Gilroy Roberts

Gilroy Roberts was born in Philadelphia on March 11, 1905, into a house where making things by hand was simply what the family did. Both his parents were professional artists. As a boy he modeled clay and carved wood; he never really stopped.

He trained the slow, old-fashioned way — classes at the Frankford Evening Art School in Philadelphia and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., studying under sculptors including Heinz Warneke. That grounding in sculpture, not just drawing, mattered. A coin is a tiny bas-relief — a raised image standing off a flat field — and Roberts learned to think in that shallow third dimension.

In 1936 he joined the United States Mint as an assistant sculptor-engraver, the understudy to chief engraver John R. Sinnock. He spent twelve years learning the craft at Sinnock's elbow. Then, on July 22, 1948, President Truman appointed him the ninth chief engraver of the United States Mint — the artist responsible for the look of the nation's money.

He held that post for sixteen years. The job that made his name took six weeks.

President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Within hours, Mint Director Eva Adams called Roberts to talk about putting Kennedy on a major silver coin. By November 27 the project was authorized. Jacqueline Kennedy chose the half dollar — she did not want to push George Washington off the quarter.

Roberts had a head start, and it was the kind of luck that only comes from earlier work. He and fellow engraver Frank Gasparro had already made the official Kennedy presidential medal, a portrait Kennedy himself had approved while alive. Roberts adapted that left-profile bust for the coin's obverse — the heads side. Gasparro reworked the medal's eagle-and-shield for the reverse.

When the trial pieces were ready, Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy reviewed them. Mrs. Kennedy liked the portrait but asked that the hair be softened slightly. Roberts made the change. Congress authorized the coin on December 30, 1963; the first dies were cut by January 2, 1964; and on January 30 the Denver Mint struck the first Kennedy half dollars. A grieving country emptied banks of them. Many never spent one — they kept it.

Then came the strange part. Complaints reached the Denver Mint that the cut-off line at the base of Kennedy's neck — the truncation — hid a hammer and sickle, the emblem of Soviet communism. It did not. It was Roberts's signature: a stylized monogram of his initials, "GR." His mentor Sinnock had drawn the same suspicion a generation earlier, when cranks insisted the "JRS" on the Franklin half dollar stood for Joseph Stalin. Two engravers, two sets of initials, the same Cold War paranoia reading treason into a sculptor's name.

The Kennedy half was not the first half dollar Roberts touched. His mentor, John Sinnock, designed the Franklin half dollar — Benjamin Franklin on the front, the Liberty Bell on the back — but died in May 1947 before the reverse was finished. The job of completing it fell to Roberts.

One detail on that coin is his, and it tells you how the Mint actually works. The little eagle perched beside the Liberty Bell looks like an afterthought because it was one. Mint officials realized an old coinage law required an eagle on every silver coin larger than a dime, so a small one had to be tucked in. The Commission of Fine Arts disliked both the cramped eagle and the visible crack in the bell, worrying they would invite jokes. They were overruled. The Franklin half dollar was struck from 1948 to 1963 — and the very next coin in that slot would be Roberts's Kennedy.

Roberts was, above all, a portraitist in metal. His Kennedy obverse is clean and dignified — a calm profile that reads instantly at the size of a coin, which is harder than it sounds. He also cut the official Congressional and presidential medals for Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, and designed circulating coinage for nine foreign nations, from Denmark to Liberia to Colombia, when those governments asked the U.S. Mint for help.

Then he did something no chief engraver before him had ever done: he left. Every one of his predecessors had held the office until they died. On October 8, 1964, Roberts resigned to become chairman of the General Numismatics Corporation — soon famous as the Franklin Mint, the private mint that would flood the postwar market with commemorative medals and silver rounds. He served there as chief engraver and chairman, and the company stock reportedly made him wealthy many times over. He kept designing — eagles, animals, medallions — until his death in Havertown, Pennsylvania, on January 26, 1992, at 86.