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)
“I thought it altogether proper that I should take a brief furlough from official duties at Washington to mingle with you here to-day as a comrade, because every President of the United States must realize that the strength of the Government, its defence in war, the army that is to muster under its banner when our Nation is assailed, is to be found here in the masses of our people.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomac ... and that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)