Crowd flips for Hot Springs coin

HOT SPRINGS — The Taylor family arrived at 5 a.m. Tuesday for the 10 a.m. ceremonial launch of the new Hot Springs quarter.

The Springfield, Ill., family was first in line to pocket the initial coins issued as part of the U.S. Mint’s new America the Beautiful Quarters Program.

Husband Chuck, wife Kim and son Cris each exchanged $100 cash for quarters, the maximum allowed per person.

Then, the Taylors spent 30 minutes going back through the line again for more quarters. By the end of the day, they planned to swap $1,500 worth of greenbacks for Hot Springs quarters.

“I’ve got a lot of people back in Springfield who couldn’t make it today,”Chuck Taylor said.

Between 1,500 and 2,000 people waited for hours in the hot sun Tuesday to swap cash for quarters. By the end of the day, the group of fanatic numismatists - the industry term for serious coin collectors - had traded $76,500 cash for its worth in quarters, officials said.

The new coin is the first installment of a 12-year Mint initiative honoring national sites such as parks, forests and wildlife refuges in all 50 states, five U.S. territories and the District of Columbia.

The Mint is releasing 56 quarters - five new designs per year and one in 2021 - in the order in which the featured sites were preserved by the government.

During this time, these will be the only new quarters the Mint produces.

Hot Springs Reservation - what later became Hot Springs National Park - was set aside for preservation April 20, 1832.

The designation came 40 years before Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming - the second site that will be honored on a quarter - got federal recognition in 1872.

“Today, Hot Springs National Park may not be the biggest national park, nor the one with the most impressive vistas, or with the largest number of visitors,” Park Superintendent Josie Fernandez said.

“But our history tells us that the ethic of preservation and protection of natural resources was conceived here.”

The coin launch, held outside the park’s headquarters along Bathhouse Row and attended by U.S. Mint Director Ed Moy, was a spectacle.

Traffic was blocked on nearby Central Avenue and Reserve Street while a band played patriotic songs for the crowd. Dedicated collectors waiting to snag new coins stood in a line hundreds deep that snaked around portable fencing.

Over the next 10 weeks, anywhere from 25 million to 1 billion of the Hot Springs quarters will be produced depending on the needs of the economy, officials said.

The Tuesday event was attractive to coin collectors because it offered a chance to get a roll of quarters at the ceremonial launch of the entire America the Beautiful campaign.

Collectors affixed postage stamps to their new quarter rolls, then took them straight to the Hot Springs post office across the street and had the stamps postmarked to increase their value.

Joe Walpole and his wife, Doris Paranhos, of Vilonia planned to exchange $1,000 cash for the new quarters. Their collection of coins and precious metals is an integral part of their retirement savings.

Walpole put the value of his collection at $100,000. He’s hoping it increases in value by 10 percent to 20 percent before he retires in about 20 years.

An added bonus is that unlike stocks, the worth of coins never drops below their face value, Walpole said.

“It beats putting your money in a CD. This way I get to look at them, pick them up, feel them, touch them, show them off,” he said. “And if I have to pay the electric bill, I just pay it in quarters.”

Not everyone at the Tuesday event came to make a buck.

Mary Ragsdale didn’t know about the quarter launch until she heard about it on the radio Tuesday morning. The retiree drove down from Benton with her husband, Charles, on a lark.

The couple figured it’d be fun to get 3-month-old grandson Caleb Scott Matthews one of the new quarters at a giveaway sponsored by the Mint.

Soon, Ragsdale got seduced by the hoopla and exchanged $80 for quarter rolls she earmarked for each of her grandchildren. She spent an hour waiting in line to get the rolls postmarked.

“I’ve turned into one of those people,” she said. “You get sucked into it.”

The Hot Springs quarter’s tails side features the facade of the park’s headquarters with a hot spring fountain in the foreground.

Don Everhart, who designed it, is one of seven full time sculptors and a number of freelance artists who design the coins and medals manufactured by the Mint.

Everhart, who works out of the Mint branch in Philadelphia, has designed and sculpted more than 1,000 coins and medals.

Two of his career highlights include sculpting and designing the Congressional Gold Medal given to the Dalai Lama in 2006 and sculpting a presidential medal given to President George W. Bush in 2009 on his last day in office.

For the Hot Springs quarter, it took about four months from design conception to striking the finished product.

Everhart said last week that he knew the image had to have a water element in it. He was also attracted to the art-deco look of the park headquarters’ facade.

“It just has an order to it and a kind of refined, stylistic look,” he said.

Everhart created the image using a computer tablet and stylus. Another Mint artist then used a computer sculpting tool called a “Phantom” to mold Everhart’s design into a digital replica of the coin. The tool provides a sense of touch that helped the artist feel the virtual clay.

A computer program then analyzed the sculpture, plotted the heights and topography of the coin, and sent the information to the coin cutter.

The end result was the Hot Springs quarter, soon to be jingling in millions of pockets across the country.