If you’ve ever seen the Kennedy Center Honors award ceremony, you can envision the rainbow ribbon with a gold name plate hanging around the neck of some of the nation’s most treasured artists.
President Donald Trump recently took over as chair of the board of the Kennedy Center, and announced that Tiffany & Company will be redesigning those medallions for the next honors ceremony.
WTOP talked with the family who has been making the medallions since the very first ceremony 47 years ago.
In the spring of 1978, James “Jimmy” Baturin, now 86 years old, said he was sitting in his shop The Baumgarten Company, known as “America’s Rubber Stamp Factory” on 11th Street NW in D.C., when he had a unique visitor.
“The Kennedy Center came in, they opened up a set of drawings on my counter and just asked me if I could make these awards,” Baturin told WTOP.
He said when he made the prototype he made the name plates out of brass because the design called for gold, but that was a little pricey for making the first trial ones.
“I said, ‘They’ll look the same. I’ll make them out of brass. They’ll look fine for the purpose of a prototype,'” Baturin said. “They loved it, and we’ve been doing business with them ever since. I’ve made all of the Kennedy Center Honors since the very first day.”
The Baturin family, who lives in Bethesda, Maryland, has made around 255 medallions for every Kennedy Center Honors recipient. He and his wife Mila and their children have made it a family affair.
Baturin said he was on-call the weekends of the honors gala and there was one time in particular he had to run to the Kennedy Center for a medallion emergency. One of the honorees accidentally pulled the award and its ribbon apart.
“They’re big, they’re hard to handle,” he said. “And Ray Charles pulled his apart.”
So he had to make a little change to the construction of the medallions.
“From that moment on, I changed the adhesive that held them together so nobody was ever going to be able to pull it apart again,” Jimmy said.
He said there was only one time where they made the medallions a little different. That was for the four recipients of the award for the Broadway show “Hamilton.” The Kennedy Center wanted them to be unique since multiple people were receiving the award.
“Made them 25% smaller, and put see-through crystals on each engraved plate so that you could see it from any angle that you were looking at it from,” Baturin said.
He said they had every intention of continuing to make them and passing off the partnership to their children. But with the announcement that Tiffany & Company will be taking over the medallions, Baturin said they weren’t surprised since the Kennedy Center has a new chairman. But he said it was sad that it’s the end of an era.
“It’s disappointing, I could cry over it, but that isn’t going to do any good,” he said.
His wife Mila said it’s been a wonderful journey that they are grateful to have been a part of.
“It’s our legacy, and we’ve always been very proud of being part of American history,” Mila said.
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