Thomas D. Rogers Sr.

In the year 2000, the United States put a new gold-colored dollar into millions of pockets. On its back, an eagle climbs the sky inside a ring of seventeen stars. The man who carved that eagle had spent four years in the Navy, two decades sculpting medals for hire, and most of his life refusing to let go of a way of working that almost everyone else had abandoned.

Thomas D. Rogers Sr. was born in August 1945 and raised in Wingdale, a small town in New York's Hudson Valley. After his Navy service he earned an associate's degree in commercial art, then went looking for work as a sculptor. He found it at the Medallic Art Company — the firm behind countless American medals — where he started as a sketch artist and learned to model in relief, the shallow, controlled sculpture that has to read clearly when it's shrunk to the size of a coin.

For nearly twenty years he was a freelance medallic sculptor, working for one private mint after another — Presidential Art Medals, Medalcraft Mint, and others. Along the way he carved more than ninety portrait sculptures of Basketball Hall of Fame inductees, the kind of bread-and-butter commission that teaches an artist to capture a likeness fast and make it last in metal. In October 1991, at age 46, he joined the United States Mint as a sculptor-engraver at its Philadelphia facility. He stayed ten years.

Here is the detail that made Rogers' name among people who know coins. Most medallic sculptors build their design up — they model the raised image in clay (a plasteline stage), then cast it, then reduce it down to coin size. Rogers skipped the clay. He carved his designs directly into the negative plaster — cutting the image in reverse, sunken where the finished coin would rise.

It sounds like a parlor trick. It's actually a feat of spatial imagination: you're sculpting a thing inside-out and back-to-front, holding the final positive image in your head while your hands cut its mirror. The American Numismatic Association credited exactly this — his "style of carving directly in the negative mold" — as the source of the fine, intricate detail in his work, and the reason for his reputation in the field.

It was also, by the time he retired, nearly a lost art. The Mint's design process was going digital, with images modeled on screens and milled by machine. Rogers worked the other way to the end. "I enjoy keeping the tradition alive in my work," he said. "My designs and sculpting have always been done by hand, just as they were by sculptors for countless generations." That sentence is the whole man: a craftsman who saw himself as a link in a chain reaching back centuries, not a stop along the way to software.

Two designs put Rogers in the pocket of nearly every American — and both are eagles in flight.

The first came in 1997, when the Mint launched the American Platinum Eagle, the country's first platinum bullion coin and, at 99.95% pure, its highest-purity coin. John Mercanti gave the front the Statue of Liberty; Rogers gave the back an eagle soaring over an American landscape, a sunburst behind it. His reverse became the constant of the series: it has appeared on every bullion strike of the coin from 1997 onward, while the proof versions rotated through new designs each year. When the Mint wanted to mark the coin's 20th anniversary in 2017, it brought Rogers' original eagle back.

The second is the one children spend without a thought. When the Sacagawea "golden dollar" arrived in 2000 to replace the disliked Susan B. Anthony dollar, Glenna Goodacre sculpted the obverse — the "heads" side — showing Sacagawea carrying her infant son. Rogers carved the reverse: a soaring eagle ringed by seventeen stars, one for each state in the Union at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition that Sacagawea guided. The design did not survive untouched. Rogers' original proposal had mountains beneath the bird; before production, that scenery was removed and other elements were shifted before the Treasury Secretary signed off — an ordinary fact of life at the Mint, where a designer's vision passes through committees and a Secretary's pen before it ever strikes metal.

Rogers' name is also on coins you might not expect. He designed the reverses of several state quarters in the 50 State Quarters program — including the Massachusetts quarter's Revolutionary War Minuteman — and modeled commemorative coins through the 1990s, among them the 1996 Smithsonian 150th-anniversary dollar and the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy dollar. Even after retiring in 2001, he kept working for the Mint under contract: his design appears on the reverse of the 2016 Native American dollar honoring the World War code talkers.