Regarding the two coins. I believe the second one has a little more wear, including a nick on the cheek and across the 3, and more wear on the hair. Why could these not have been from the same die?
One of the happy times of my childhood in the 1940s was when my father came home from collecting monthly insurance payments on his route (they had 5, 10 and 25 cents per month policies). We would go over all the coins and he would let me pick out the old/unusual ones including Indian head pennies, steel pennies (WWII), V nickles, walking liberties, etc. I still have them plus earlier coins my father had found including several large pennies.
Mother let me go through her purse and I still have a little safe that once held my “coin collection” until the ice cream man came by and I was without funds except for....
Look at the bottom of the lettering on both coins plus the period after liberty and the date on the second coin, not on the first.
That's a great memory to have. Somewhere around here there's some oddball coins, including a British half penny from just before the UK reformed its currency to the decimal version they now use. Also, there's an early American sub-nickel, either a 2 cent or 3 cent piece (I just don't remember) someone traded my dad for a silver dollar the guy needed to complete his collection. Dad's mom had a sort of piggy bank that she put weird coins that came to her via circulation. This only came to my attention about ten years ago. I shook them out through the coin slot and had to look up some of them by best guess, just to see what they were. None of them set the world on fire (essentially no value), but I was going to keep them intact anyway. Slid them back in the slot when I was done.