Iconic fishermen's memorial rejected for quarter

GLOUCESTER, Mass. - To this oldest of America's seaports, the Man at the Wheel memorial is a shrine to thousands of fishermen who have lost their lives at sea.

To the U.S. Mint, it isn't worthy of commemoration on the back of a quarter.

Local folks, not the federal government, maintain the Gloucester Fisherman's Memorial. So the mint rejected it as ineligible for a national historic coin program, even though nearly 110,000 online voters made it their No. 1 choice of historic sites in Massachusetts.

"It has to be supervised or managed or conserved by a national agency, based on the criteria and legislation in the America the Beautiful Coin Act of 2008," said Jana Prewitt, a Mint spokeswoman.

Instead, she said, the honor will go to the runner-up in the Massachusetts online poll, Lowell's National Historical Park. It got less than 30,000 online votes.

Each of the 50 states and six U.S. territories were asked by the Mint to designate one historic site for the back of quarters produced over the next 10 years.

The overwhelming favorite in Masschusetts was the 8-foot statue of a fisherman holding a boat's wheel during a storm, with an inscription from the 107th Psalm, "They that go down to the sea in ships."

The statue is surrounded by placards embedded in granite with names of local fishermen and their ships lost at sea in the past 85 years. That includes the crew of the Andrea Gail, whose story was popularized in the book and movie, "The Perfect Storm."

The monument was sculpted in bronze by Leonard Craske in 1923 for the city's 300th anniversary and appears on the National Register of Historic Places.

The iconic figure has helped this city attract thousands of tourists, many of whom are emotionally moved by the loss it depicts.

State Sen. Bruce Tarr called the Mint's decision an "outrage" and vowed to do "whatever we can to fight this."

But Gov. Deval Patrick's office, which conducted the online poll to select a historic site, indicated nothing more could be done.

"Unfortunately," said Kimberly Haberlin, a spokeswoman for the governor, "the U.S. Mint has made the decision that this site is ineligible for this program."

This story was reported by the Gloucester, Mass., Daily Times.