Meet Gary - Current Editor-in-Chief and former Director of Expertizing
Note: This interview, conducted in late spring, reflects the day-to-day work that Gary Loew conducted as the Director of Expertizing during Pennsylvania's quarantine. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The American Philatelist.
Erin: Can you share with our members what your job title is and what you do here at the APS?
Gary: My job title is the Director of Expertizing, and what I do is a mystery to many. The role of Director of Expertizing really involves coordinating the efforts of our Expert Committee, which is a group of 180 experts from all over the country who specialize in a wide variety of stamps by country or specialized area of collecting. For example, the most popular area we get the most certificates for is the Washington/Franklin series of the United States. I think we have about 8 or 9 experts just in the Washington/Franklins … We have folks who can cover pretty much every stamp-issuing entity that exists today. We have a couple of holes here and there, and nobody can monitor everything, but we come pretty close.
I feel like every time I speak with you I always learn something new about expertizing and I'm happy to get to know more about your role as the Director of Expertizing. Another thing I am curious about is how long you have worked at the APS?
I started in June of 2019.
So you haven't worked here too long, but are you a stamp collector, and are you a member of the American Philatelic Society?
I am a life member of the APS and I am a philatelist. I collect stamps and covers. So when you say you are a postal historian, generally speaking, people think about covers. I am a postal historian because I study postal history, the history of the post office and its impact on society. There's a difference between being a cover collector and a postal historian but the terms get used interchangeably.
Gary acts out the National Recovery Act stamp at Summer Seminar.
Do you remember the very first thing you collected that brought you into the hobby?
When I was eight years old, before they invented paper, I think, my father gave me his stamp album and I've been a stamp collector ever since. That's about two-thirds of a century, to put it in round numbers. But included in that album was an absolutely beautiful blue stamp from the West African British colony of Gambia. It was the first stamp of Gambia, a six pence embossed profile of Queen Victoria.
I fell in love with Queen Victoria . . . she was dead which didn't help me any . . . but I also fell in love with the stamp and through that stamp fell in love with stamp collecting.
That's a great story. So let me rewind a little and get to know a bit more about your job. Can you tell me the best parts of your job?
There are so many, I am often stunned when I come into work because there is always something interesting going on. It is a world of fun - my collecting interests have always been absurdly narrow and specialized, and I've studied philately for a number of years, but that hardly makes me an expert in all areas. When I started this job, I didn't know how much I would learn about both the hobby of philately and the world itself through stamps.
I never know what will come across my desk. Collectors - mostly members of the APS, but you don't have to be a member to use the expertizing service - send in stamps from all around the world and they want to know: is it genuine? What's the correct catalog number? What's the condition? These are the three main aspects of expertizing, but they also ask very interesting questions from time to time, such as "Why was this stamp issued?" or "Is it an error variety?" While we rely on the experts of the expert committee to do that, I'm along for the ride to figure out which expert first gets to see it and which one follows up with the second opinion . . . and sometimes a third or fourth is necessary. What makes our expertizing service different from everyone else on the planet is we guarantee our certificates and put our money where our opinion is and that means we had better get it right.
Gary is a frequent Summer Seminar instructor.
Gary (right) in the Reference Collection inspecting an Inverted Jenny stamp with Expert Committee member Ken Lawrence.
It sounds really exciting to be in the front row seat of all these interesting journeys you get to take with each collector and their stamps. So you might have touched on this a bit earlier, but is there one resource on the website that you'd like to highlight that is related to your job at the APS?
If you go to stamps.org and look at the services tab, you will see the link to Stamp Authentication which is really the name of the process that we do with Expertizing. So if you click on that Stamp Authentication link, it will take you to a page with all the information about our Expertizing services including a downloadable form to submit.
We guarantee our certificates and put our money where our opinion is and that means we had better get it right.
Just to get to know you a little more outside of your job, I was wondering if you could share a fun fact about yourself?
There are no fun facts about me, I'm a grumpy old man (just kidding) ... I have well over 100 albums that house my collection, which is in two parts: Gambia and the 1935 silver jubilees of King George of 5th, both pretty narrow specializations... You would probably say that with those two very narrow collections, how would I have so many albums? The answer is, as a cover collector, they take up a lot of room. Even for Gambia I collect about 150 stamps, which is not that many, but when you get into collecting covers you can have a really big collection. Every cover has a unique aspect - who mailed it, who received it, where was it mailed from, where did it go to, etc. I also collect covers that go through Gambia - if it went through as part of a postal route, I collect it!
I think it's really cool that despite having to work from home, I get to learn through these interviews about what everyone is collecting, what they would collect and see things like your stamp room.
I can tell you there is not a day that goes by that I don't learn something new, A) about the hobby of stamp collecting and B) about the world around us. Stamps and covers are a lens through which we can understand all kinds of different aspects of society.
I couldn't agree with you more. Something that I've enjoyed the most since starting my job at the APS is watching Exploring Stamps on Youtube to learn about the world through stamps. Since we are all currently working from home, a question I'd like to ask is how have you transitioned to working from home during this time?
Before I took the job at the APS, I was working as a writer about postal history full time so I was used to being ensconced in my office here and banging away at the keyboard. Since I came back to working at my office at home I am . . . ensconced in my office here and banging away at the keyboard, so it's no different from what I did before. For me, working from home is pretty normal and comfortable with my writer's background.
Personally I would say that I miss the social aspect of being at the office, but I am happy that we are able to connect with one another over Zoom for meetings and seeing everyone for the APS Cares interviews also brightens my day. I'd love to hear about what you enjoy about our members or if you have a specific memory with a member please feel free to share it.
Every month I write a column for The American Philatelist, "Adventures in Expertizing." I find that when I write about members and the impact of expertizing on their collections, I get a lot of feedback... I had the pleasure of informing a member that he was wrong about a stamp he thought he had. He had submitted a U.S. Scott 1, the first stamp issue of the United States in 1847, and he thought it was the standard U.S. #1, which has a catalog value between $300-700, depending on its little wrinkle or variety. Well, it turns out that little wrinkle he had wasn't in the $300-700 category - it had a catalog value of $10,500. I had the great pleasure of giving him the good news, and that is one of the most popular columns I've written. It's such an interesting hobby because you never know what you are going to encounter.
Philatelists are great people and people who work with philately at the APS seem to be the same, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
That is such a great story and really does show that you never know what you will find when you are stamp collecting and where it will take you.
While I love working with stamps and love working with the members who send in those stamps, I have to tell you that one of my great joys when I began working at the APS was to find out just how wonderful this team is - the people who work at the APS, and yes, that includes you, Erin, are just wonderful to work with.
Yes, we all have our individual jobs, roles and responsibilities, but it's just such a nice bunch of folks to be working with. I'm very grateful and I've gotta tell you, I'm so blessed to be working at the APS. Philatelists are great people and people who work with philately at the APS seem to be the same, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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