Charles L. Vickers

In 2009, the U.S. Mint put four new pictures on the back of the Lincoln cent, one for each chapter of his life. The second one shows a young man in work clothes sitting on a log, reading a book, an axe-wedge and mallet resting in a tree stump beside him. That is Abraham Lincoln before he was Lincoln — the frontier rail-splitter teaching himself out of borrowed books. The man who designed and carved that scene was Charles L. Vickers. And when he drew that self-taught boy on a log, he later said he was reaching back to his own teenage years.

Vickers was born on July 16, 1937, in Camp County, in the piney woods of northeast Texas. As a young man he served two years in the U.S. Army with the 101st Airborne Division — the paratroopers — then went to New York to learn his trade the hard way: the Art Students League, the Frank Reilly School of Art, the Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts. These are drawing-and-sculpture schools, not coin schools. He was a sculptor first, and a coin man second.

He spent the rest of his working life turning that craft toward metal. In 1976 he joined the Franklin Mint, the big private medal-maker outside Philadelphia, and rose fast to senior sculptor. In 1985 he struck out on his own studio, and the commissions that came were not small — President George W. Bush's 2001 inaugural medal, the christening medal for the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, a 25th-anniversary medal for Pope John Paul II. Then, in December 2003, at sixty-six — an age when most people retire — he joined the United States Mint. He stayed twelve years.

Here is the thing most people get wrong about coins. The designer who draws the picture and the sculptor-engraver who turns it into a coin are usually two different people. A Mint sculptor-engraver takes a flat drawing and builds it in three dimensions — first in clay or plaster, today often as a digital sculpt — judging every slope and shadow so the picture reads in relief, the raised-and-lowered surface a coin is struck from. That model becomes the master die, the hardened steel stamp that strikes the coins. Get the relief wrong and the design won't fill, won't stack in a roll, or wears flat in a year.

Vickers was a staff sculptor-engraver, not a freelance artist. For most of his coins, someone else drew the design and Vickers gave it depth and life in the steel. He sculpted the three saluting scouts on the 2010 Boy Scouts of America silver dollar. He sculpted presidential portraits — John Adams, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce — onto the Presidential dollars. He sculpted national-park scenes from Minnesota to Arches onto the quarters. Over twelve years his hands carried dozens of other artists' drawings the last, hardest mile from paper to coin.

But the Mint's staff also competed as designers, and now and then Vickers won. On a handful of coins and medals the picture is his own — drawn and sculpted by the same hand. That is why those carry his mark. The first time you spot a tiny set of initials tucked into a coin's design — beside a portrait, or, on the 2009 cent, at the foot of the log — that is the artist's signature in miniature. Vickers' mark is CLV.

His designs run deeper than the Lincoln cent suggests. He drew and sculpted the "Scientist" reverse of the 2006 Benjamin Franklin commemorative dollar — a portrait of the man as inventor, not founder. He designed Thomas Jefferson's Liberty for a 2007 First Spouse gold coin. He designed several of the 2008 Code Talkers Congressional Gold Medals, honoring the Native American servicemen whose languages the enemy never broke. And one of his earliest Mint credits is among the most moving: the obverse of the Congressional Gold Medal for the families and lawyers of Briggs v. Elliott and Brown v. Board of Education — the cases that ended legal segregation in American schools.

2009 was Lincoln's 200th birthday and the cent's 100th. To mark both, the Mint kept Victor David Brenner's century-old Lincoln portrait on the front — the obverse, the heads side, almost unchanged since 1909 — and replaced the back with four one-year reverses tracing his life: the Kentucky log-cabin birth, the Indiana youth, the Illinois years of law and politics, and the presidency in Washington.

The Indiana panel, Formative Years, was Vickers' — he both designed and sculpted it. He didn't reach for log cabins or top hats. He drew a teenager taking a break from splitting rails to read, because the real story of those Indiana years (1816–1830) is a poor frontier boy educating himself with almost no schooling. Vickers said the scene came from his own youth in the Texas woods — which is why the boy on the log feels less like a monument and more like a memory. It is a quiet, humane choice for a coin that landed in hundreds of millions of pockets.

The design launched on May 14, 2009, at Lincoln State Park in Indiana. Philadelphia struck 376,000,000 of the Formative Years cents for circulation and Denver struck 363,600,000 — these are everyday pennies, not rarities. But the Mint also sold a collector version: 784,614 coins struck in the old pre-1982 copper-rich alloy (95% copper, a heavier 3.11 grams) with a satin finish, sold in that year's Uncirculated Sets. It was a chance to own a brand-new Lincoln cent in real copper, one last time, instead of the copper-plated zinc that fills the circulation strikes. On any of them, look at the foot of the log on the right and you'll find CLV.