William Cousins

William C. Cousins was born in Philadelphia on July 13, 1930 — the city that has been home to the U.S. Mint since the country began. But he did not start his career there. He spent more than two decades a few miles down the road at the Franklin Mint, a private company famous for medals and collectibles, where he worked as a staff sculptor from 1967 to 1990 and rose to director of sculpture.

That made him a master of the medallist's craft before he ever cut a circulating coin. A sculptor-engraver builds a design in relief — first as a large clay or plaster model, then reduced to coin size — judging at every step how light will catch the high and low points once the piece is struck in metal. Cousins had done it on hundreds of medals.

In 1990, at sixty, he joined the United States Mint as a staff sculptor-engraver. He stayed a decade and retired in 2000. It was a short federal career — but he arrived just in time for two of the most-circulated coin projects of the modern era.

Cousins's biggest job almost no one notices, because it was an act of restraint rather than invention. When Congress launched the 50 State Quarters program in 1999, the Mint needed George Washington's familiar profile to share the coin with a new design for each state — fifty of them, five a year, through 2008. The trouble was space.

So Cousins modified John Flanagan's original 1932 Washington portrait — the obverse, or heads side. He reduced the size of Washington's bust and shifted the lettering that had lived on the back over to the front, freeing the entire reverse for each state's image. His initials were added to the truncation of Washington's neck, beside Flanagan's. That reworked portrait went on to anchor not just the State Quarters but the America the Beautiful Quarters that followed — billions of coins.

He also worked at the level of a single design. For the 1999 Delaware quarter — the very first of the series — Cousins adapted a Delaware teacher's competition concept of Caesar Rodney on horseback into a form that could actually be struck, and is credited as the coin's designer. The pattern fit his whole career: take an idea, and make it work in metal.

Cousins's first prominent U.S. coin came almost as soon as he arrived. In 1992 the United States struck a set of commemorative coins to support American athletes heading to that year's Olympic Games — Albertville in winter, Barcelona in summer. Cousins designed the obverse of the clad half dollar: a gymnast caught in motion, with a large American flag and the Olympic rings behind her. The reverse — the tails side — by Steven Bieda showed an olive branch crossing the Olympic torch.

It is a small coin with a big sense of movement, and it sold well. The Mint struck 161,607 uncirculated half dollars at Philadelphia (the "P" mint mark) and 519,645 proofs at San Francisco ("S") — a proof being a specially prepared, mirror-finish coin made for collectors rather than for spending.