Alfred Maletsky

Pull a New Jersey quarter out of a jar and look at the back: Washington standing in a boat, men straining at the oars, ice in the river. The man who carved that scene small enough to fit on a coin was Alfred Maletsky — and almost nobody who ever spent the quarter knew his name. That is the quiet bargain of a Mint sculptor-engraver. Your work rides around the country in pockets and cash registers for decades, and the credit line is microscopic.

Alfred F. Maletsky was born in 1943 in Easton, Pennsylvania. He learned to draw and sculpt in Philadelphia — a certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, then the John Hussian School of Art. His first paying job with that training had nothing to do with coins: from 1969 to 1975 he worked in the advertising art department of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, the city's big afternoon newspaper, drawing for the page.

His move into metal came at the Franklin Mint, the famous private maker of medals and collector pieces, where he sculpted from 1976 to 1992 — sixteen years. It was an apprenticeship in exactly what the U.S. Mint would later need: taking a flat picture and pushing and pulling it into a shallow sculpture a coining press can stamp.

In July 1993 he joined the United States Mint in Philadelphia as a sculptor-engraver. He stayed about a decade, retiring at the end of 2003. In that single decade his hands touched some of the most-collected American coins of the era — and one of the most-circulated.

To read Maletsky's credits honestly, you have to know a split that runs through almost every modern U.S. coin. Two different skills sit behind the picture on a coin. Someone designs it — draws the scene. Then someone sculpts it into a relief: the raised, three-dimensional model the steel dies are cut from. (The relief is just how high the design stands off the surface; the obverse is the front — the "heads" side; the reverse is the back.)

Sometimes one person does both. More often they are two people, and the coin carries both initials. Maletsky worked both sides of that line, and that is the key to which coins are truly "his."

On some coins he was the engraver — the craftsman giving someone else's drawing a physical body. On the 1995 Atlanta Olympics basketball half dollar, the three leaping players were drawn by Clint Hansen; Maletsky sculpted that obverse. On the 2001 New York state quarter, the Statue of Liberty and the words "Gateway to Freedom" were designed by Daniel Carr; Maletsky engraved the reverse.

On other coins, the idea was his own. The reverse of the 1995 Civil War Battlefield $5 gold coin is Maletsky's — a bald eagle holding a banner that reads "Let us Protect and Preserve" (the obverse, a bugler on horseback, came from the painter Don Troiani). The James Smithson portrait on the obverse of the 1996 Smithsonian 150th Anniversary $5 gold is his. So is the obverse of the 1996 Paralympics silver dollar — a wheelchair athlete in mid-race, with the word "spirit" rendered in raised Braille so a blind collector can read it with a fingertip. That design later won a Coin of the Year award.

His most-loved single image is the 1997 Jackie Robinson silver dollar. Maletsky designed the obverse: Robinson sliding into home, the way he stole it in the 1955 World Series. It is not a stiff bust. It is a body in motion, weight thrown forward, caught a half-second before the tag — a genuinely hard thing to freeze onto a two-inch disc, and he did it. (The matching $5 gold coin in that program is not his; its portrait was William C. Cousins', the reverse James M. Peed's. The dollar is the Maletsky piece.)

And then the coin that outran them all. At the very end of his Mint years he both designed and engraved the reverse of the 1999 New Jersey state quarter — Washington and the Continental Army crossing the Delaware on the freezing night of December 25, 1776, a scene built on Emanuel Leutze's famous 1851 painting, under the motto "Crossroads of the Revolution." He also designed the reverse of the 2004 Wisconsin state quarter — a cow, a wheel of cheese, a husk of corn, and the state word "Forward." Those two designs were struck in the billions and dropped into ordinary American change.