ArtStamp

24 Sep 2022
10:00:34pm

re: What was your first stamp purchase ?

Phil, what a brilliant idea for a Thread! Going down memory lane...

Definitely the Liberia triangles were superb.

I did not have a stamp shop in my small Cuban town back in the fifties. However, we had Ignacio Ortiz Bello, an older school mate who not only collected, but proselytized on the positive aspects of "la filatelia", and sold to many of us his doubles, or "repetidos". I remember buying several Cuban stamps--the Patriots: Marti, Gomez, de la Luz Caballero, the ubiquitous Franco portraits and the Queen of the Netherlands face--all a penny a piece. (I did not have an allowance--unheard of where I lived. But I could scavenge for empty CocaCola bottles for which we could get a few pennies--"centavos"--at the small grocery store near my home owned and operated by several Chinese refugees from the Mao regime. I remember getting my first Chinese stamps from them.)

Ignacio left Cuba as a young man, like many of us young kids enrolled in a Catholic boys school that was taken over by the Castro regime right after Playa Giron, in April-May 1961. He settled in Miami where he continued his philatelic business endeavors owning a philatelic store in Little Havana, plus writing a "Filatelia" column for Mecanica Popular that also provided lists of collectors' contacts from around the world. He was known in Latin America, Spain and the USA where he presented, lectured and exhibited. He was our mentor, our school mate, and friend.

 
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angore

Al
Collector, Moderator
25 Sep 2022
05:50:20am

re: What was your first stamp purchase ?

I do not remember.

 
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Lou47

25 Sep 2022
11:45:37am

re: What was your first stamp purchase ?

Does anyone recall the Nestle Quik stamp collection and album ad from the 50's?
This was my (maybe Mom helped me!) first stamp purchase!
Great thread, Phil!

 
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d1stamper

25 Sep 2022
01:30:18pm

re: What was your first stamp purchase ?

I do not remember my first purchase, but it may have been to an ad in Popular Mechanics.

I got started collecting when the girl next door showed me her collection.

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Jansimon

collector, seller, MT member
25 Sep 2022
04:15:44pm

re: What was your first stamp purchase ?

I must have been 9 or 10 years old when I first purchased some stamps for my collection. About one year earlier a school friend got me interested in stamps when he showed me his and his father's collection. Saint Nicholas was so kind to give me my first stockbook, about the smallest one on the market but I still have it, more than 40 years later. Together with my granddad I spent many hours going through old papers at my grandparents' attic, hoping to find special stamps. I can't remember how I found out, whether it was something I heard myself or that my mother told me, but it appeared that there was some sort of stamp shop in my small village. On the second floor of a shop, I can't remember what they sold there, a guy had a room full of stamp books, all priced and waiting for collectors to empty them. You had to ask downstairs at the counter if the man was in and if he was, you could go upstairs. Looking back it is hard to imagine how my mother thought it was okay for me to go to a place where I'd be alone in a room with an elderly man I did not know. Different times I suppose.
Anyway, it was all harmless and this person was very patient. He would let me browse through all the books even though he knew I had only one guilder or less to spend. In the end, after endless doubts I picked my first stamps. He took them out with a pair of tweezers (I must have told my parents about this, because not much later I got my own), put them in a small glassine envelope, took my pocket money and sent me off again. Back home I put the first stamps I picked in my book, not knowing then that they were about the most common Dutch commemorative stamps available. Never mind that, nor the fact that they were issued in a dark time with not so nice political motives, I thought they were beautiful and they were mine.

Here they are, the naval heroes set of 1943.

 
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re: What was your first stamp purchase ?

My first purchase and first album also was the Nestles' album -- I would say, back in 1957 or '58. Mine came via a Nestle Crunch Bar wrapper mail-in order, though. That stamp with the knight and his sword is one of my favorites. Several years ago, I bought a box of old albums & envelopes, and about half-way down was a Nestle's album, just like the one I started with! It might not be the very same one I had, but it still has a place of honor on my shelf now.

 
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philb

26 Sep 2022
09:31:29am

re: What was your first stamp purchase ?

Ian, Yes teachers seem to live in a world different from we mere mortals !

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re: What was your first stamp purchase ?

Sometime in the early 1940's my mother brought home for me in Utica, NY, a packet of stamps. Before that I wasn't aware of their existence. Been hooked on them ever since. Can't recall my first purchases, but I do have some memory of buying from mail approvals in the mid-1940's from an outfit either named Kenwood or located in a Kenwood place. Alas, so far, no stamp collectors among my children and grandchildren!

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ArtStamp

26 Sep 2022
08:41:00pm

re: What was your first stamp purchase ?

Here's my version of Ignacio's Cigar Box Postage Stamps Organizer. (Trying to remember how it was done was part of the fun...)
And everything about the hobby when I was growing up--except the printed albums and catalogs--was handcrafted. My first album was a notebook with lined pages I purchased at the local print shop. I carefully wrote the names of each country with my school Esterbrook fountain pen. How could that compete with a neatly printed, manufactured album?
Hope you enjoy this.

 
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cdj1122

re: What was your first stamp purchase ?

During the 1940s, we lived in a part of Brooklyn called Gravesend, founded by the early Dutch settlers, near Coney Island. Mom and Dad had collected stamps all during the Great Depression and worked on their Scott album in the evenings at the kitchen table by the light of a single lamp. The kitchen window had, had to have, a heavy blackout curtain to prevent the glare from the lume of city lights assisting any Nazi U-boats lurking offshore in detecting a passing Merchant Navy vessel plodding along the coastline.
I must have been five or six then and they gave me enough stamps to soak, dry, sort and mount to keep me quiet and out of trouble. I had a "Captain Tim's Ivory Stamp Club (A short Radio program.) album, available by mail, for about ten cents and a couple of Ivory Soap labels.
Ivory Soap; " ... 99.44% pure, it floats ! ..." was their commercial. I still use liquid Ivory soap when the home Health Aide does the bedbath several times a week, despite the clear plastic bottle being labelled "Dishwasher Soap and the aide's disdain. "They certainly got their money's worth from that commercial.
My first actual stamp purchase was either from Subway Stamps which was a kiosk in the IND subway tunnel at the Nassau Street station when my dad took me on occasional Saturday "Vest Pocket Dealer" adventures to see his contacts in "The Stamp Building," or from one of the Woolworth or Kresge "Five and Dime" stores along Brooklyn's Fifth avenue in Bay Ridge where most of my father's family lived.
Subway Stamps was the first dealer we would see on the way in and the last on the way home. During much of the depression, my father had worked for George Burr and Company. George Burr was a Wall Street millionaire financer who collected matched plate blocks and frequently sent my dad to search for and purchase the coveted plate number blocks at any Post Office he passed while he made deliveries to and from different stock market firm offices.
My father must have figured that if plate blocks were a good investment for Mr. Burr they could be good for him. Later at the end of the '40s when they were sold to dealers the profit paid for the rent of a cabin at Greenwood Lake, NJ which kept me and my younger brothers out of the city during the annual summer polio epidemics that killed or maimed so many other children. Johnny was born with a heart valve defect and was not expected to live to the age of six, but he did, dying when nine years old in 1952. Polio or Whooping Cough, then rampant dangers before the vaccines against them were created brought fear and sometimes suffering every summer to the hot city dwellers.
So stamps were a fact olf life from some of my earliest recollection and I only recall a few particular issues, one being the One Penny Dromedarius Ship issue of South Africa, another Spain's "Naked Maja,'" probably every young boy's dream stamp set in those days, and perhaps the issue fon the passing. of FDR. My parents, both dedicated members of the Republican Party, thought FDR was the spawn of Satan, and expressed their opinion, often and loudly. but business was business, so corner blocks were found, bought and sold.

 
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Bobstamp

10 Oct 2022
11:04:33pm

re: What was your first stamp purchase ?

If I could remember my first stamp purchase, and I can't, it might have been one of these U.S. stamps issued in 1950:



I didn't immediately start buying approvals, but purchased stamps from our local postoffice, which was not much more than a shack just up the road in our tiny, unincorporated village, Arenas Valley, in Southwestern New Mexico, about six miles east-northeast of Silver City, where I attended school and where my dad was editor of the Silver City Enterprise. New members might enjoy my web page about that post office, Box 28.

Bob

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