Steven M. Bieda

Steven M. Bieda is the rarest kind of coin designer: an amateur who beat the professionals, then walked into the statehouse.

He was born January 21, 1961, in Warren, Michigan, and he grew up a coin collector — one of those kids who reads the catalog cover to cover. He stayed one. He also became a serious student, stacking up degrees: a bachelor's and a master of public administration from Wayne State University, a law degree from the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, and a master of laws in taxation back at Wayne State. By his thirties he was a tax attorney.

Then, in the late 1980s, the U.S. Mint opened a competition. Congress had authorized a set of commemorative coins — special coins struck to mark an occasion rather than to circulate — to help fund American athletes headed to the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. The Mint wanted designs. Bieda, the collector, sent some in.

He won. A design he had drawn ended up on the reverse — the "tails" side — of the 1992 Olympic half dollar, the coin's clad version that anyone could buy. The collector had become a designer. That alone would earn him a page here. But Bieda kept going. In 2002 he was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives, and later to the State Senate. He is, as the numismatic press likes to point out, the only person who has both designed a United States coin and been elected to state or federal office.

The story of Bieda's design has a twist collectors love: he didn't draw it for the coin it ended up on.

The 1992 Olympic program had three coins — a copper-nickel half dollar, a silver dollar, and a gold five-dollar piece. Bieda submitted ideas across denominations. The design that made it into production — an olive branch crossing the Olympic torch — was originally one of his entries for the gold coin. The Mint's selection committee liked it, but they placed it on the half dollar reverse instead. So the image of branch-over-torch that millions of people now hold was, in a sense, a gold coin's idea that found a home on the cheapest coin in the set.

There's a division of labor on every modern U.S. coin that's worth knowing. The designer draws the image; a Mint sculptor-engraver then renders it in three dimensions — sculpting the relief (how high the design stands off the surface) and cutting the master tooling the coin is struck from. Bieda was the designer. The veteran Mint sculptor John Mercanti — later the Mint's chief engraver — translated Bieda's reverse into the struck coin. The obverse, the "heads" side, with its gymnast in motion against the flag, came from a different outside designer, William Cousins.

Bieda's eye for coins didn't retire when he entered politics. Years later, as Michigan worked through the federal State Quarters program, he stayed close to the process — by one firsthand account from a Michigan numismatist, working with Mint sculptor-engraver Alfred Maletsky to push for the design that showed Michigan's map as dense forest. He never held a Mint job. He just kept showing up where the coins were being decided.