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09/28/2016 08:30 AMOn the face of it, George W. Bush and Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider are about as alike as night and day.
But the former president and the headbanger have at least one thing in common: each has a ring handcrafted by Clinton’s own David Landino.
About 500 of David’s one-of-a-kind designs—D.L. Heritage Coin Rings—are in circulation around the world, as far as Australia and Great Britain, and throughout the U.S.
By day, David is senior manager of security systems for Yale University’s Public Safety Department, where he’s worked for the last 22 years.
“I manage the team that plans access patterns for electronic ID cards, burglar alarm systems, and electronic access investigations,” he explains.
In the small hours of the night, however, when his kids are tucked into bed, he gets out his blowtorch and mallet and makes heirloom jewelry.
It’s relaxing, he says, to spend two or three hours hammering at a piece of steel—the way a long run or a soak in the tub might clear another person’s mind. (Sidenote: His wife, Susan, and their children have not always found the nighttime hammering quite as relaxing, as when David’s bench was set up in the dining room or, worse, the master bedroom. He is currently set up in the basement, where he is working to create a “proper shop.”)
Lost and Found
“My first ring came about because I lost my wedding band,” he says.
It was Palm Sunday, 2013, when he looked down at his hand and realized his ring was gone. At the time, he and Susan had been married 14 years.
Crushed, David contacted the jeweler who made his wedding band.
“Unfortunately,” he says, “the replacement price was astronomical.”
For days, David fiddled absently with his ring finger, checking for a ring that wasn’t there.
“I would habitually flick my finger, and the missing ring was making me slightly crazy,” he says. “So I set out to make a meaningful replacement.”
A lifelong coin collector, he began researching whether or not a coin could be converted into a ring.
“Come to find out, soldiers in World War II made what’s known as spoon tap rings out of silver coins. It was a form of trench art, meaning they would make these rings to pass the time when not in battle. The process involved tapping on the rim of a coin hundreds of times using a spoon from their mess kit until the coin flattened and widened out. Eventually the tapping would cause the coin to flare out and curl over. Once the coin got to be the width of a band, a hole was bored into the center and the coin could be worn. This process nearly obliterated all detail on the coin, but it served its purpose.”
David set out to copy the spoon-tap technique, and within a few hours he’d made himself a ring.
“The OCD in me was quelled,” he jokes, adding that once his family and friends saw his replacement band, “suddenly everyone wanted one.”
Tools of the Trade
David’s earliest creations, he says, were made with basic tools.
“A hammer, a steel anvil, sandpaper, and a coin were all that was required,” he says.
His idea at the time was to make rings in exchange for a few bags of groceries that he could donate to Shoreline Soup Kitchens & Pantries (SSKP) in Clinton. His children—daughter Ainsleigh, who’s now 10, and son Colton, 7—delivered the donated groceries every Wednesday, he says, “and gave back to the community we love.”
With all of D.L. Heritage Coin Rings’ first-year proceeds going to charity, the Landino family was able to donate 1,300 pounds of groceries to SSKP.
As he’s honed his art, David has replaced and added a number of hand tools that allow him to accurately size a ring and preserve all of a coin’s original detail, inside and out. Examine one of his rings closely and see the crisp detail on the obverse and reverse sides of the coin, as well as his stamp—a cursive “DL”—inside the band. With the refined process, creating a finished piece now involves a few hours of work.
“First, a center mark is made on the coin,” he explains (He uses calipers to measure the center precisely). “Then, depending on the final ring size, a hole is cut from the center of the coin using a jeweler’s saw.” The hole, a hair’s width, is extremely fine. Then the coin is annealed and hammered down a steel mandrel with a leather mallet until the ring is sized and shaped properly.
“These new tools take a beating—literally,” David says. “And because tool replacement isn’t cheap, my business model had to change slightly to allow me to continue. Now we donate 25 percent of every sale to the pantry in the way of personal hygiene products and food, which enables me to replace broken and worn equipment as necessary while still providing for the Shoreline Soup Kitchens & Food Pantry.”
David has also figured out new uses for the centers of his coins—some of which have interesting and intricate designs and can be made into pendants.
“I don’t like to waste anything,” he says. “Now if I could only figure out how to reuse some of the dust particles.” (He’s working on a concept.)
Through his coin ring sales, David has not only stocked the shelves at the food pantry, but also provided financial support for The Cove Center for Grieving Children in Meriden, which helped his family through the sudden loss of their two-year-old nephew.
“They answered a call for us at a terrible time in our family’s lives and helped us talk with our children about Brayden’s passing. We needed help with delivering the tragic news to our own children and didn’t know where to turn,” he says. “The people at The Cove were so helpful.”
In 2015, D.L. Heritage Coin Rings donated 25 percent of the year’s profits to The Cove—”We felt it was the least we could do.”
At Yale, David has also turned an in-house potluck party into an annual Toys for Tots chili cook-off, where the price of admission for every taster is a new, unwrapped toy for a boy or girl.
His primary benefactor, however, is SSKP.
Find a Penny, Pick It Up
His uncle and grandfather before him collected coins, and that’s where David’s interest bloomed. His grandfather, who worked as a toll collector in the 1950s and ‘60s, picked up loose change—silver coins—that spilled onto the ground outside the tollbooth.
“That’s how he started,” David says.
David picked up the hobby at age eight, and his own personal collection centers on late 18th- and early 19th century U.S. Large Cents—the first coins ever struck at the U.S. mint—which are bigger and heavier than modern quarters.
“My prized possessions are a 1794 U.S. Large Cent and a 1955 doubled die Lincoln penny,” he says.
In 1955, during one of the night shifts at the Philadelphia Mint, one of the obverse dies was misaligned—a minting error that resulting in a doubled image on about 20,000 to 24,000 coins that were introduced into circulation. Many of these were distributed as change in 23-cent cigarette packs sold in vending machines. The machines took a quarter, and two cents’ change was included with each cigarette pack.
As for the coins David now uses to make his jewelry, most of his clients ask for a specific year—usually to mark a birthdate or significant event in their lives.
“I’ve made rings for people of all walks of life, from all over the world, to honor weddings, anniversaries, the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one.”
Wedding band sets are his favorite.
“Many of them are for folks looking to buck the trend of traditional gold wedding rings. A coin ring allows them to choose meaningful years to carry with them. Some ask for the year they are being married, while others will choose birth years of grandparents, parents, or children,” he says. “For me, it’s humbling to know that someone has chosen a piece of my art for the rest of their lives.”
Other than Dubya and Dee Snider—who found D.L. Heritage Coin Rings online and talked to David personally on the phone—other notables wearing D.L. Heritage designs include television director Guy Norman Bee (whose credits include E.R., Third Watch, Criminal Minds, Ringer, and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit); Big Brother and Survivor reality TV contestant Caleb Reynolds; Internet sensation Marty Ray; and actor Jeffrey Pierce.
The Family Jewels
David was born in New Haven and grew up close to the seawall and Lighthouse Park.
“As many Italian-Americans did at the time, I lived in a two-family home with my grandparents upstairs, and me, my sister, mom, and dad on the first floor. Most all of my childhood memories involve my family, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.”
From a young age, he says, he felt the importance of being together for family meals, picnics, and parties, and he cherished the support structure that a close-knit family fosters.
“This is a principle that my wife and I practice to this day with our children.”
Clinton residents since 2003, David and Susan involve their kids in the family business and their charitable work.
“Ainsleigh and Colton handle weekly food deliveries to the pantry, hauling the bags from the car, weighing the food on the scale there, and unpacking the bags for the pantry volunteers,” he says. “We have them involved in order to instill a sense of community and to teach them that there are people in need of help and that we should do as much as we can to support our community.”
Susan, he says, is the bookkeeper, shopper and “couponer extraordinaire.”
“She’s capable of turning a 25 percent donation into much more by combining coupons and sending away for deals from companies. Her efforts allow us to maximize our giving potential.”
Over the last three years, their efforts have resulted in roughly 2,500 pounds of food being purchased and delivered to SSKP.
David’s designs range from about $25 to $160.
For more information, check out D.L. Heritage Coins on Facebook or see David’s work on display at the Clinton Art Gallery, 20 East Main Street. In addition to coin rings, David has expanded his handcrafted jewelry collection to include bracelets, rings made from vintage demitasse spoon handles, wire and gemstone wrap rings, and cold-forged necklaces featuring turquoise, upcycled china, and Fordite (also known as Detroit agate), formed out of layers of paint deposits from the early automobile industry.