Steven M. Bieda

Steven M. Bieda is the rarest kind of coin designer — an amateur who beat the professionals, and then walked into the statehouse.

He was born on January 21, 1961, in Warren, Michigan, and he grew up the kind of collector who reads the catalog cover to cover. He never stopped. He was also relentless about school: a bachelor's degree and a master of public administration from Wayne State University, a law degree from the University of Detroit Mercy, and a master of laws in taxation back at Wayne State. By his late twenties he was a tax attorney — and still a serious numismatist, eventually serving as legal counsel to the Michigan State Numismatic Society and other coin organizations.

Then, in 1990, Congress passed the Olympic Commemorative Coin Act. It authorized three commemorative coins — special coins struck to mark an occasion rather than to spend — to help fund American athletes heading to the 1992 Games in Albertville and Barcelona. The U.S. Mint opened the designs to an open competition, the public welcome to submit. Bieda, the collector, sent his in.

He won. One of his drawings became the reverse — the "tails" side — of the 1992 Olympic half dollar, the clad version anyone could buy for a few dollars. The hobbyist had become a designer credited on a federal coin. That alone earns him a page here. But Bieda kept going. He was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives in 2002 and to the State Senate in 2010. As the numismatic press is fond of noting, he is the only person ever to both design a United States coin and win election to state or federal office.

The best part of Bieda's design story is a twist he tells himself: he didn't draw it for the coin it ended up on.

The 1992 Olympic program had three coins — a copper-nickel clad half dollar, a silver dollar, and a gold five-dollar piece (the "half eagle"). Bieda entered ideas across all three denominations. The design the Mint chose — an olive branch crossing the Olympic torch — was originally one of his entries for the gold coin. The selection panel liked the image but routed it to the half dollar reverse instead. So the branch-and-torch that millions of people came to hold was, in Bieda's own firsthand account, a gold coin's idea that found a home on the cheapest coin in the set. Below the olive branch, if you look closely, you'll find his initials: S.M.B.

There's a division of labor on every modern U.S. coin worth knowing. The designer draws the image; a Mint sculptor-engraver then renders it in three dimensions — setting the relief (how high the design stands off the surface) and cutting the tooling the coin is struck from. Bieda was the designer. The Mint's John Mercanti — who would become its chief engraver in 2006 — sculpted Bieda's reverse into the coin. The obverse, the "heads" side, came from another outside designer, William Cousins: a gymnast caught mid-motion against the flag and the Olympic rings. Around Bieda's torch runs the old Olympic creed in Latin — CITIUS ALTIUS FORTIUS, "Faster, Higher, Stronger."

Bieda's eye for coins didn't retire when he entered politics. As Michigan worked through the federal State Quarters program, he stayed close to the design fight — by one firsthand account from a Michigan numismatist, he worked with Mint sculptor-engraver Alfred Maletsky to push for the version that rendered Michigan's map as dense forest. He never held a Mint job. He simply kept turning up wherever the coins were being decided.