Business Strike 1964 Accented Hair Half Dollars - Did They Exist?

FlyingAl

Do they exist? It is extremely likely, that at one point, they did. However, they were lost to the melting pot.

Let's take a look:

Letter one - Eva Adams instructs Mr. Sura of the process to produce dies of the new design for the Kennedy half, and then clearly says that he should strike trial coins from the BUSINESS dies, and produce the Proof dies after those trials had been approved. This letter is dated the 12th of December.

.
.

Letter two - Adams receives three of those trials on the 13th and then sends them to be destroyed. We will see later on that these coins were certainly Accented Hairs, but were not Proofs.

.
.

Letter three - Ms. Kennedy's revisions are received on the 19th, where she suggests that the Accented Hair details should be removed. This confirms that all of the coins above were Accented Hair business strikes.

.
.

Finally, we see the recollections of Gilroy Roberts, the man who designed the obverse. He recollects that Proof dies were not put into production until well after the trials were struck, and mentions how carefully the trial strikes were handled.


.
.
Do they exist today? Extremely unlikely - see the original letter in this thread where Adams mentions that all trial strikes should be destroyed. There is no reason to believe that her order was not carried out.

Additionally, we see the below letter in which Secretary of the Treasury Dillon mentions the first through fourth Proof halves were saved and documented, with the little caveat at the end that "these... are the only special coins in existence". This makes it clear that ALL trial strikes of the Kennedy half dollar were in fact destroyed in 1964, and before March 13th.

IkesT

Interesting documents; thanks for posting!

Neither the part in the hair or the lines on the cheek (the details identified by Eva Adams for modification) vary between the regular design and the accented hair variety. The accented hair variety is just a modified version of the regular design where additional incuse hair details were engraved on a regular hub. That being the case, it appears from the available information that the original trial strike design they are referring to in these documents is a different version that predated both the regular adopted design and the accented hair variety.

If so, there could also have been accents added to that original version in creating the regular adopted design, as Roberts suggests, but since we haven't seen the earlier version, we don't know what and where those accents would be (and these then would not be the same accents found on the accented hair variety).

FlyingAl

@IkesT said:
Interesting documents; thanks for posting!

Neither the part in the hair or the lines on the cheek (the details identified by Eva Adams for modification) vary between the regular design and the accented hair variety. The accented hair variety is just a modified version of the regular design where additional incuse hair details were engraved on a regular hub. That being the case, it appears from the available information that the original trial strike design they are referring to in these documents is a different version that predated both the regular adopted design and the accented hair variety.

If so, there could also have been accents added to that original version in creating the regular adopted design, as Roberts suggests, but since we haven't seen the earlier version, we don't know what and where those accents would be (and these then would not be the same accents found on the accented hair variety).

This may also be true (a different change to the original design). Regardless, the general story of the patterns would ring true. More research would need to be done to confirm what exactly what changed.

Mr_Spud

I know of one coin dealer who once told me they saw one, but I’m guessing it could have been a proof that just looked like a business strike or something like that.