Congratulations to John Kleeberg for the honour of the Archer M. Huntington Award.

Waters (1906) notes that the P (eye) T refers to Pitt, not Thomas Paine, apparently a rebus. Waters also thinks this more likely a Skidmore piece than a Spence piece. In Atkins, the predecessor to Dalton & Hamer, Waters notes it as END OF PITT, N. 798.

It is in Dalton & Hamer. I have had a couple of them. The PT at the top of the reverse has nothing to do with Thomas Paine. if you look closely, it has letter P, then an EYE in the center, then the T. P “eye” T, for Pitt. It is political, and is anti-Pitt, so it is End of P—T, or end of Pitt. The maker in this case is FOR Thomas Paine.

With regard to the blind man nickel patterns, there are at least 4 known of J1682 and at least 5 known of J1697.

Regrettably, I do not have great images of the edge device on these which is why one does not appear on the uspatterns.com website under either pattern listing.

I am attaching an image of the Harry Bass Foundation example that was sold in Heritage 2014 ANA sale with arrows pointing to 4 of the 5 bars on the obverse picture and 3 on the reverse image. The 5th bar is hiding under the upper right white arm which holds the coin in place.

If anyone owns an example and can supply an edge on image of either pattern, that would be greatly appreciated.

I read with great interest that in 2014 the British government rejected giving the famous author Roald Dahl the honor of a commemorative coin on his 100th birthday in 2016, on the grounds of anti-Semitism. I just read Wikipedia on Dahl’s remarkable military, literary and personal lives. In the late 1990s, I had the opportunity several times to meet Dahl’s first wife, American stage and film star Patricia Neal, in Manhattan before her passing in 2010. Your article represents an interesting intersection of numismatic news with the tumultuous history of the 20th century.

As most of us know, Dahl was one of Britain’s most celebrated 20th-century writers. He would have deserved the recognition on a commemorative coin, had he not also been so impulsively outspoken, especially in the wake of the notorious 1982 massacre of many hundreds (some say thousands) of defenseless Palestinian civilians in Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Israel’s Phalangist allies. Dahl’s poorly chosen anti-Israeli comments at the time were quickly portrayed as anti-Semitic – he denied it – but the damage was done. Everyone who was living in the Middle East in 1982, as I was, vividly remembers the global uproar surrounding those events near Beirut, which forced the eventual resignation of Israel’s defense minister, Ariel Sharon, once one of Israel’s greatest generals, who eventually had to take “personal responsibility” for the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

According to Wikipedia, Dahl had a very distinguished World War II record in the Royal Air force, as he shot down a number of German and Vichy bombers as well as several German fighter planes in aerial combat in the Battle of Athens. Before that, he nearly died in the crash in the Egyptian desert of an obsolete RAF fighter plane he was piloting, after being given erroneous flight directions. The accident caused severe head injuries that left him temporarily unconscious and blinded for some time.

Dahl and Neal married in 1953 and had five children. She won the first-ever Tony Award in 1947 for Best Featured Actress in a Play. In 1963, she won the Oscar for Best Actress in “Hud.” In 1965, in her late 30s, Neal suffered three cerebral aneurisms, losing the ability to walk and talk, and Dahl took personal charge of nursing her back to health in the following years. Eventually she was able to resume her acting career. In 1983, Dahl and Neal divorced and he married an old flame, Felicity d’Abreu Crosland, who was related to the British Royal Family.

I was fortunate to meet Ms. Neal a few times in the 1990s, when she was invited to be a special guest at functions of Manhattan’s Twelfth Night Club, America’s oldest ladies-of-the-theater group, founded in the 1890s. I have been “a gentleman friend” of the club for over 20 years. At our last meeting in 1999, Ms. Neal signed her autobiography for club members and told them about her lead role in her final feature film, “Cookie’s Fortune,” which was released that year.