July 23, 2007: "Brand New Tires"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
This was a fun one.

We definitely wanted to focus on the car, which is the thing that makes this coin so interesting. And what better way to do that than to describe the coin as though it was a car, using the same hackneyed phrases you find in automobile ads in the classified section of your newspaper? (Actually, there are probably a lot of better ways, but this was the best one we could think of).

Our goal was to make it obvious that this is what we were doing, but not go completely overboard – it had to be somewhat subtle.

Anyway, the end result seemed to work as we had multiple inquiries about this coin.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We had many minor variations using all sorts of typical automotive descriptors in place of the ‘. . . and four brand new tires.’ line, but also one that was quite different:

"The previous owner was an elderly woman who only drove it to coin shows on Sunday." was one we almost selected, but it just seemed a little too indirect and too likely to confuse our readers.

We opted for the safer route in this case, since the concept was goofy enough to begin with.