1964 'Accented Hair's Little Brother' - T2o-T1R

Atsinger, DDO fs-103 has the RDV-002 and RPM#6 not sure if you have looked into variety vista but it is a great site for information its a awesome site

From what I can figure there were 4 different Kennedy half reverses.
At least ones that I have seen. These include proofs and business strikes. Strt. G/Broken rays, Strt. G/Strt. rays, Serif G/Broken rays
and Serif G/Strt. rays. Just looked at my 1968 and 1969 proof sets.
These both have Strt. G's and Strt. Rays. (so far anyway). Also checked out a few rolls of my 40% business strikes. A mix of reverses there. Seems like the type 1 rev. was used quite a bit on at least the business strikes. 40%'ers anyway. Maybe they just used the type 1 proof until it was worn out on business strikes. Not sure what was used after 1970.
Never bothered to look. The OP's math seems to work out as it is close to my own on approx. how many trans. were minted. But still just a guess. Out of approx. 75 to 125K ACH's minted which leaves
about 3.8 million (i think:) proofs left could be as much as half of those were trans. ? Someone out there must have more info on the numbers or maybe no one cared to check it out. Poor old Kennedy half dollar.

Reading a good book about die usage in these time, cam across the 1952 Superbird Quarter. Now that is neat!

Ah that explains it then. Now I just have to get an estimate of how many 'strikes' there were. As an example, if 100K were made, and dies are good for 10K strikes, then it would presume to be 9 sets of TY1OBV/TYP1REV,then at some point the obverse was pulled. That does not mean they stopped using the TYP1 Reverse though. I will never know exactly but it sure is fun trying to figure it out.

How very interesting! The only thing I have to add is that I think you numbers being melted in the last 5 years are way off. From late 2009 until early 2013 coins were being shipped off to be melted two to three times a week. I'm a dealer and I can tell you that anything minted after 1958 became fair game for the melting pot. I personally know of several thousand silver mint sets that were broken up and melted. I used to buy the cents and nickels from a couple of other dealers for face value after they were broken out of the sets. I had a few HUNDRED rolls of proof cents and nickels. Now multiply that across the nation and I think you will see what happened. My take has always been that when the dust settles we are going to see some major number changes in the silver proof sets. And discover some real rarities in the years to come. It has been well over a year since anyone has come in to offer me a Franklin Proof set. And I used to have boxes of them, they were so common.

As anecdotal evidence....

I have a number of these transitional proof Kennedy halves. I recently bought a roll of 64 Proof Kennedys and there were 12 of the transitional variety out of the 20. A previous roll I purchased had 5. Low sample number but they may not be as rare as the AH. The only way to reconcile this is to assume that the number of AH's out there are much less than the 100,000 that is generally thought.

Also in regards to that 64-D that is for sale at Heritage, the higher star of the two stars along the ray does not completely block out the ray as it does in the proofs. I'm not convinced that it is an older proof reverse die that was used in Denver, just an anomaly in the reverse dies that Denver had. Plus there would be no reason to ship proof reverse dies across the country to the branch mints.

If there were fewer AH's than 100,000 minted, the reverse dies could have been used on a lot more transitional coins than you've figured. Taking your example from above if 100,000 Ah's were minted and the reverse dies were good for another 30% or so making a total of 130,000 units combined of AH and transitional. If the accepted number of AH's are less than 100,000 (possibly a lot less) than it would stand to reason that the transitional mintage could be 3-4 x the AH mintage, say 30,000 AH to 100,000 transitional. Personally I believe that there are a lot more than 130,000 proofs out there with the 1st reverse die.

Makes sense, now I get what you are saying. I am beginning to think there might be more also even if the Kennedy Book says less so. I wonder how many AH were melted?




Very good point, but the AH popularity is there I guess because of the story and low mintage. True collectors might not be interested in general but that could change, specifically if the do away with the half dollar at some point. I just hope by rarity alone it would be worth something, and if it gets recognized as such. There are a few Kennedy half collectors myself being one of them but in no way are there near the same number as say penny collectors.