Still Won’t Buy Much

You know those people on TV who volunteer their entire faces and other body parts for an extreme makeover? Well, it’s not voluntary, but Thomas Jefferson is getting one too. On new 5-cent pieces to appear this winter, the U.S. Mint gives the third president an enhanced profile: bigger head, bolder, bushier eyebrows, more determined chin and cheeks and, who’d have guessed, a rather Bob Hope-like nose. Mint officials call it a “fresh contemporary look” for the diminishing nickel, the next dropped coin people will stop stooping to pick up. This coin change comes a year after Andrew Jackson got his hair redone for the new $20 bill.

Jefferson, both a founding and a philandering father, will be on the nickel’s left side gazing to the right, impervious to his declining stock among historians. His eyes seem focused on the distance like a visionary who might order two someones named Lewis and Clark to conduct a historic exploratory expedition across the newly purchased American heartland and Northwest.

Besides being a coin collector himself, Jefferson was the president who authorized James Madison to make the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 for a sum of coins that ended up being 7.5 times the $2 million appropriated by Congress. Even without Montana, it was a bargain.

The nickel has carried Jefferson’s pig-tailed image since 1938. The new “tails” side will show either a grazing bison or a tree-lined Pacific coast with the quote, “Ocean in view! O! Joy!” William Clark jotted that in his journal before realizing they still had to row all the way back east on a red-eye canoe.

While we’re making over historical figures, let’s add several inches to Madison’s 5-foot-4 frame. Adjust Lincoln’s hat choice to something lower than a basketball hoop, maybe a Cubs cap. Trim some of those Santa Claus presidential beards. Make Grant a little less dazed on the new $50s. And why confine image improvements to dead presidents? Perhaps Mint officials could make a mint by offering to give a “fresh contemporary look” to our family photos from the 1960s and 1970s. They could erase those hairdos, sideburns and geeky glasses, along with the leisure suits and neckties that resembled napkins. Now, that’d be a makeover worth more than a nickel.