CCAC makes history on Twitter

A new page was turned yesterday at a meeting of the Citizens Coin Advisory Committee.

Member Donald Scarinci sent out Tweets on Twitter as the meeting progressed. Since I was not in Philadelphia to attend the meeting, having on-the-spot commentary was both interesting and helpful.

I hope others feel this way and he will make Tweets a regular part of his role at CCAC.

Don told me that he started using Twitter just last week.

“This is probably numismatic history because it is the first time a CCAC meeting will be reported on Twitter,” he wrote me in an e-mail.

Naturally the primary purpose of the CCAC meeting was to choose a reverse design for the 2011 Native American dollar that it can recommend to the Treasury secretary, who makes the final decision. However, we might well remember it for the Tweets instead.

The CCAC endorsed a design that was also endorsed by the Commission of Fine Arts. It depicts a peace pipe being passed with just the pipe and the hands shown.

It marks the Wampanoag Treaty of 1621.

What I am really jealous of is not the Tweets so much as the tour of the Philadelphia Mint where the CCAC members were shown the new five-ounce silver America the Beautiful coins. These will have the same design as the program's circulating quarters.

Because they have to be three-inches in diameter, the five-ounce silver coins are very thin and have to be struck on a Graebener coining press that was specially purchased for this job.

Congratulations, Don, on taking us all another step into the 21st century.