Director of The United States Mint
Brooks was appointed by President Nixon, the third woman named to the post. During her administration, she oversaw the initiation of the Eisenhower dollar coin, as well as the redesign of the United States Bicentennial coinage including the quarter, half dollar, and dollar coins for the United States Bicentennial.
She is also credited with saving the original San Francisco Mint building, known as the "Granite Lady," by transferring it to the Treasury Department. The building, one of the few to survive the Great Earthquake of 1906, had been vacant since 1937 and fallen into disrepair. It is now both a National Historic Landmark and a California Historical Landmark. The city renovated it and located the Museum of the City of San Francisco in the building. Brooks received the “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” Award in 1974 from the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau for her preservation efforts.
During Brooks' tenure as Director of the Mint, she famously led a tour of the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky for members of the United States Congress and the news media on September 23, 1974. As of 2012 this tour still is the only time that the inside of the USBD has been seen by members of the public.
In addition, Brooks was awarded the American Numismatic Association’s Medal of Merit in 1988, and was the first woman to receive the United States Treasury Department's highest honor, the Alexander Hamilton Award. She was inducted into the University of Idaho Alumni Association’s Hall of Fame in 1970. The university also conferred upon her an honorary doctorate in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Mary Brooks
Famous quotes containing the words director, united and/or states:
“The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)