Presidential Heads
and Tails

When I was three-and-a-half, my family lived in Hingham, Massachusetts, a small suburb of Boston. Our neighborhood was like most of those surrounding Boston in that it had a good supply of Catholics of Italian-American and Irish-American backgrounds.

Of course, being three-and-a-half, I didn’t give much thought to our neighbors’ religious denominations. My world basically consisted of our house and the big yard between it and our neighbors, The James Family. The yard was where my little brother and I would play with Mary Beth and Donnie James, the two neighbor kids that, conveniently, were our age. The yard was also where my mom and Mrs. James would hang the laundry on the clotheslines with wooden clothespins. I remember them talking and laughing while keeping one eye on us kids, big baskets of wet laundry at their feet.

He’s number two but still trying harder! President John Adams will have his own coin in 2007 as part of the U.S. Mint’s new presidential dollar series. Photo courtesy the U.S. Mint

One day in November the yard was the scene of a ruckus like I’d never experienced. Women—not just Mrs. James and my mother, but other women from the neighborhood—showed up in the yard screaming, “Someone shot Kennedy! They shot the president!” There was crying and yelling and raising arms to the sky like I had never seen from adults and I remember thinking that the world must be coming to an end. All of a sudden, all of the mothers scooped up their children and ran into their respective homes. Then we all watched the news on television until the dads got home.

You have to remember, this was a suburb of Boston in 1963. John Kennedy was not just from Massachusetts but was the first Catholic president in our nation’s history. For most of our neighbors he was family. More than that, he was like the best part of a person’s family. Not the drunk uncle. Not the crazy cousin. He was the guy that made the family proud beyond their wildest dreams. I’m talking about straight A’s, football star, war hero with a beautiful wife proud.

Even at the age of three I understood that something terrible had happened to my neighborhood and my country. It started my lifelong obsession with the presidency. When I went to school I read everything I could about President Kennedy. My parents then bought me a book on all the presidents that started with George Washington and went all the way up to the then-current man in office, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The book featured two pages of text on each president with their portrait in a little oval frame with decorative olive branches and arrows around it.

Of course, it was easier to fill two pages of text on Franklin D. Roosevelt than it was to write that much on, say, Millard Fillmore. Once you get past the fact that Fillmore ascended to the presidency after the untimely death of Zachary Taylor in 1850, there’s not a lot to be said for the man’s place in American history. He did fall in love with and eventually marry his grade school teacher Abigail Powers. It’s the sort of love story that’s generally frowned upon these days, but has a gentle one-room schoolhouse kind of charm when viewed through the lens of history.

As president, Fillmore’s greatest legacy is probably some of the anti-slavery legislation introduced during his term, including abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia. When the Whig Party dissolved in the 1850s, Millard refused to join the Republican Party, choosing to instead throw his hat in with the Know Nothing, or American Party. I think we all know how that turned out.

It was announced this week that the United States Mint will honor all of our presidents with new one dollar coins. Like the Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea dollar coins of recent history, the new president dollars will be slightly larger and heavier than quarters and gold in color (if not in metal).

The new coins will be introduced in February 2007 and the series will honor four different presidents per year, in the order they served in office. Each president will appear only once, except for that sly Grover Cleveland who took a vacation between terms and is now generally acknowledged as both our 22nd and 24th president. There is no truth to the rumor that the William Howard Taft coin will be slightly heavier than the other presidential dollars.

Each of the dollars will have a view of the Statue of Liberty on the converse, or tails, side of the coin. The U.S. Mint adopted the idea of the rotating designs from its very popular 50-state quarter program. That program has proven so popular among collectors that some of the quarters, especially the Alabama coin stamped in a limited number, are virtually out of circulation.

The Mint is also hoping that inflation has finally made the arrival of the coin dollar a necessary convenience for Americans. As more vending machines, parking meters and other machines accept the new coins, the Mint is hoping that Americans will start carrying them in their pockets.

So, the question remains, can Millard Fillmore and Calvin Coolidge succeed where Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea failed?