The 2015 March of Dimes Silver Dollar

You already own a small monument to this coin's story. Look at any dime in your pocket. That's Franklin Roosevelt's profile — and he is on the ten-cent piece because of polio.

In 1921, at thirty-nine, Roosevelt caught the disease and never walked unaided again. In 1938 he founded a charity to fight it. The radio star Eddie Cantor coined its nickname on the air, urging Americans to mail their loose change to the White House in "a march of dimes." Millions did. Dime by dime, ordinary people funded the research that produced Jonas Salk's polio vaccine in 1955 — and all but erased a disease that had paralyzed children every summer.

When Roosevelt died in 1945, the Mint put him on the dime within a year. The choice of denomination was no accident: the public had been donating dimes to his cause for years. The coin was a thank-you note from a grateful country.

Seventy years later, the March of Dimes — by then refocused on the health of mothers and babies — turned seventy-five. To mark it, Congress authorized a commemorative silver dollar. And the Mint did something quietly perfect: it reunited the two faces of the polio fight. The man the disease struck, and the man who stopped it. The patient and the cure.

The obverse — the heads side — sets two profiles nose to nose: Franklin Roosevelt and Dr. Jonas Salk, the leaders at either end of the fight against polio. It was designed by Paul C. Balan, an artist in the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program, and sculpted by Mint medallic sculptor Michael Gaudioso.

The reverse — the tails side — drops the politics entirely. It shows a baby cradled in an adult's hand, a plain image of the charity's modern mission: the health of infants. It was designed and sculpted by Don Everhart, one of the Mint's most prolific engravers.

Two mints struck the coin, and the mint mark — the small letter naming the facility — tells you which. The proof, with its mirror-bright fields and frosted devices, came from West Point and carries a W. The uncirculated (or "burnished") version came from Philadelphia and carries a P.

By modern commemorative standards this is an affordable, accessible coin. The authorized cap was a generous 500,000, but the public bought a fraction of that. The Mint's reported figures land at 32,030 individual proofs (2015-W) and 24,742 individual uncirculated dollars (2015-P) — both well under the ceiling, which is why no single version is a true rarity. As a bullion-grade silver dollar carrying roughly three-quarters of an ounce of fine silver, much of its baseline value simply tracks the metal.

The real collector prize isn't the dollar at all — it's a tiny coin that rode along with it.

To raise more for the charity, the Mint offered a three-coin Special Silver Set: the 2015-W proof silver dollar flanked by two 90% silver Roosevelt dimes — a proof dime struck at West Point (W) and, for the first time ever, a reverse proof dime struck at Philadelphia (P). A reverse proof flips the usual recipe — frosted fields, mirror-bright devices — for a striking negative-image look. That 2015-P reverse proof dime was issued nowhere else. Only 74,430 sets were sold against a 75,000 limit, a near sell-out, which makes the set the scarce, sought-after piece of the program — and the dime inside it the part collectors actually chase.

For a grade-conscious buyer, the gap between a top-grade proof and an ordinary one is where the interest lives. With cap-limited modern silver, condition and the slab grade do most of the work the date can't.