Charles L. Vickers

In 2009, the U.S. Mint put four new pictures on the back of the Lincoln cent, one for each chapter of his life. The second one shows a young man in work clothes sitting on a log, reading a book, an axe-wedge and mallet resting beside him. That is Abraham Lincoln before he was Lincoln — the rail-splitter teaching himself out of borrowed books. The man who designed and carved that scene was Charles L. Vickers.

Vickers was born in Texas in 1937. As a young man he served two years in the U.S. Army with the 101st Airborne Division, then went to New York to learn his trade the hard way — the Art Students League, the Frank Reilly School of Art, the Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts. These are drawing-and-sculpture schools, not coin schools. He was a sculptor first.

He spent the rest of his life turning that craft toward metal. In 1976 he joined the Franklin Mint, the big private medal-maker outside Philadelphia, and rose to senior sculptor. In the mid-1980s he struck out on his own studio, and the commissions that came were not small — the official medal for President George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration, the christening medal for the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, a 25th-anniversary medal for Pope John Paul II. Then, in December 2003, at sixty-six — an age when most people retire — he joined the United States Mint.

Here is the thing most people get wrong about coins. The designer who draws the picture and the sculptor-engraver who turns it into a coin are usually two different people. A Mint sculptor-engraver takes a flat drawing and builds it in three dimensions — first in clay or plaster, now often in a digital sculpt — judging every slope and shadow so the picture reads in relief, the raised-and-lowered surface a coin is struck from. That model becomes the master die — the hardened steel stamp that strikes millions of coins. Get the relief wrong and the design won't fill, or won't stack, or wears away in a year.

Vickers was a Mint sculptor-engraver — staff, not a freelance artist. For most of his coins, someone else drew the design and Vickers gave it depth and life in the steel. He sculpted Donna Weaver's three saluting scouts on the 2010 Boy Scouts of America Centennial silver dollar. He sculpted Barbara Fox's Olympic National Park quarter. Over twelve years his hands carried dozens of other people's drawings the last, hardest mile from paper to coin.

But the Mint's staff also competed as designers, and now and then Vickers won. On a handful of coins the picture is his — drawn and sculpted by the same person. That is why he signs them. The first time you see a tiny set of initials tucked into a coin's design — on the field beside a portrait, or, on the 2009 cent, at the bottom of the log — those are the artist's mark. Vickers' mark is CLV.

2009 was Lincoln's 200th birthday and the cent's 100th. To mark both, the Mint kept Victor David Brenner's century-old Lincoln portrait on the front — the obverse, the heads side — and replaced the wheat-and-then-Memorial back with four one-year reverses tracing his life: Kentucky childhood, Indiana youth, Illinois law and politics, the presidency in Washington.

The Indiana panel, called Formative Years, was Vickers' — he both designed and sculpted it. He didn't reach for log cabins or top hats. He drew a teenager taking a break from splitting rails to read, because the real story of those Indiana years (1816–1830) is a poor frontier boy educating himself with almost no schooling. It is a quiet, humane choice for a coin that landed in hundreds of millions of pockets. The Philadelphia and Denver mints struck the Formative Years design for circulation in 2009; the Mint also sold collector versions in the old pre-1982 copper-rich alloy, struck with a satin finish, so collectors could own a Lincoln cent in real copper one last time. Look at the bottom of the log on the right and you'll find CLV.