WASHINGTON — The U.S. Mint has launched a campaign to get new "golden dollar" coins into general circulation seven months after their debut.

The problem so far — millions of the coins have been squirreled away in coin collections and piggy banks.

Mint director Jay Johnson said that Allfirst Financial of Baltimore will promote the $1 coins' use and routinely pay them to customers at its 261 branches in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and Washington, D.C. Similar arrangements are under way with banks elsewhere.

"Strong business relationships with the banking industry are critical to making golden dollars easy to get and even easier to use," Johnson said.

The new $1 coins feature a likeness of Sacagawea, the Shoshone guide who led Lewis and Clark to the Pacific two centuries ago, and 1 billion will be minted by September — more than the total number of Susan B. Anthony dollars during that coin's 21-year history.

"Susies" never caught on because they had the look, feel and color of a quarter; of 870 million minted, most wound up in government vaults.

Not so with the new bucks, a golden manganese brass alloy coin that is thicker than a quarter with an extra-wide smooth edge to distinguish it from a 25-cent piece.

The first 200 million $1 coins got snapped up within weeks. On Jan. 27, half were shipped to the Federal Reserve for distribution to banks, with another $100 million going to Wal-Mart to use as change in the company's 3,000-plus stores.

Instead of finding their way into general circulation, the new dollars helped spark a sudden interest in coins along with their cousins, the 50 state quarters. The Mint ramped up production to meet surprise demand when coin collecting suddenly caught on with more than 100 million Americans.

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The state quarters program launched in 1999 proved so popular that the American Numismatic Association gave away its stock of 15,000 quarter collector boards at the World's Fair of Money this month in Philadelphia.

The Mint's quarters program adds five state designs a year for five years in the order that states joined the Union, starting with Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia and Connecticut last year and Massachusetts, Maryland and South Carolina so far in 2000. New Hampshire and Virginia are due before 2001.

State quarters quickly worked their way into commerce, but the golden dollars didn't, partly because banks were slow to ask for them: When the Mint offered to expedite delivery to 112,000 banks last spring, fewer than 4,000 participated.


On the Net: http://www.usmint.gov.

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