Crosser and been informed that "if we do not get the authority to print the coins now it will be useless". The following day, Bulkley moved that the Senate concur in the House amendments, which it did, and the bill was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on May 5, 1936. Preparation Brenda Putnam, a well-known sculptor, was engaged to design the coin. On May 1, even before Roosevelt signed the legislation, the Director of the Mint, Nellie Tayloe Ross, sent sketches that had been submitted by Putnam to the Commission of Fine Arts. That commission had been charged by President Warren G. Harding's 1921 executive order with rendering advisory opinions on the designs of public artworks, including coins. On May 2, commission chairman Charles Moore responded to Ross, giving preliminary approval, and stating that one of its members would work with Putnam as she prepared the necessary plaster models. That representative was Lee Lawrie, who suggested to Putnam that she use stars to represent the cities of the Great Lakes region. Putnam had placed, on the map on the reverse, sketches of buildings to represent the sites of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Toronto. When Lawrie wrote to Moore to report this and other progress, Moore joked about the coin having an enlarged star for Cleveland, Putnam's models were approved by the commission on June 2, 1936. The Medallic Art Company of New York reduced the models to half-dollar sized hubs from which coinage dies could be prepared. Design Putnam's obverse features Moses Cleaveland, in a depiction based on the only known portrait of him, by an unknown artist. Surrounding Cleaveland are two lines of inscription, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA * HALF DOLLAR and MOSES CLEAVELAND * LIBERTY. The designer's initials, "BP", are beneath Cleaveland's head. The reverse shows a map of the Great Lakes region with nine stars to represent its cities, listed from west to east: Duluth, Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto, Buffalo, and Rochester. Cleveland gets the largest star, which is transfixed by a compass. Anthony Swiatek and Walter Breen, in their book on commemoratives, stated that "we have not found documentation, but we suspect that the compass was intended to show Cleveland as the center of industry within a radius of approximately 900 miles", thus encompassing, the authors suggested, not only the Great Lakes cities represented, but New York, Boston, Washington, and