Summit County Citizens Voice

Home of snazzy bumper stickers and shiny new quarters

Palm trees. Dugout canoes. Frigate birds. Need we say more?

Good afternoon and welcome to VoiceOver, Summit County’s only column that is holding in its hands a brand new quarter with the logo of the Mariana Islands on it.

We’re looking at this thing, saying, “Whoah, the Mariana Islands! How cool is that? We sort of vaguely knew  the U.S. had some possessions way out there in the Pacific, but have they already run out of states to put on the quarters?”

Dozens of VoiceOver Readers: “Don’t know, we are not really that into coins, except for using them in vending machines to buy Twinkies. But we will check in with the American Numismatic Society and find out if there’s any special sequence or logic to the way the quarters are released.”

VoiceOver: Cool! We’re thinking there are probably some numismatists out there in Summit County, and we’re hoping we’ll here from one of them. But we have to tell you, these were about the shiniest quarters we’ve ever seen. We’re thinking it was because we got them as change in a coffee shop/bakery down in the vicinity of the Capitol, where we were having coffee.

Thing is, this coffee shop is just around the corner from the Denver Mint, and we got to wondering if maybe a few rolls of these new quarters fell off the back of the truck, because every single one of them was totally new. We almost felt bad putting them in the parking meter outside. We felt more like we should be putting them in a nice black velvet thingy and saving them for our grandkids.

In the meantime, we checked out the Mariana Islands online, and now we can tell you, they are located waaaaay out there, in the vicinity of the Philippines and just west of the Mariana Trench, the deepest known part of the ocean.

DOVOR: “Really? How deep?”

VO: Super-deep. You could put Mt. Everest down in there and have some room left over for some of Summit County’s smaller peaks. At its deepest, the trench drops down 11,034 meters, or 36,200 feet. Let’s put it this way: You wouldn’t want to drop a quarter in there!

DOVOR: “And what about the Marianas? We’ve been feeling chilly the last few days and we’d love to at least think about someplace warm and sunny, even though it doesn’t look like there’s any extended vacay time in our near future.”

VO: Right. Twas Ferdinand Magellan who first laid European eyes on these islands in 1521 during a Spanish circumnavigation of the world. During Spanish domination of the Pacific, galleons used the islands as a stop between Acapulco and the Philippines.

The U.S. took them over as a result of the Spanish-American War in 1898. A year later, Spain sold the rest of the islands in the vicinity to Germany for about $4.1 million, not a bad deal for a bunch of groovy tropical islands. And yes, they are hot, tropical.

DOVOR: “Sweet. We’re getting our seersucker suit dry-cleaned as we speak, dusting off our trusty Panama hat and clicking over to CheapTickets.com as we speak. Do we need a passport?

VO: Good question. Not sure, but we always recommend carrying a passport. Much easier to make a quick getaway that way.

We gotta run. Need to build a deep-sea submersible. But the first three people to answer our trivia question of the day will be first in line for a snazzy new Summit County Voice bumper sticker, just as soon as they’re printed.

The question is, how many states have already been commemorated in the U.S. Mint’s popular series?

Have a stellar weekend.

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