RHYME OF THE AMERICAN CENT That large Cent, you know the Copper coin bearing Liberty, the one my grandpa had saved in a Mason jar for me, in 1857 became bronze and was shrunk to a smaller size featuring a golden eagle soaring the star-studded skies. In 1859 Longacre brought Miss Liberty back to the cent and in so doing, he set an important coinage precedent: not only did he design a new coin with Miss Liberty on it, he featured her wearing a native-American war bonnet. Fifty years later, President Roosevelt triumphed in his quest: the mint director, bullied, threatened and continually hard-pressed, struck Victor David Brenner's design of the new 1909 Cent to honor the 100th birthday of Lincoln, our sixteenth President. WW2 brought another change to the bright and shiney Cent in '43 as Copper was needed for the shells that would set the world free. Soon after Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the bill and blotted the ink, the composition of the Cent was changed to a core of steel plated with zinc. In '44 it became a bronze coin again which suited everyone just fine, with no more changes to the worthy Cent until the year '59. To celebrate the long running fifty years of the noble One Cent the wheat heads on the reverse were replaced by the Lincoln Monument. The One Cent cost more than its face value to make, so, out of the blue, Congress mandated its composition be changed in the middle of '82. Since then, the new business strikes spilling into the finished coins' hopper are composed of a core of zinc coated with a layer of copper. 2009 celebrates Lincoln's 200th birthday and 100 years of the Cent, you know. The mint decided to keep the old Lincoln design on the obverse, and properly so. Four new reverse designs were decreed (two already done, two still to come). Rolls of the first two designs of the new Cents are fetching a tidy sum. I own both P & D circulation coins and two of the packaged proof sets and, like you, am waiting for the other two, but that's as good as it gets. If I had fifty rolls each of the four new reverse designs, I would happily trade all of them for one brilliant uncirculated 1909-S V.D.B.! Clinker (all rights reserved)
To cjh1985: Ipersonally want to thank you for reading my rhyme and your positive comment...:high5: Clinker
