July 4, 2011: "Sailed the Ocean"

Author:
D. Wnuck

Concept:
We thought the wild blue toning on this Columbian Half needed to be highlighted, and what better way to do that than to draw on the famous child’s poem featuring the line "Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue"? Exactly.

Which then made featuring the ship on the reverse of this coin (which coincidentally seems to be sailing on an ocean of blue toning) a numismatic no-brainer.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We knew we were going with this basic idea, but spent a lot of time trying to come up with a way to begin the caption with "Columbus sailed the Ocean . . ." (so that it sounded like the poem), and then put the line break immediately afterward (even though this short caption didn’t really require one), in order to delay the inevitable ‘zinger’ an extra split-second.