Katie Thornton

Yeah, so Paul submitted his original design for the Missouri State Quarter Contest to the First Lady's office, which was running the competition back in 2001.

He had collected coins as a kid, and he thought his design would be a cool way to honor the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

So he was really stoked when he won.

And for a while, not much happened.

He says he didn't hear anything.

But then in the spring of the following year, he got a message.

The Mint's design looked kind of like Paul's, but Paul and others thought it was just really ugly.

I would hope so, but they did eventually just get rid of that word altogether.

Yeah.

You know, Paul says he didn't get much from them.

The Mint said it was uncoinable and they said that Paul didn't understand like metal flow and things like this.

And I guess multiple private mints who make, you know, special tokens and things like that reached out to him and they were like, oh, this is coinable.

We would love to make it.

But but Paul says, you know, from the Mint, they just sort of sprung these these design changes on him.

no, he was not going to let this go.

He was not going down without a fight.

Well, it would have been a dud because what Paul didn't realize was that the state legislature wasn't actually in session at the time.

But one thing that Paul did at this protest was he took about 20 quarters, just normal quarters, because, you know, at this point, the Missouri state quarter hadn't actually come out yet.

They'd just been publicizing the design.

And he printed up some round stickers with his Missouri quarter design on it.