Frank Gasparro: the man whose art is in your pocket

Frank Gasparro liked to play a small trick on store cashiers. He would hand over a penny, flip it to the back, and announce that he had designed it. By his own account it rarely landed: "They look at me like I was crazy, so I don't do it anymore," he once said. But he wasn't bragging. He was telling the literal truth — and so few people believed him that it became a kind of private joke about a strange career. He had made art that billions of people carried, and almost none of them knew his name.

Gasparro was born in Philadelphia on August 26, 1909, the son of Italian immigrants. He showed a gift for sculpture young. As a teenager he apprenticed under Giuseppe Donato, who had himself worked in the Paris studio of Auguste Rodin — so the boy from South Philadelphia learned his craft one handshake away from the most famous sculptor of the age. He graduated from South Philadelphia High School in 1927, studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and won scholarships that sent him to Europe to refine his hand.

In December 1942, with the country at war and grand sculpture commissions scarce, Gasparro took a steady job: assistant engraver at the United States Mint in Philadelphia, under Chief Engraver John R. Sinnock. It was meant to be practical work. It became a life's work. He would stay at the Mint for nearly forty years, and on February 23, 1965, he was sworn in as its 10th Chief Engraver — the artist responsible for the look of the nation's money. He held the post until he retired on January 16, 1981.

By the time he died in 2001, at 92, his designs had been struck onto more coins than those of perhaps any artist in history. The Lincoln Memorial reverse alone ran from 1959 to 2008 — well over 100 billion pennies. The man in the pocket, it turned out, was telling the truth all along.

A coin designer works under brutal constraints. The canvas is smaller than a fingertip. The relief — how far the design rises off the surface — has to be shallow enough to stack and strike by the billion, yet deep enough to read. The image has to survive being cut into hardened steel dies, the master stamps that punch the design into blank metal. Gasparro's training as a sculptor in the round was the foundation, but the discipline of coinage was about saying the most with the least.

His method was patient and almost journalistic. He hoarded reference — newspaper clippings, magazine photographs, books — and built each design through layers of tracing paper, refining a profile until it could be cut straight into steel. He gravitated to two motifs above all: Liberty and the eagle, the oldest furniture of American coinage, which he drew again and again without ever quite repeating himself.

His signature touch was a kind of dignified restraint. The Eisenhower portrait is all jaw and brow, a soldier's profile pared to its essentials. The Kennedy half's reverse takes the heraldic eagle of the Presidential Seal and renders it with crisp, almost architectural precision. He wanted the lettering to carry too: on the Kennedy reverse he gave E Pluribus Unum — "out of many, one," the national motto — real prominence rather than tucking it away. Gasparro's coins don't shout. They hold their shape at arm's length and reward a second look.

The Lincoln Memorial cent (1959). In 1959 the country marked 150 years since Abraham Lincoln's birth, and the Mint wanted a new reverse — the "tails" side — for the penny, replacing the wheat-ears design that had run since 1909. The Mint's engravers competed; more than twenty in-house designs were submitted. Gasparro's won. His reverse shows the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, with the seated statue of Lincoln just visible between the columns. The result is a quiet marvel of design: Lincoln appears on both sides of the same coin — his portrait on the front, his monument with his likeness inside it on the back. Few coins anywhere can claim that.

The Kennedy half dollar (1964). When President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, the Mint moved with extraordinary speed to honor him on a coin. Chief Engraver Gilroy Roberts designed the obverse portrait; Gasparro designed the reverse. He had a head start: he and Roberts had recently produced the official Kennedy presidential medal, and Gasparro adapted its heraldic eagle — the eagle of the Presidential Seal — for the coin's back. Released in March 1964, the Kennedy half was hoarded almost instantly as a keepsake, vanishing from circulation as fast as it appeared.

The Eisenhower dollar (1971). This one Gasparro carried with him for a quarter of a century. On June 19, 1945, he had stood on Fifth Avenue in New York among the enormous crowd welcoming General Eisenhower home after the Allied victory in Europe — and sketched him. As Gasparro later recalled in a U.S. Mint account, "I made a drawing for a medal with his portrait side view and I also made a portrait in the round." When the Mint asked him to design the Eisenhower dollar in 1969, he pulled out those old drawings. He designed both sides: the general's profile on the obverse, and on the reverse an eagle landing on the Moon — based on the Apollo 11 mission insignia drawn by astronaut Michael Collins, honoring the first lunar landing on the same coin as the wartime commander-in-chief. (The 1975–1976 Bicentennial reverse, with the Liberty Bell over the Moon, was a separate design by art student Dennis R. Williams, not Gasparro.)

The Susan B. Anthony dollar (1979) — his proudest, and America's least loved. Gasparro first designed something quite different for a small dollar coin: an allegorical Liberty with flowing hair on the front and a soaring eagle on the back, in the old tradition. But the late-1970s push for women's rights changed the brief entirely. In October 1978, Congress passed the law ordering that the new dollar carry the portrait of Susan B. Anthony — a real woman who fought for the vote, the first non-mythical woman ever on a U.S. circulating coin. Gasparro built the portrait from the few surviving images of Anthony. At the insistence of the federal Commission of Fine Arts, he aged and hardened her likeness, settling on a sterner Anthony rather than a softer one. He regarded the coin as the greatest achievement of his career. The public hated it — too close in size and color to the quarter, easy to confuse, easy to ignore — and it failed in circulation. The artist's favorite work and the public's rejection were, for once, the same coin.

Designing the nation's money meant designing by committee, and Gasparro did not always win. His coins passed through Mint directors, Treasury officials, and the Commission of Fine Arts — and any of them could send a design back.

The clearest case was the Eisenhower dollar's eagle. Gasparro's first version of the Moon-landing eagle was, in the eyes of the government, too aggressive. Mint Director Mary Brooks told him the bird looked "too fierce, too warlike, a little too aggressive," and asked for something friendlier. Gasparro was reportedly unhappy about softening it, but he made the change and called the final eagle "pleasant looking" — a phrase that reads, depending on your mood, as either acceptance or a craftsman's dry shrug.

The Anthony dollar carried its own quiet tug-of-war. The flowing-hair Liberty he started with was overruled by Congress. The portrait he then made was, at the Commission's request, aged and stiffened from his earlier sketches. The coin Gasparro most wanted to be remembered for was shaped at nearly every step by people who were not him — which may be why he held onto it so fiercely.