Dennis R. Williams

Most people who design American money are seasoned sculptors with decades behind them. Dennis R. Williams was a 21-year-old junior, and he entered the contest because his instructor assigned it.

Williams was born on October 26, 1952, in Erie, Pennsylvania, and grew up drawn to art and sculpture. By the early 1970s he was studying at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, majoring in sculpting. When the U.S. Treasury opened a national competition to redesign the backs — the reverses — of the quarter, half dollar, and dollar for the country's 200th birthday, one of his college instructors handed the whole class the contest as a project.

Nearly 900 designs poured in from across the country. A panel of five judges — including Robert Weinman, son of the famous coin sculptor Adolph Weinman, and former Chief Engraver Gilroy Roberts — narrowed the field to twelve finalists. Treasury Secretary George Shultz picked the winners. In March 1974, the dollar went to Dennis R. Williams.

He was the youngest person ever to design a United States coin. The prize was $5,000 — money he said he'd put toward his education, with the hope of one day teaching sculpture himself. On April 24, 1974, the three winners were invited to Washington to collect their prizes and meet at the White House.

Williams's idea was simple and bold: the Liberty Bell, hung in front of a full, cratered Moon. It tied the founding promise of 1776 to the country's newest triumph — the 1969 Moon landing — in a single image. Old liberty and new frontier, on one coin.

A winning sketch is not yet a working coin. Frank Gasparro, the Mint's Chief Engraver — the man who sculpted the Eisenhower portrait on the front — took Williams's concept and adapted it for the press. Gasparro simplified the features on the lunar surface and adjusted the lettering and the bell so the design would strike cleanly at full size. The dollar is 38.1 mm across, the largest circulating US coin of its era; a busy design loses its crispness on a piece that big.

If you look closely at a Bicentennial dollar, you can find Williams in it. His initials — DRW — sit just below the bottom edge of the bell, to the right of the clapper. That small mark is the artist's signature, the way designers quietly sign their coins.

The choice wasn't universally loved. Some collectors grumbled that the Liberty Bell had been used before — most famously on the Franklin half dollar of 1948–1963 — and wasn't fresh enough for a once-in-a-century coin. The public, though, took to it. Williams's bell-and-Moon ran on every Bicentennial dollar, dated 1776–1976, struck across 1975 and 1976 in the hundreds of millions, the most widely held design of his short numismatic career.