Like many of you I suspect, I began my stamp collecting as a youngster when I received a beginner’s stamp album and a lot of canceled U.S. commemoratives. My fondly-remembered first album was the Minkus My First Stamp Album. The cover had five cute kids and their dog parading with a banner and signs touting stamp collecting. That was in the mid-fifties. I was soon into learning all about hinges, perforations, watermarks, glassine envelopes and exotic approvals (like those beautiful triangular stamps from San Marino, wherever that was). And, I began wondering about the people on the U.S. stamps like Juliette Low and Will Rogers, the events like the landing of Cadillac in what became Detroit and the Puerto Rico Election, the places like Mt. Rushmore and the Grand Coulee Dam and the organizations like the American Bankers Association (?), the Poultry Industry, and the Railroad Engineers of America. Pretty heady stuff for a kid who at the time had not been outside the states of Mississippi and Alabama! I got my Boy Scouts Stamp Collecting merit badge and some investment advice from the merit badge counselor. He pointed out that if you buy a stamp for 3 cents and sell it at 6 cents, it is an impressive 100 percent return on your investment. Following his advice, I began purchasing plate blocks. That turned out not to be very enlightened. I should have been buying fewer plate blocks and more baseball cards, but I digress.
Of course, back then all U.S. stamps were just one color, had a border, and a boldly stated “U.S. Postage.” So, since my philatelic socialization happened in those years, I have always been just a bit uncomfortable with these new multi-colored stamps with no borders. By the way, how did we get from Washington, Franklin and the final reunions of Civil War veterans to Bugs Bunny and frozen treats as the subjects of commemorative stamps?
My collection has evolved after several stops and starts into its current version, which is not particularly valuable but fun to look through. I mean, what’s not to enjoy about reflecting on the American Bankers Association or the American Turners Society? My favorite series are the Prexies and the 1940 Famous Americans. (Yep, all one color, a border and “U. S. Postage” prominently stated.)
A stamp story – one day in 1962 I was at the post office continuing my ill-advised project to accumulate plate blocks when lo and behold there was the 4¢ Mercury Project stamp that had just been released that day. I felt like I was somehow part of the successful space project. And then, of course, I shrewdly bought eight plate blocks, which I still have, waiting for the market to turn up.
Most of my pre-1920s stamps are canceled. Of course, one reason is because canceled stamps are less pricey, but another reason is that they were actually used as postage. I like to think that in, say, 1861 with a war going on, somebody somewhere stuck a stamp on a letter. And not just any stamp, but that particular 2¢ Washington stamp that is today in my Scott’s Minuteman Album. I hope that one of these days it will be in another album, being enjoyed by a collector who will continue to preserve it. And then there are my signed Duck Stamps. I wonder who Earl L. Fries – apparent duck hunter – was. In 1934, he signed his Duck Stamp. Earl is almost certainly not with us anymore, but now some 87 years later his memory lives on through his signed Duck Stamp in my collection.
Kids today may have the internet for learning all there is to know about the subjects of some of those 40s commemoratives like the Palomar Mountain Observatory, the Gold Star Mothers, or Fort Bliss. That’s great, but I know that those of us of a certain age even without the internet sure had fun learning by looking at those stamps and wondering what they were all about.
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