Numismatic Ms.

The new buck is a lady

A new coin will be jingling in Americans' pockets and purses beginning this week, or so the Treasury Department hopes. The coin is an eleven-sided dollar bearing a likeness of Susan B. Anthony, the 19th century suffragist leader, whose drive for women's rights at the ballot box led to the enactment in 1920, 14 years after her death, of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote nationwide.

Lest the new buck go the way of the Eisenhower dollar and the Jefferson $2 bill, both of which had disadvantages and have just about disappeared from active circulation, the Mint is spending $600,000 on what amounts to an affirmative-action campaign to help the numismatic Ms. Anthony get ahead.

Among other things, a 20-page press kit being distributed by the Mint urges bankers to "consider naming your new branch the Susan B. Anthony branch" and sponsoring poetry contests in her name. Retailers are encouraged to "schedule a Susan B. Anthony sale week," and citizens' groups, are exhorted to throw bingo or "Susan"parties using the coins as prizes. Diagrams show merchants how to reorganize their cash drawers to accommodate the coin.

Store owners had no place in their cash registers for the $2 bills when they were introduced in 1976, and some found it too easy to mistake them for $20 bills. The heavy, poker chip-sized Eisenhower dollars proved clumsy to carry around after they appeared in 1971, and are now pretty much relegated to the slot machines in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

But Treasury hopes for the Anthony buck are high. The coins, which are made of nickel-covered copper and contain no silver, weigh only a third as much as the Ike dollar. They are also cheaper to produce than paper dollars--3-c- for a coin that lasts 15 years vs. 1.8-c- for a bill that survives 18 months. The coin's distinctive undecagonal shape, besides being an aid to the blind, is also intended to help store clerks and bank tellers speed up transaction time and reduce errors; it should also cut down on jamming in currency-counting machines used at banks. In fact, the " Susan's" only flaw may be its size, which is just slightly larger than a quarter. Some women have already been heard to snicker that they do not know what that is supposed to reflect--the status of women or the status of the dollar.

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