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In an age with few avid coin collectors around, quarters don't generate too many oohs and ahhhs. If coins inspire anything at all, it's usually a trip to the arcade or the gumball machine.

But the institution in charge of making the money we love to spend, the U.S. Mint, hopes to change that.

MORE COINS FOR YOUR MONEY

Starting in 1999, it will issue the first in a series of circulating commemorative quarters, one for each of the 50 states. It's a hefty task, with proposals and sketches passing furiously between the Mint, governors' offices, citizens and arts councils, all to produce a design good enough to pin on the tail of the quarter.

Because each design must show something-- an historical figure, landmark, natural resource-- that represents the state, the Mint considers the project a kind of circulating lesson plan for U.S. citizens, where a flip of the coin gives a one-inch peephole into a different state.

"I think it'll be like the license plate game," said Peggy Amsterdam, director of the Delaware Division of the Arts who helped select a design for the state. "When my brother and I used to travel, we would try to find every state. You would learn through the license plates all the state slogans."

NEW COINS = MORE MONEY?

New coins also will save the government money. Coins are cheaper to use than paper money because they stay in circulation 30 or 40 years, while the average dollar bill wears out after just eighteen months. Some estimates show that converting to dollar coins could save the Treasury $150 million a year, which is no small pocket change.

But to people who collect coins, numismatists, the real challenge of the project isn't saving some bucks or teaching students the difference between Idaho and Iowa -- it's reviving the dying hobby of coin collecting. "The domino effect of this is that coin collecting will be given sort of a renaissance, a shot of adrenaline," said Anthony Swiatek, a professional coin collector (called a numismatist) in Manhasset, New York who has been visiting classrooms to promote the hobby for 22 years.

Coin collecting does seem to need a boost these days. Dave Harper, editor of Numismatic News, estimates that the number of collectors in the United States has dropped from over three million in 1964 to about 500,000 today.

"The collecting fraternity is continually worried. Eventually all the old geezers will bump off."

Richard Doty, curator of coins at the Smithsonian Institute, views the situation this way: "The collecting fraternity is continually worried. Eventually all the old geezers will bump off."

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It seems strange that coin collecting would be unpopular. Like baseball cards, stamps and comic books, coins seem to be universal collectibles that everyone has stashed in a drawer or attic somewhere.

Many collectors blame the lack of excitement on the U.S. Mint. American coins haven't changed in 50 years. "Our coins have changed so little that we tend to take them very much for granted," said Robert Hoge, Curator for the American Numismatic Association.

HAVE YOUR SAY!

But that soon will change. The government is also working on making new dollar coins. And you can have your say. Secretary of the Treasury Robert E. Rubin has established a Dollar Coin Design Advisory Committee and anyone with design ideas can discuss their ideas with the U.S. Mint. Contact Michael White at the U.S. Mint at (202) 874-7565. Production of the new dollar coin is expected to begin in December 1999 and should circulate by early 2000. To meet that deadline designs need to be ready by September 1998.