April 5, 2010:

"Great-Grandmother"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We are not suggesting that the Indian Princess depicted on this exceptional gold dollar is actually Sacagawea’s great-great-great-grandmother (at least we don’t think she is), but rather that this coin is the conceptual precursor of the current generation of gold (actually golden-colored) dollars, including the Sacagaweas.

Which we think is an extremely apt comparison in this instance, since no one spent this one either.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We had a few ideas which made philosophically similar (but different) references to this piece being an ancestor of today’s coins, including the very literal "The original golden dollar."

We thought this might be a problem though, since the featured coin is a Type II example (as opposed to a Type I which has a depiction of Liberty on the obverse), and thus cannot be considered the original one.

Which then led us to "It used to be that golden dollars were actually made of gold.", but that sounded to us like the lament of an extremely bitter person who longs for the good old days. And who the heck wants to read an ad like that? Exactly.

So we opted for the great-great-great-grandmother approach instead.

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"Great-Grandmother"