar coins each year, each depicting a U.S. president. These were available at banks but the project wasn’t much promoted and no one got them in change, so it ran out of steam pretty early on. I used to get them at my bank, but the bank stopped getting them by the time they got to presidents of the middle of the 19^th^ century. To be eligible, a president needs to have been dead for at least two years. In 2011, they stopped making them for circulation at all.

As, one hopes, will the quartermillennialstwocenturiesplusfifty coins being cranked out now, of which the flimsy new dime is one.

The first to be released was the “Mayflower Compact” quarter. In keeping with the mint’s tendency toward calendar confusion, it bears the date(s) “1776-2026,” as do the others. Of course, nothing says “1776-2026” like a coin memorializing a document from 1620. Additionally, like the other 1776-2026 coins it looks more than a little goofy. (You can see them all here.) One wonders if one of the Trump children or in-laws fancies himself or herself an artist. Who knows, maybe Trump himself doodled them. Though it is possible they are some artificial intelligence thing, with the AI accidentally set to “cartoon.” And in defense of the coins, they’re better than the Google Gemini rollout.

The circulating coin issue(s) include a nickel. You have surely noticed that for the last decade or so the mint has abused poor Thomas Jefferson’s face in multifarious ways. His face was cut in two for no reason, rearranged in numerous fashions, and generally abused. The new version depicts him as a failed “looksmaxxing” “influencer” or something. The other coins depict what appears to be an angry George Washington, a long-haired, bug-eyed space alien, identified as James Madison, commemorating the U.S. Constitution, and so on. They are, in a word, ghastly, with only a couple of exceptions.

One of which is the dime (The other is the half dollar). It is merely very, very busy, with letters that would be easily legible only if the thing were the size of a manhole cover. As I mentioned, it is thinner than a normal dime, about the thickness of a Canadian dime when they were still silver and, as Canadian currency is wont to be, not worth much. (Which brings up a possibility. The Canadian dollar is known as — sorry, not making this up — as the “loonie.” In his continuing micturition contest with Canada, perhaps Donald Trump decided victory would be his if he offered many denominations of informally loonie coins.)

The dime design is called “Emerging Liberty,” and from her expression Liberty didn’t like whatever she is emerging from, no, not one little bit. The flip side (“reverse,” in genteel language) shows that which on a much larger coin would be identifiable as an eagle — on the dime it can’t be identified as anything — and in addition to usual phrases seen on U.S. coins we now have “Liberty Over Tyranny,” a phrase apparently written just for the occasion; it’s not actually famous or anything. (Looking at them, I think it would make sense were the designs for the dime and the half dollar swapped. Too late now, I guess. The reverse of the half dollar seems inspired by a Kodak moment of a child being handed an ice-cream cone by an adult.)

There will be a special penny, but if you want one you’ll have to buy it from the mint at a premium. They’re not being made for circulation.

Fortunately, we’ll get the plain old Roosevelt dime back next year. The quarter and the fifty-cent piece will begin a series of advertisement for sporting activities. And if you’d like a few million dollar coins the color of plumbing fixtures, call the mint and they’ll happily sell you a dump truck load of them.

I can’t help but think of the old woman on 42^nd^ Street, how if she were alive today — surely she isn’t — her cry of “Coins. Coins. Coins” would be interrupted by peals of laughter when she received a coin from the new issue.

Though I am surprised by the nickel. I expected it to depict Donald Trump.

And to be wooden.