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WHEN I was a kid, I collected stamps. It happened very organically.
I remember how I got started. It was summertime in our small town just outside Atlanta in the late 1950s. Like a lot of kids who couldn't wait until school got out, I found myself with nothing to do one summer's day. In reality, boredom was a rarity. We neighborhood kids played lots of backyard sports; pretended to be Superman, Davy Crockett, and Sgt. York; built a tree house; explored interesting woods nearby; captured lightning bugs in Mason jars; and often rummaged through an abandoned barn just behind our property. Snowball, my loyal woozle, was a solid black cocker spaniel and always a friend in need.
But, as kids are wont to do in the summer, one day I whined to my mother and father, "I'm bored." One of them (I can't remember which) suggested I collect stamps. I must have been six years old going on seven.
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So I began to tear stamps off letters I found around the house. At the time, first class postage cost three cents and the standard stamp was the purple Statue of Liberty. Of course, there was air mail, too, a bit less ubiquitous than the Liberty, but readily available. The air mail stamps cost a nickel and were an orange-red, featuring a four-engine, propeller-driven plane.
(All photo credits listed below.)
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I quickly learned I couldn't just tear the stamp off the letter without severely damaging it, so my mom showed me how to soak the letters in warm water to release the stamps from their envelopes undamaged. I carefully placed them on a dishtowel to dry, and then I put them in a shoebox.
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I began to scour the mail daily in hopes of finding a new stamp. Occasionally, we would get a foreign stamp that caused a stir. I really got excited when the cost of postage rose to four cents and a new wine-colored Lincoln stamp replaced Lady Liberty in 1958. Naturally, air mail went up, too, to six cents, but, alas, the new stamp was part of the same uninspiring series that produced the five-center.
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More interesting were the wide range of commemorative stamps which honored everything from Labor Day, with its Soviet-style working class hero, to the International Geophysical Year, a two-color hybrid in which Michelangelo meets Dante. The subjects were eclectic: the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, Progress for Women, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Boy Scouts, the 1939 New York World's Fair, the National Parks, and dozens of famous people.
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I discovered, in the back of comic books and Boy's Life, that I could order scads of stamps--on approval--from H.E. Harris or another company for a quarter. I would tape my quarter to the order blank and soon the anxiously-awaited package would arrive. My dad would help me identify the dazzling array of countries whose philatelic contributions were included. The foreign stamps were exactly that--alien. American and European stamps were officious and monochromatic, while African and Asian stamps were colorful and oddly sized and shaped--triangles, diamonds, and circles. They might feature metallic inks, embossed foil, or photographs. The bright, four-color process was startling, like parrots amidst pigeons. The Soviets, too, produced awesome stamps. Their series highlighting the Moscow subway produced some of the most beautiful stamps ever, imo. And while the US may have eventually won the space race, during the early 60s the USSR definitely won the space stamp race. After awhile, it became clear my shoebox was insufficient. I needed an album. And I soon had Harris' beginner edition stamp album.
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Over the years, my passion for collecting waxed and waned. I upgraded albums and became more serious and knowledgeable about my hobby. I was excited to learn that President Franklin Roosevelt had been a philatelist. Later, as a Boy Scout, I visited FDR's Little White House in Warm Springs, GA, and seeing his stamp collection there was a highlight I have never forgotten. The collection was vast and--I already knew--expensive. But I felt a connection to the great man and imagined myself looking over his shoulder at his albums and chatting about stamps with him.
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Every other Saturday morning during the late 50s and early 60s, my dad would pile us kids in the green '56 Chevy (my parents' first-ever new car), and we would drive downtown to visit the Atlanta Public Library on Carnegie Way. (My mom must have been eternally grateful for the respite.) The Library seemed a vast, labyrinthian granite and marble palace of wonders to me then. It had elevators, stacks and stacks of tomes, every newspaper and magazine imaginable, and the first copy machine I ever saw, a primitive, slow contraption that printed in negative--white letters on black pages. In those days, in addition to books, one could check out record albums and framed prints of famous paintings. My dad fed himself a steady diet of classical music, and every month a fresh masterpiece would hang above our couch--Renoir, Gauguin, Picasso, da Vinci. He practiced parsimonious sophistication. While he was upstairs in the exotically named Mezzanine browsing Mozart and Beethoven, I was downstairs in the children's reading room indulging in Dr. Seuss and Winnie the Pooh and, later, The Hardy Boys and Matt Christopher.
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And across the street from the library was the Georgia Stamp & Coin Company. I would save my nickels and dimes, collect empty Coke bottles for a penny apiece, and dream of getting a really rare stamp, like the airmail stamp with the inverted plane or the $1.30 Graf Zeppelin. But I could only drool over them, because they cost dollars and I had only cents. The owner (I think his name was Bill, which might mean he was the William Neff mentioned in the link above) was very patient with us, letting us look at lots of stamps and take up his time, all the while knowing he would make a sale of less than a dollar. I remember his intelligent face, his Brylcreemed black hair, his black-framed glasses, and his long-sleeved white shirt and narrow, subdued tie. He never wore a suit coat. We would leave with me clutching a glassine envelope of treasures for my collection, and my dad would make our final stop down the street at Nosh O' Rye Delicatessen, where I was introduced to the wonders of herring in cream sauce and other strange morsels.
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In 1963, the new George Washington stamp reflected a price increase to five cents for first class, while air mail, in a refreshingly modern design featuring a jet and available in two different colors, advanced to seven cents. (Air mail later went the way of the dinosaur, but I still miss seeing these.)
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By this time, I had amassed a worldwide collection of well over a thousand stamps from more than a hundred countries, but later I began to concentrate more on US commemoratives, First Day Covers, and plate blocks (four stamps from the corner of a mint sheet and featuring the numbers of the printing plates).
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In October 1963, like the rest of the philatelic world, I was thrilled by the news of the Dag Hammerskjold invert, on which the yellow background was reversed. Errors on stamps generally make them extremely collectible. However, the USPS decided to print 40 million additional copies of the error to lessen the value of the original mistake and make it available to collectors. As a result, the invert is worth no more than the correct version today.
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A month later, the entire nation was in mourning. Before November 22, no one could have predicted that one of the early five-cent commemoratives would be a gray stamp with our bright young President next to an eternal flame. I was twelve years old and heartbroken. Unfortunately, more of these sad commemoratives would follow as a result of the turbulent and violent decade.
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The 70s ushered in innovative and striking new designs as US stamps finally shook off the drabness of the Depression, the hardships of WWII, the uptightness of the 50s, and the sterile modernism of the 60s. One was the famous LOVE stamp, based on radical pop artist Robert Indiana's iconic design for a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card. By 1973 I was graduating from college and was far removed from philately except as a casual spectator.
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I had lost my enthusiasm for stamps in high school, discovering new passions like girls, beer, and music. I quit collecting long before the golden years of the 80s and 90s when the USPS decided that it could make lots of money selling stamps to collectors. An explosion of wildly innovative, albeit commercially-motivated, designs began to be produced. I remember wishing I were a kid collecting again. But by then I had kids of my own, pursuing their own unique passions. Both my sons are smart and both are in college now so I guess they found their way without stamps, though I can't help but feel that they missed something. Pokémon cards just don't measure up.
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I still have my stamp collection in a box in the attic somewhere. It's probably not worth much since I attached the stamps with hinges, a no-no for collectors who want pristine condition. Regardless, stamp collecting was one of the best activities I ever engaged in. I learned so much language and geography and world and American history. I learned why Suomi appeared on stamps from Finland, why "Belgian" was dropped from the Belgian Congo, why there were two Chinas, and why inflation caused a 1930s German 5 Tausend Mark stamp to be overprinted with 2 Millionen. I'm pretty good at trivia, and I believe one reason is my childhood passion for stamps. Most of all, though, stamps meant that I spent lots of elusive quality time with my dad, an Austrian Jew who immigrated to America in 1938 and slogged through the jungles of New Guinea wearing the uniform of a country that rewarded him with citizenship and the G.I. Bill. He became a public school music teacher, and he always knew the answers to my questions. I guess his three children are his legacy as we all became public school teachers, too.
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Like most people the world over, I rarely use snail mail anymore. I even more rarely write letters--perhaps that's why I feel the need to blog. Stamps are just an occasional bill-paying necessity now. They have lost their romance, mystery, and excitement. And while I hate to think that stamps will cease to exist someday, I am certain, regrettably, that they are ultimately doomed. They had charm, personality, and beauty. They told stories. I suspect coins are not far behind on the road to extinction. But for a kid in Georgia in the 50s and 60s, stamps opened the door to the world.
Photo Credits
3-cent Liberty: threes.com
5-cent Air Mail: postcardmarketingidea.com
4-cent Lincoln: arago.si.edu
6-cent Air Mail: arago.si.edu
Labor Day: pubrecord.org
Geophysical Year: 1847usa.com
Advertisement: ingraham.ca
République de Guinée: en.fotolia.com
Moscow Subway: colnect.com
Monaco FDR: postalmuseum.si.edu
Atlanta Public Library: multimedia.dailyreportonline.com
24-cent Inverted Air Mail: vintageantiquecollectible.com
$1.30 Graf Zeppelin: gradedairmailstamps.com
5-cent Washington: arago.si.edu
7-cent Air Mail: artfire.com
Dag Hammerskjold: mysticstamp.com
5-cent Kennedy: postalmuseumblog.si.edu.com
8-cent LOVE: superflygallery.com
18-cent Space 8-block: ioffer.com
German Overprint: flickr.com
Sharjah Snail: animalonstamps.wordpress.com
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Thanks to tonight's Top Comments contributors. Let us hear from you when you find that sunbeam amongst the clouds.
TOP COMMENTS
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