Alfred F. Maletsky

Most coin artists draw symbols — an eagle, a torch, a wreath. Alfred F. Maletsky did something rarer. For the 1997 silver dollar honoring fallen police officers, he carved two specific, living men.

He worked from a news photograph by Larry Ruggieri: two U.S. Park Police officers, Robert Chelsey and Kelcy Stefansson, pressing paper against the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington to take a rubbing — a pencil tracing — of a friend's engraved name. Maletsky kept the photograph's grief intact in the metal. It is one of the very few U.S. coins where the people shown can be named.

Maletsky was born in 1943 in Easton, Pennsylvania. He trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia, then spent years in commercial art — the advertising department of the old Philadelphia Evening Bulletin newspaper through the mid-1970s — before he ever touched a coin.

Maletsky learned to sculpt money at the Franklin Mint, the private firm famous for collector medals and commemoratives. From 1976 he spent roughly sixteen years there, modeling circulating coinage for the British Virgin Islands and a long run of medals — presidents, historic events, famous artworks rendered in relief.

That is the craft behind the credit. A coin is not drawn; it is sculpted — built up in clay or plaster at large scale, in low relief (the shallow raised modeling that has to read clearly when shrunk to an inch of metal). The Mint then reduces it and cuts the steel die, the hardened stamp that strikes each blank.

In July 1993 Maletsky joined the United States Mint in Philadelphia as a sculptor-engraver — the in-house artists who model and cut the nation's coins. He signed his work with a small AM monogram. On the police memorial dollar he did both jobs at once: he designed it and engraved both sides — the obverse (the heads side, here the two officers) and the reverse (the tails side, a single rose laid across a plain shield with the words "To Serve and Protect").

His range at the Mint was wide. He sculpted the classical bust of James Smithson for the obverse of the 1996 Smithsonian Institution $5 gold commemorative, and modeled Jackie Robinson sliding home for the obverse of the 1997 Jackie Robinson silver dollar. In the 50 State Quarters program he was the artist behind New Jersey (1999) — Washington crossing the Delaware — and behind the design of the California quarter (2005), the John Muir and Yosemite scene that fellow Mint engraver Don Everhart cut into the die. His New Jersey quarter won the 2001 Coin of the Year award.