What if you knew where to get the keys to the city of Ruston or Ponchatoula? What if you could create a medal that distinguished you as a medical resident at Charity hospital circa 1936 or a Shriner from the lodge in Harahan? Would you indulge in a little role-playing or add a few things to your curriculum vitae? Most of us would, but the power to bestow these appellations lies with one Louisiana family, and it has been the keeper of medals, awards and honorific medallions for more than one hundred years.
Buried deep behind the classic, tin-ceilinged storefront of Adler’s Jewelers on Canal Street in New Orleans rests an archaic-looking machine, complete with leather belts, cogs and gargantuan iron weights. It is a manual press and in a flutter of dust, galloping straps and a crash of weighted dies, it has hammered out commemorative totems for just about every significant Louisiana event for the past century and a half.
The Adler family was called upon to create a coin to commemorate Louisiana’s Centennial in 1912 and when the present Bicentennial Commission started looking into how to honor this year’s two-hundredth birthday, it called upon the Adlers again. A lot has changed since the first centennial coin was stuck in 1912. Those organizing those earlier festivities could not know that the country was about to be embroiled in a bloody war or that a pandemic of influenza would carry off millions who had survived the war.
They could not know that the great flood that prompted the raising of the levees was a bit more than a decade away or that names like Betsy and Katrina would take on a spectral character. About the only things that have not changed since that first coin was made are the machine itself and the family that watches over it.
On a recent fall afternoon, Tiffany Adler, a member of the fourth generation to run the family enterprise, showed me the coin Adler’s has designed to honor the state’s two centuries within the American republic. It is a heavy, copper-hued thing that shows the state and its major rivers on one side and a variation of the familiar pelican motif on the other.
The coin is a weighty thing, more like a doubloon from the Spanish Main than a quarter you might drop into a vending machine. It has substance. It has gravitas. It is, I gather, meant to impart some of the rich substance that has shaped the past two hundred years of Louisiana history.
Our state is blessed with a richer history than most. Spanish, English and French flags have flown here. Portions of the Florida parishes were even their own country for a time. Sometimes it is easy to look past all that history because it is so ever present. We are just rolling off of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, the greatest land deal in national history and a defining moment in our eventual path to statehood. So, it is good to have a heavy, symbol-laden thing to remind us of all that is past.
It is also good that this commemorative coin is pounded out by a Victorian era contraption that has played a humble and unsung role in so many of our state’s proud moments.
Upstairs from the hulking manual press is a table full of smudged and oil-stained dies. These are the templates for the aforementioned keys to the city and medals to commemorate long forgotten associations. Each is roughly the size of a big-built man’s clenched fist and weighs around forty pounds. Dug into these lead forms is an impression conceived to mark a point in the history of a life, a town or an institution. They are the obverse and reverse of memory. Laid out in a dimly lit corner of Adler’s already storied structure, the dies are a fascinating repository of past triumphs.
The Bicentennial coin that the Number 2 model press from the Standard Machinery Company of Auburn, Rhode Island, will make to mark this year-long celebration will be one more in its legacy of stories told in stamped metal.
A two-hundredth anniversary of statehood may strike some as an academic distinction, an arbitrary way of marking time. But the stack of dies above Adler’s tells an altogether different story.
Details. Details. Details. louisianabicentennial2012.com
