Alfred Maletsky

Most people who carried a New Jersey state quarter never knew his name. That is the quiet truth of being a Mint sculptor-engraver — your work travels the country in pockets and coin jars, and almost no one asks who made it.

Alfred F. Maletsky was born in 1943 in Easton, Pennsylvania. He trained as an artist in Philadelphia, then spent his early career far from coins — drawing for the art department of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, a big-city afternoon newspaper, through the early 1970s.

His move into metal came at the Franklin Mint, the famous private maker of medals and collectibles. From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s he sculpted there: coins for the British Virgin Islands, medals of U.S. presidents, and reliefs based on famous works of art. It was years of practice at the exact thing the U.S. Mint needed — turning a flat drawing into a shallow sculpture that a coin press could stamp.

In July 1993 he joined the United States Mint in Philadelphia as a sculptor-engraver. He stayed roughly a decade, retiring at the end of 2003 — and in that decade his hands touched some of the most-collected American coins of the era.

To understand Maletsky's work you have to understand a split that runs through almost every modern U.S. coin. A coin has two jobs behind it: someone designs it — draws the picture — and someone sculpts it into a relief, the raised three-dimensional model the dies are cut from. (A relief is just how high the design stands off the surface; the obverse is the front, or "heads," side; the reverse is the back.)

Sometimes those are two different people. Sometimes they are the same person. Maletsky did both jobs across his career, and that is the key to reading his credits honestly.

On the 1995 Atlanta Olympics basketball half dollar, the picture of three players was drawn by Clint Hansen; Maletsky was the engraver who sculpted it into a coin. On the 1994 Prisoner of War silver dollar — a chained eagle breaking free through barbed wire — the design came from Tom Nielsen, and Maletsky sculpted the obverse. He was the craftsman giving someone else's idea its physical body.

But he was also a designer in his own right. The reverse of the 1995 Civil War Battlefield $5 gold coin is his — a bald eagle on a shield over the words "Let us protect and preserve." The James Smithson portrait on the 1996 Smithsonian 150th Anniversary $5 gold is his. The Paralympics wheelchair athlete on the 1996 silver dollar is his design. And his most famous work is pure Maletsky: the 1997 Jackie Robinson silver dollar, showing Robinson sliding into home, the way he stole it in the 1955 World Series. It is not a stiff portrait. It is a man in motion, mid-steal — a hard thing to freeze onto a coin, and he did it.

His best-known circulating work came at the very end of his Mint years: the 1999 New Jersey state quarter, with Washington and the Continental Army crossing the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776 — "Crossroads of the Revolution." He also designed the 2004 Wisconsin state quarter, struck after his retirement. Those two designs alone were minted in the billions and went into ordinary pockets across the country.