L. W. Hoffecker

In the long list of names credited on United States coins — sculptors, medalists, Mint engravers — Lyman William Hoffecker is the odd one out. He was none of those things. He was a coin dealer. And the 1935 Old Spanish Trail half dollar is, as close as the record allows, the coin he designed, financed, and sold himself.

Hoffecker was born on September 27, 1868, in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, the son of a carriage maker. He caught the collecting habit at eighteen, trading coins while carrying mail for a small-town post office. In 1900 he moved to El Paso, Texas, with his first wife, Cora, and built a comfortable living in the building-materials trade — door, sash, and plate glass. He retired in 1922 to do what he actually loved: buy, sell, and chase coins. He toured something like seventy countries hunting specimens, and with his second wife, Sarah "Jennie" Watkins, ran a rare-coin firm out of El Paso. He named it for her: the Watkins Coin Company.

By the 1930s Hoffecker was a known figure in American numismatics. He joined the board of the American Numismatic Association — the country's main collector body — in 1936, and in 1939 the membership elected him its president, a post he held through 1941. He kept dealing until his health gave out, and he died in El Paso on January 13, 1955, at the age of 86.

Hoffecker's gift was never sculpting. It was getting a coin made — and that turns out to be the harder art.

His first attempt was a flop. In 1929 he organized a campaign for a half dollar marking the 75th anniversary of the Gadsden Purchase, the 1854 deal that bought a slice of today's Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico. He chaired a commission, lobbied Congress, and got a bill passed. Then President Herbert Hoover vetoed it. Hoover had come to see commemorative coins as a racket — issues dreamed up to enrich their sponsors rather than honor anything — and he wanted them stopped.

So Hoffecker waited out the administration and tried again with a new subject: the 400th anniversary of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish explorer who wandered the Gulf Coast in the 1530s, tied to the route remembered as the Old Spanish Trail. This time the politics were tighter, and the story Hoffecker told later is the best part. He went to Washington, worked the lawmakers, and — by his own account — landed a five-minute audience with President Franklin Roosevelt. The meeting, he said, "saved us." The bill passed. In 1935 the Philadelphia Mint struck the coin.

For the design, Hoffecker did the almost unheard-of: he supplied the drawings himself. The obverse — the heads side — carries the head of a cow staring straight out at you. It is a rebus, a picture-pun: cabeza de vaca is Spanish for "head of a cow," and since no reliable portrait of the explorer survived, Hoffecker simply drew his name. The reverse — the tails side — shows a blooming yucca over a map of the five Gulf states, with a line tracing the trail west to El Paso. Because Hoffecker couldn't sculpt, he hired a local, out-of-work El Paso man named Edmund J. Senn to turn the sketches into the plaster models the Mint needed — the large relief versions a coin's dies are cut from. Hoffecker, by his own telling, stood over Senn while he worked in Hoffecker's own garage, unwilling to ship the job to some distant artist who might dawdle or revise his ideas.

There's a quiet irony baked into the design that collectors still enjoy pointing out. The real Old Spanish Trail ran a different route than de Vaca's, and de Vaca covered much of his journey by boat, not overland — and he is not thought to have reached El Paso at all. The map on the coin is less a record of where the explorer went than a portrait of where Hoffecker lived.

Designing the coin was only half of it. Hoffecker also distributed it.

He bought the entire issue from the government and sold the coins to collectors himself, at two dollars each plus postage, through the El Paso Museum committee he chaired. In his advertising he made a high-minded promise: "we wish all collectors to obtain a few and will not allow any speculator to hold up the public." It was a striking vow from a man who personally owned every coin and stood to profit on each sale.

And yet — unusually for the speculation-soaked commemorative coins of the 1930s, when sponsors routinely held back issues to ramp up prices — no real scandal ever attached to Hoffecker. Part of the reason is that he gave a large share away: by one newspaper account he donated $6,500 from the proceeds to the El Paso Museum, the cause the coin had been authorized to support. The dealer-historian Q. David Bowers, who calls the whole arrangement a "scheme," credited Hoffecker's survival to "his adroit sense of politicking"; the reference works of Anthony Swiatek and Walter Breen put it more simply — "no scandal attached itself to Hoffecker." The next year, 1936, he handled the Elgin, Illinois centennial half dollar the same way.

That mix is what makes him worth knowing: not a sculptor, not a scoundrel, but a salesman with genuine taste who treated a coin the way a good dealer treats anything — as a thing to be designed well, made cleanly, and placed in the right hands.