Did you know this fact?

Found this on aboutcoins.com

Only the Dead May Appear on U.S. Coins by Law

Nowadays, it is federal law that no living man or woman can appear on the U.S. coinage. Presidents must be dead for at least two years before they are eligible for inclusion in the Presidential Dollar series. I wonder if Americans will ever find a public figure who is so revered by the populace that they would allow a living person to grace the circulating coinage. I wouldn't bet on it!


So how long will it take them to get caught up on the Prsidential Dollar? What will they do if they get past all the dead presidents and have to wait?

 

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Coolidge comes to mind....

http://acoins.com/centennial.html

 

The special olympics commemorative had a living person on it as I recall.....

 

The Kennedy half was issued in 1964, less than two years after his assassination, so they must have gotten an exemption to issue it early. Are there other exceptions?

 

The Obama coin was issues bef........oh wait, that was a colorized novelty....

 

The '26 Sesqui $2.50 is one of my personal favs!:eating:

 

And, hate to cite wiki....


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_centennial_half_dollar

 

hwat's rwong baout Wiki? :goofer:
(or do you mean you don't like to cite it for coin facts?)

 

I believe you are correct.

 

This is true, but I'm not sure if it was an exception or if that was before the 2 year rule was made.

 

"Everything changed on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the streets of Dallas, Texas. A decision was quickly made to honor the nation’s fallen leader by replacing the image of Franklin on the United States half-dollar. The change didn’t have to come from Congress; President Lyndon Johnson issued an Executive Order directing the United States Mint to make the change."

From: http://www.usmint.gov/historianscorner/index.cfm?action=nugget07-12-06

 

i dont think that it pertains to commeratives

 

If Nancy Reagan lives until 2016, she'll be on a First Spouse Gold coin since the current law states that for each prez honored with a Prez Dollar, their spouse will also be honored (even if she's still alive at the time).

 

I did know that at one time but among most everything I read I forgot it too.

I would rather they stop putting real people on coins and go back to being artistic with a new liberty design and a kick A** eagle on the reverse.

 

saq dollars

 

I think it's the fact that anyone can edit turns me off to them. It was late, I was tired, and I strayed.....:smile

 

like anything else gotta question what you read but I like the idea that anyone can edit, but then your piers the world over review the submissions. I don't believe any source to be an absolute authority, especially on information however, with Wiki, one thing that really irks me is how people in the media, entertainment, companies pushing new products, basically anything related to PR, exploits profiles on Wikipedia. Really gotta watch out for that stuff on Wiki.

 

This is actually false. There's a law against putting living people on currency or stamps, but that law does not cover coins--the reason being that the law was passed back before any coins depicted real people anyway, so nobody thought to include coins in it. (There's a very good story behind this law; it was passed because Spencer Morton Clark, the bureaucrat in charge of selecting the Fractional Currency designs back in the 1860s, decided to put his own portrait on one series of the five-cent notes. Before that unfortunate incident, several better-qualified living people had appeared on the currency without much objection, including Lincoln during his presidency.)

More recently, the law that created the Statehood quarters specifically prohibited any image of a living person from appearing in that series. Likewise, the law that authorized the Presidential dollars says that a President must have been dead for two years in order to be included (though it says no such thing about spouses, as already pointed out).

But there's no law against putting a living person on any other coins, only a strong tradition of not doing so. There've been five commemorative coins depicting living people--including that Sesquicentennial half-dollar with the portrait of the sitting President--but in each case there was some grumbling when the coin came out, and one or two of the people so "honored" were strongly opposed to the idea themselves.

If the Treasury decided tomorrow that they wanted to put Obama on the circulating dime instead of FDR, there'd be no law stopping them. But I'm guessing that, long before the new design got through the mandated review process, Congress would rush such a law into the books...look what they did when the Mint tried to take Jefferson off the nickel in 2003. Therefore, the Treasury wouldn't try such a thing even if they wanted to; nobody wants to bring that much controversy down upon themselves.

 

I agree 100% with Crusty. Lets get back to ideals and not men.

 

Numbers is correct, the "fact" is not a fact. There is no general law forbidding a living person on a coin. The prohibition of no living person on the state quarter or no living president on the President dollar is specific to those coins. As he mentioned if Nancy Reagan lives long enough she could become a living person on the first spouse coins (Is Betty Ford still alive? I know ladybird Johnson died not too long ago.)

He explained why the prohibition is in place for currency, but even if there had been coins with living persons on them they would not have been included in that law. The government is very specific about keeping the laws dealing with currency separate from those dealing with coins.

Interestingly there is no time limit about how long a person must be dead before he can be pictured on the currency. This is in contrast with stamps where a person must be dead at least 25 years before he can be pictured on a stamp.