1946-S

The 1946-S Roosevelt dime is the inaugural San Francisco strike of John R. Sinnock's new design, with 27,900,000 pieces produced in the same calendar year the Treasury adopted the coin on January 30, 1946, on what would have been Franklin Roosevelt's sixty-fourth birthday. San Francisco's output is the lowest of the three 1946 issues by a wide margin, trailing Philadelphia's 255,250,000 and Denver's 61,043,500, and represents the West Coast facility's first dime work since Sinnock cut the dies replacing Adolph Weinman's Mercury (Winged Liberty Head) design. The "S" mintmark sits on the reverse to the left of the torch base, the branch-mint placement Sinnock had engraved into the working dies before the design went to press. The obverse carries the left-facing Roosevelt portrait with the small "JS" initials at the bust truncation, the same initials that prompted the short-lived Joseph Stalin rumor in the months after release. The reverse pairs a vertical torch with an olive branch and an oak branch, the three devices reading as liberty, peace, and strength.

The 1946-S follows the silver-era specifications: 2.5 grams, 17.9 mm diameter, 90% silver and 10% copper, with a reeded edge. Authentication on a circulation San Francisco strike begins with the weight check at roughly 2.45 to 2.55 grams in any reasonably preserved example, examination of the "S" mintmark for clean punching without remnant of another letter beneath it, and inspection of the reeded edge for uniform spacing. First-year die work occasionally produced softness in the torch's central band lines on early-state strikes, and San Francisco's planchet preparation in 1946 tended to leave subtle frostiness across the fields that PCGS and NGC graders use to confirm production origin. Strike quality is typically strong for the date, and the Full Bands (FB) designation, applied to coins showing fully separated horizontal lines on the torch's central band, is the standard condition-rarity overlay.

The 1946-S is classified Regular in the Roosevelt series despite carrying the lowest mintage of the 1946 trio. PCGS and NGC populations are healthy across circulated and lower Mint State grades thanks to first-year set-saving, but MS-67 Full Bands examples are genuinely scarce and command meaningful premiums for registry-set collectors. For broader context, see the Roosevelt Dime series history.