Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
hmmmm.....memories.
Tim.
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Yeah, Tim, we went down memory lane pretty quickly, didn't we? We must be getting old for all of those memories to come back so quickly...
My memory of stamps at an early age is, first of all, sitting there as a youngster, watching my dad and step-grandfather working away at their stamp collections. When I was finally old enough, I got one of those kids' stamp albums; but I really remember my first Canadian album. That one was 100% with my dad. I remember my blank quadrille pages and a lesson in how to mount stamps as we went along. We started from Canada # Scott 69, since that was the earliest extra that my dad had in his collection of everything. From there, we spent weeks, months going through all of his extras for a few hours every evening, building my own collection. It was just me and my dad, looking over every stamp with a magnifying glass and picking out the best ones.
Even today, all of my "originals" have a little dot next to them in my collection.
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I think I was around 8 when I got interested in stamps when I was watching my mom and dad work on theirs in the evening back in Norway,
They would give me an old stamp and the Gibbons catalog and atlas and if I could find the country and the stamp and tell them about the country and stamp it was mine.
It was an interesting way to get interested in stamps,history and geography and I still love all 3 of them.
There was an old whaling captain that I would visit and bring home made cookies to and when he found out I liked stamps he would always give me some from far away places like the South Pacific Islands and I would rush
home and look for it in the catalog and find the country in the atlas
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I started about 12 or so. Barth Healy was syndicated in my local paper, and I,d follow his discussions of upcoming new issues and create my own FDCs for them, each containing something important inside. I was just getting interested in girls (not always reciprocated, unfortunately), and I'd often pour my romantic adolescent heart out in these letters to myself,giving me a time capsule of young romance, or at least my failed attempts at it. I later donated a shoe box full of these missives and FDCs to a local orphanage while on a 20-year collecting hiatus. I'd love nothing better than to get these back and read all about my little former self.
I guess, at heart, I have always been a cover collector.
David
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Well, it was 50 years ago when I was in the 2nd Grade. One of the boys in the class brought in a bag of used US stamps and handed them around. The stamps had been pulled off envelopes. He asked me if I wanted one, to which I answered in the positive. He gave me one of the "Hire the Handicapped" stamps. It was torn and thinned on the bottom right corner, but it was my first stamp.
That night, I showed the stamp to my dad. It wasn't long after that when my dad gave me a Majestic Stamp Album and an Honor-built sack of stamps on paper. Now 50 years later and 299,999 stamps added to that one, it truly has been a lifelong hobby where I have met many great collectors and dealers through the years.
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Not long after I started collecting stamps, our Grade 8 teacher assigned us to make a presentation about a hobby. I naturally chose to talk about my stamp collecting, and saw an opportunity: I made up small packets of duplicates and planned to sell them for .25 each in the hopes of both making some money and encouraging my classmates to become collectors. I remember only one thing about my presentation: I didn't sell a single packet.
Bob
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You have to do what the drug dealers in the schools do. Give away free samples. Once they are hooked, then you start charging!
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12:59:31pm
My parents collected stamps during the 1930s as did many others. It was a hobby that could be persued at home on a shoestring during the Great Depression. Shortily after the War started in Europe I was born and things like military duty and a victory garden took precidence, but still stamps were washed from paper and small packets arrived from different sources to be sorted and either mounted or saved in envelope halves. Somewhere near the end of the 1940s they bought a new Scott's International Album and I recall sitting around the kitchen table as they transferred stamps to the new album or mounted Dad's latest aquisition from his trips to Nassau Street and I stuck stamps that they gave me into children's albums.
Then I had my own album which I kept up till around the early - mid '50s.
One fond memory was going into F.W. Woolworths or S&S Kresge's "Five and Dime" stores with a quarter or 50 cents where I could buy a small cloth bag that had miscellaneous worldwide stamps or an envelope of Dennisson's Hinges that sold 1,000 for 25 cents.
Then came college and the military which led to a visit to the Tokelau Islands. And then;
http://stamp-collector.co.uk/MachinForum/viewtopic.php?t=489
(Modified by Moderator on 2012-02-24 13:08:40)
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As an only child growing up in the 30's with, fortunately, 2 working (on and off) parents, I was a quiet, often lonely child who had to "make" my own fun. Somewhere around 8 or 9 years of age, I discovered stamp collecting... probably as a result of those ads in comic books. You know, on the page that sold you x-ray glasses and shrimp eggs to grow your own monkey fish. I think I got a 10 cent worldwide album and a bag of stamps for a quarter. - Hinges? we don't need no stinkin' hinges- never heard of them... I used to glue the stamps directly to the album page. A little flour and water, stir and instant paste. What a mess! Later, I moved up to mucilage glue in the little bottle with the split nipple top. Equally as messy.
I stopped collecting after a few years when sports grabbed my interest... then girls, college, girls, the US army, girls, and a new career in that order. After marriage, I started collecting again, although my old material had gone into my mother's trash. I collected until the mid-70's when I stopped again to do the Little League coaching bit, some work travelling, and lots of household chores. I went back to collecting a couple of years ago, pulling my old albums from the closet. Playing catch-up is a losing game, so I gave up WW to focus on a handful of countries of interest.
So far as I know, no one else in my extended family has any interest in stamp collecting, although I am doing my best to get my grandchildren interested. It's a tough battle when they each have those handheld computer thingies to play all sorts of games.
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For me, back around 70+ years ago, the desire to get a boyscout merit badge was the motivating factor.I don't recall if I ever did get that merit badge, but I was hooked! It's great to read about the paths traveled-it recalls much of my my own. Thanks all for the postings and the memories.
Dan C.
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It was the darkest years of the Second World War. I was around six years of age and had just learned how to read passably.
We lived in an "habitation" called Chapleau, in northern Ontario- a coal and water stop for the steam locomotives of the Canadian Pacific Railway. If memory serves, me, my sister and my mother were the only residents of that desolation, except when a train rolled in with my father (a locomotive fireman/wiper).
I practised my reading skills on hand-written letters and became enamored of postage stamps as they seemed to indicate there was intelligent life elsewhere on the planet where I so longed to be. That love has never left me.
Postage stamps expand my mind, especially so when I regard one with a scene I've never before observed, or from a place where I've yet to visit. Postage stamps? What's not to love?
John Derry
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Like Dan, my motivation was a Boy Scout merit badge, and I did get mine, and I really did have to earn it. I was tested about my knowledge of stamps and stamp collecting by the postmaster at Fort Bayard, New Mexico, which at that time was a Veterans Administration tubercular hospital. I had to explain the difference between definitive and commemorative stamps, and that I understood the uses of special delivery, airmail, and postage due stamps. I had show that I could handle stamps with tongs, measure perforations, and mount stamps with hinges. I no longer have my original merit badge, but I did find one on eBay a while back:
The requirements for a stamp collecting merit badge in the U.S. seem to require even more knowledge now than they did when I got mine. See the requirements here.
By way of sad contrast, take a look at how Scouts Canada has dumbed things down:
I wonder when the supposed grown-ups of Scouts Canada are going to drop their Hippy daze and learn that it requires a lot of pressure to make diamonds out of carbon.
Bob
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I was six years old when I was made to see a packet of stamps by my mother who is a teacher.She had so much to tell me.We received heaps of letters as people liked to send us letters.I still have many aerogrammes etc.Those days people sent letters and Christmas cards
How much to scan?
Now actively for the past five years, the internet has swollen my collection.
In the midst of it all, I still have the first stamps I received.
My hobby involves getting the items and then the display process.Never ending..I wish I have physical help.
These days I have revived sending Christmas cards to a lot of people.
There is even a Santa card project based in the North Pole, Canada.
I have added Postcards to the letter project which is boosting the stamp project.
The mighty postcard needs the humble stamp to travel.
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When I was 12 we visited family in Florida (my mother's aunt) and there were only all those old adults around. My grand-aunt's son (then in medical school) had a huge accumulation of foreign stamps & I was offered to chance to take any duplicates I found. That Christmas she sent me my first album (I still have the album and those stamps). I started getting approvals from Jamestown Stamp Co. and Kenmore Stamp Co. Still have the Jamestown Stamp Identifier that was provided. Later purchased stamps through HE Harris, as well as the bags of stamps in 5 & 10 stores (Kresge & Woolworth, as I remember). Now I am surrounded by boxes & boxes of stamps on paper and enjoy soaking even today (not the self-adhesives, tho', but I'm trying the various options I've seen in the American Philatelist and online).
Roger
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Roger,
That was fun for me to read!
VERY similar to me; My mom actually worked at S.S. Kresges (now known as K-Mart) and prior to that she worked at Woolworth's 5 and Dime. She would bring home those Red or green 'Bags o' Stamps' every now and then, to my delight.
I started at about 10 yrs. old getting approvals from Jameston, Mystic, Kenmore and a couple others I can't recall the names of.
By the way - did you know that you can STILL get those bags of stamps?! They are at Hobby Lobby! I was quite pleased when I noticed them there....
Randy
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There was a company in northern New Jersey called Stamp-o-Mat that sold very nice selections of 100 used U.S. for 79 cents (plus 4 cents tax). I started buying a packet every two weeks with my allowance when I was 10 years old. I also ordered the famous packs of 100 for a dime from Garcelon Stamp Co. and other New England companies, and dabbled in the approvals. Once I got ahold of a Harris Catalog and started ordering singles by scott #, I was hooked!
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Randy: don't know if there are any "Hobby Lobby" in this area. I'll have to keep an eye open for them.
And I had forgotten about Garcelon--yeah, I got approvals from them too. "Boys Life" was a great source of ads for getting approvals (along with the freebies that came to start you out).
Roger
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I have heard of Hobby Lobby in Maryland. A lot of today's "hobby" stores still stock stamps and albums, even though they cater more to model cars, trains and crafts.
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......and coins.
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Unfortunately, Hobby Lobby doesn't carry model trains anymore. I was not happy with their decision about that. I rarely go there anymore.
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12:25:33pm
" ... And I had forgotten about Garcelon--yeah, I got approvals from them too. ..."
Somewhere in my "Someday Isle" file I have placed one or two imprinted glassine envelopes from every dealer I met over the years. Sadly, all too many exist no where else.
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Kenmore, Falconer, Jamestown, Harris, Garcelon, Mystic, plenty more too hard to remember.
Wasn't there a Stamporama approval dealer out of White Plains, NY back in the 1960s?
Charlie, that's kind of cool that you kept glassines from the approval dealers.
I won a box lot in an auction a while back that had a glassine from Kenmore when it was still in Kenmore, NY (by Buffalo). I sent it to them at their New Hampshire location.
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Don't forget Littleton when they did both stamps and coins!
I am strangely drawn to lots that contain old glassine approval sets, even if it is not pre-1940 Europe. A lot of what I have been collecting is based upon what I did growing up. I am trying to purchase old albums I used to use that I since traded away.
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The year was 1947 and my dad asked me to look up a picture of a stamp in his catalog. What I eventually learned that my dad was a stamp collector, not a perfectionist. He had so many errors in his books that I could not tell him his mistakes. What I did do was ask to take certain countries for myself and fill them with the correct issues and the best quality I could afford. As it turned out I did get many outstanding issues which eventually allowed me to sell them and buy a house. It took a long time after this to recover and start collecting again. My expertise and enjoyment is in displaying what I have been able to re-collect since the dark days of selling top of the line stuff. Although I'm still missing some of the stuff sold I'm happy with what I have and continue to enhance my books.
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My first set of mint stamps were the Norse American set........it were those or a new Athearn locomotive..............the stamps won that day........still have those stamps, but trains have taken over as my primary collecting.
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When I was 8, in 1974, my father tried to pass on his love of coin collecting to me. It didn't take him long to figure out the coins he was giving me were being secretly spent on comic books and candy by his young apprentice, so he decided to introduce me to stamps.
Stamps were somewhat more interesting to me, and since they were useless as currency, I kept them and even put them into the Harris stamp albums he gave me (the Independence for U.S. stamps and the Travelers for the rest). I remember having far too many stamps of General Franco from Spain, and getting a little bored with the whole hobby, until I found in one of those little cloth bags full of stamps on paper, a stamp from some place called De-Haute-Volta. It was a tribal African mask, and for some reason it just fascinated me.
Once I figured out the Harris stamp album defined De-Haute-Volta as Upper Volta, I realized stamp collecting was something of a game. Finding out what stamp belonged where suddenly became important to me. Finding out WHERE Upper Volta was came next. Suddenly stamps were taking me outside their perforated borders and introducing me to the world. I specifically remember it started with one stamp with silly words on it and a really cool looking mask. I just recently dug that stamp, and the rest of my collection, out of a box that it had been stored in for the last 25 - 30 years, and its amazing how those stamps greeted me like an old friend. I think I'm back, although it might take me some time to process how stamp album pages from 2000 - 2012 take up as much space as 1847 - 1999.
Brad
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01:55:10pm
I guess we all acquire an excess of certain long running sets such as the Francos and wonder what the heck to do with them once several lampshades have been decorated and the wife starts to complain.
One year I sat with the kids and a mess of older used X-mas stamps making personalized book marks that they could give to relatives who no doubt would toss them away in short order, but it was a fun exercise with my children. Well, some of the fun sort of dissolved when I discovred one daughter had made some really nice markers out of those matched plate blocks of the experimental X-mas with town precancels that she found but the less said about that the better.
I still find the early Franco series boring but the more colorful series that started in about 1955 and ran on until his much noted passing, (noted by late night commedians), has also produced several varieties and especially some quite noticible shades.
For some reason, long running series with multiple varieties just appeal to me. Sometime next month or the month after I plan to sort, classify, identify and mount all the different "Exporta's" from Mexico that I have accumulated and it may create its own mini album as there are so many paper and printing varieties, not as many as the Machins, but still as long and involvd as the Germania's or Wildings and equally as interesting.
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It's been over a year since the last response to this thread, but I have really enjoyed reading everyones stories. I hope more people will tell their stories now as well..
I started by helping my grandfather when I was about 4 years old. I would sit and sort the "pretty pictures" and then a year or so later I was able to start sorting the countries by name, even if I didn't know what the country was at the time. I would help gather up hundreds of stamps that had finished drying after my grandfather had taken them off paper.
This sort of went on until he passed away when I was 11 years old. I liked the stamps but really didn't know what to do with them on my own. They had all been left to me, so I put them away for a couple of years. Only looking at them once in awhile, but not really doing anything with them.
When I was 14, I was in a store and there was huge worldwide album that caught my eye. So I asked my mom if I could have it, and she bought it for me along with 3 or 4 comic books and a book of Shakespeare Plays. ( Which I never did finish reading ) Shakespeare that is.
I didn't have anyone to collect with, but I enjoyed working with my stamps, buying the little bags from the store, and sorting through the remainder of a 25 pound bag of stamps on paper that my grandfather had been working on.
A few years later I was at a local festival, and I found a group of stamp collectors promoting collecting and a local stamp club. One month later I was a member of the club and have been a member of one or the other stamp club for the last 37 years.
I enjoy going to club meetings, especially if I have something to do with the club as well as at the club. I'm a part time dealer right now in our local club. I've been president of one club, show chairman of another a couple of times, director and club reporter. I've helped at club auctions, sales books, junior tables, and security.
Besides collecting stamps, I love all stamp related books, reference and "story" and catalogues in any language. I also collect postcards, and the related books about them.
Now I am not home alone with my collection. My daughter is also a collector, started when she was about 2 or 3 years old. Dropped out for a few years and came back to it when she was about 20. She has exhibited as a junior all over Southern Ontario, and a few places in the USA. She has been awarded around 40 trophies, ribbons and certificates. Most silver and higher. Even an award when she was 7 for medicinal plants on stamps.
My mother also said, "If you can't beat them, join them." So for the last few years she has gotten in on the collecting bug as well. Just not as seriously as my daughter and I have.
So that's my story.
Hope I hear from you now, if you haven't written one.
Bye
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I was probably about 8 years old, and got an Atlas Stamp album and packets of stamps. Couldn't make the hinges work, so I used scotch tape as hinges. Bought stamps at Woolworth's, Marshall Field's, and approvals from every company I could find. My mother got me all the stamps that came into her office, and the neighbors also saved them for me.
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I am now almost 69 years young and I can remember my father introducing me to stamp collecting when I was 7 or 8, maybe earlier. I was hooked because it was what my Dad did and I wanted to impress him that I could keep up. Actually I surpassed him by leaps and bounds, but I never made an point of it. My favorite was the Over-run Countries Issues and soon after, the Farley's. I just could not get enough of them until I got introduced into the Washington/Franklins. 60 years later I am still learning about them and I doubt I will ever know all there is to know, but I am still into them. I think I have at least touched over 50,000 of them at one time or another and have boxes full that I have not even looked at yet. There was over 132 billion issued and there are some real treasures in there if you can find them.
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07:36:25pm
My first memory is the CTOs that came in the cereal boxes. My first two stamps were Kampuchea and Botswana (I even remember the exact picture on them but I'd have to look them up). I don't remember what cereal it was but I used to love getting them. From there I started finding the little bags at Woolworth's and later Leisure World where they also had the manila stock pages - cheap back then!
When we used to go to the local flea market every weekend, there were about a dozen stamp dealers. I also remember going to the C.N.E. (Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto) every summer with my folks and loved the hobby building because there were always lots of dealers there. Picked up some nice things there plus lots of penny bags.
Kelly
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I was very young, maybe 5 or 6, when I remember my mom bringing home stamps from her work. She worked with a worldwide shipping company so they got mail from all over. I vividly remember at around 8 years old I got a set of Iran blocks on pieces, all with nice SON cancels; I still have them! Those would be my first memory of actual stamp collecting.
Cheers,
Peter
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I was a child living in New York. I noticed one day that an envelope that my Mother received looked "different" It didn't only have a postmark on it, it also has some kind of label, with a picture of Benjamin Franklin on it.
It fascinated me. It said 5 cents on it. Wow! that was a lot of money to a child back then.I told my Mom that 5c was a lot of money. She said "that's nothing son, look at this letter that Aunt Maude sent us ,from Illinois. It has a 10c sticker on it which shows a picture of George Washington.
I asked her why did the sticker say 10c & have 2 "X's" on it? She said she thought the X's were Latin for 10.My Mom was quite intelligent. Well, I saved those 2 stickers. Unfortunately most of the letters after that, still came only postmarked without, those little stickers.
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My first memory is riding my bike to the local stamp store in Metuchen, NJ, near where I grew up, with a couple of friends. That sticks out to me about getting excited about looking at an album to put my stamps in and to trade with friends on a local level.
I have to confess I miss that here in Orlando. 
Somehow work gets in the way.
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I'm not sure which was the "first" memory, but these are all early memories and around the same time:
1. Giving my father the cash and order form for an order through the H.E. Harris catalog. He got me started and didn't mind converting the cash to a check and sending off the order. The stamps were proudly mounted (with hinges) in a Minkus All-American album.
2. The annual two-hour trip to St. Louis (nearest city) for clothes shopping also included a stop at the stamp counter at Famous Barr.
3. Partnering with another 2nd grader to create a catalog of duplicate stamps for sale or trade. We even got to use the school's mimeograph!
4. Being scolded by my mother for trash can diving for stamps when I went to the Post Office with my father. She said the men used the trash cans for spittoons. It was years later before I knew what that meant.
Lars
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I still have stamp #1 in my collection. When I was 10 years old, I found a torn-off corner of an envelope with an Italian stamp on it. It was dirty and crumpled, but I thought it was kind of neat so I kept it. Maybe a week later, a packet of 5 common definitive stamps came in a box of Corn Flakes. I was off and running! I had long been a fan of geography (received a globe for Christmas when I was 6, a road atlas when I was 8) so stamps meshed neatly with that. Now I have a fancy mint Canada collection and a great big pile of worldwide cheap stuff. I have more fun with the worldwide cheap stuff ...
Ryan
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I was about 10 years old, in 4th grade, when my grandfather gave me an "Illustrated Around-the World" stamp album and some stamps. The album was primarily U.S., and although he was not a collector himself, he seemed to know a lot about the hobby. He showed me how to use a watermark detector, a perforation gauge, and a Scott's catalog.
I didn't understand the catalog, but remember being thrilled to find that I had a Turkish stamp from the 1920s that matched one of its illustrations. The album only had a few "A" countries, with room for supplements. "You don't want those foreign stamps," Grandpa said. "American commemoratives are the best."
I still have that album, and I still use it for my U.S. commemoratives -- only to 1960. It has nice write-ups to go with the stamps.I agree with him that commemoratives are the best, but my interests have expanded to worldwide commemoratives. You learn a lot about history, geography, and culture through them.
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Remember visiting the Grandparents for "Sunday Lunch" and "Papa" would sit me on his knee and show me a stamp under his old-fashioned "Microscope. He would then give (both my sister and I) a stamp in a little envelope (possible glassine??) to add to our stamps books he had set up for us in an ordinary ruled line exercise book. My sister STILL has her book.....mine long gone (but not the stamps!(
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I must have started when I was around 10 or so with a small stock book. I started slowly soaking stamps off envelopes and even damaged a few being too aggressive...I finally moved on to a Harris Worldwide album and started using hinges and getting approvals from the various companies that advertised in ads behind magazines. As I got into sports, girls and music I sorta stopped collecting but still kept old stamps and had my mom and sisters save stamps for me. During my college years and a few years after that I did not do much with my collection but I still would keep the stamps off envelopes. After my first child was born and we were living in Boston around the Bicentennial I would stop in some stamp store in downtown Boston...S.L. Stone I believe was the name. Then I started buying some stamps again as much as I could afford. Off and on that continued until the early 80s collecting mainly US but some European countries like Greece. After the kids graduated and left home I started slowly trying to fill holes in the old album and started again. I even joined a local stamp club.
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My First Memory's of Collecting Stamps is ?Sitting at the kitchen table when I was about 13 years old with my parents sorting stamps I had bought from a stamp company probably "Global Stamps" and putting them in my Album. My parents were not stamp collectors but they sure took an interest in me collecting them.Back then you could get a package of 50 or a hundred for 10-20 cents. Found in the back of Magazines. I started out collecting WW but after about a year I stopped collecting WW and went to U.S. Only. After a year putting them in a starter Album. My Parents bought me a New Minkus All American Stamp Album which I still have with the stamps I put in it way back then. Aunts, Uncles, Neighbors everybody saved stamps for me from the mail, in their attics and anywhere they found a stamp. At about 18 Girls, USAF and college and family got in the way and I just forgot about stamp collecting. I'm now 68 years old and have just returned to Stamp collecting about 4 years ago when my wife bought me the American Heirloom Collection from Mystic Stamp Co. for my 64th Birthday. It has grown from three volumes to five. She has no interest in stamps but thought I would like to get back into the Hobby after talking to a mutual Lady friend who is a collector. I cherish the memories of hunting through those cheap stamps with my Parents for that one or two stamps I didn't have. Now my collection has grown to around 10,000 stamps which includes singles, plate blocks and souvenir sheets. I'm pretty solid Mint from 1940-1980 but have a long ways to before 1940 and after 1980.
I've read all the posts in this thread. It's been great reading all the different posts and how everyone got started in collecting stamps and where they are now. I hope they keep coming.
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I started collecting in 1965 when I was 7 years old. My older brother had collected stamps and my mother had helped him quite a bit. She found out that he had been selling off the good stuff to buy pot for "the band", hey, it was the 60's. She took what was left and gave it to me as most of it was bought with her money. The good stuff was all gone. I know he had U.S. #1&2, and he had all the US zeps, some in blocks. At seven I was still fascinated with what seemed like a million stamps. What I started with was a Scott's US album with very common stamps. The oldest stamp was a #26. Their was a WW album with mostly common stamps. I also got a shoebox with stamps on and off paper and a coffee can full of 3 cent purple statue of liberty stamps all on paper. Over time I learned to look things up in the Scott's catalogs at the library. My original haul had 7 stamps cataloging between 50 cents and 9 dollars. They were the most valuable in the lot. I have tracked them in a notebook throughout the years. I stopped adding new entries to the notebook in 1977. Every once in a while I come across that old tattered notebook. I was better organized 40 years ago than I am now.
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Anyone remember the Nestle Quick stamp offer back in the 1950's?
That was my very first collection. Unfortunately, I didn't keep that old paperback album.
I was very fortunate as a youngster in that my neighbor, a WWII Army veteran, was a worldwide collector. He found out that I was interested in collecting and helped me to learn more about collecting, acquire a nicer album and hinge more world-wide stamps in that album. I never tired of his showing me his massive 3-volume Scott International album collection. He was a great mentor. Thanks and rest in peace, Mr. Gdula!
As many here, I set aside the albums in my teens and early twenties. One day in the early 70's while stationed in the greater Norfolk area, I stopped at a large hobby store to look around. I saw beautiful stamps, a large selection of awesome albums, Scott catalogues ... and I was hooked again! Still avidly collecting in my mid-60's; I can't imagine life without this wonderful hobby!
Wishing everyone a very happy, healthy and great stamp collecting 2014!!
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I bumped this oldie back up as it contains discussions of people's early stampin' memories, including names of the old approval dealers.
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Mission Stamp Co. is another.
WB
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Back in the sixty`s I bought some Canada Scott No. 4, Beaver from J.N. Sissons in Toronto at auction.
Then after I was married and we wanted to buy a house I sold them at auction Sissons and received enough for a down payment on a house in 1971.
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I have shared this memory before. It was 1966 and I lived in Izmir Turkey as a US military dependent. There was no TV in Izmir in those days so we read a lot of books. I was reading the book Johnny Appleseed and my father remarked that the 1966 Johnny Appleseed commemorative stamp was on a package we had just received from my grandparents. I was in love with the officialness of this image on a stamp which sparked my interest in stamp collecting at the early age of nine. I still have that stamp!
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I have a lot of memories of dealers I did business with over the years, started collecting in 1962. Many of course are no longer around. Might be interesting to throw out a few names and see if anyone recalls the, bought from them or knows what became of them. A couple:
J. Sanders, Philatelist. That is how that firm titled themselves. Based in Southampton, UK I bought from their approval books in the late 1960's. I think they were on Commercial Road. I did Google Earth search a year or so when I recalled their address and there was still a stamp shop at that address!
Kristinn Ardal- this dealer based at Keflavik Airport, Iceland, advertised in Linn's and Meekels for many years from the late 59's and I think I still saw ads from them as late as the mid 80's. He (or she?) sold Iceland stamps and Scandinavian material from a regularly issued price list. Iceland seemed an exotic place to get mail from as a young collector. I always assumed this dealer was a male- I did find someone in Iceland on Facebook with that name and it was an older female.
If any interest I can bring up several more. The life span for dealing is incredibly long for stamp dealers. I collect old stmp magazines and I was amazed when looking over issues from the 1920's to see names I recalled from the 1960's!
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Like many I started collecting at the age of 7 or 8, living in San Jose Ca. My father had collected since he was a kid. I thought his collection was amazing and he got me started with a WW Regent album and a U.S. Minuteman Album. He had lots of duplicates so that was my main source early on. I did buy some approvals from the usual suspects but never thought they were a very good deal. We moved to NY a couple years later and dad started visiting the shops on Nassau st. so I was able to build off the duplicates he got there. Visiting the National Postal Museum and meeting up with neighbor Pat Hearst were the biggest inspirations in my early collecting years.
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Trip to Woolworth, bought one of those cloth bags with stamps on paper inside it. Just a few dollar's but many hours of fun for a new guy!
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My earliest memory is having an empty Kellogg's Corn Flakes packet with some stamps in it. I was shaking them up and picking some out. The Statler Brothers song "Flowers on the Wall" is stronly linked to that memory. I was also the younest of five boys who collected stamps. We used to have a stamp census every now and then and we would compete with each other as to who had the most stamps from particular countries. I always came last. I also remember my mother telling me that I could have one stamp from her album for some reason. I picked a black swan stamp from Australia (not Western Australia). I also remember putting some stamps into a tin and looking at them a few weeks later. They were "overgrown with rust". Lessons learnt.
BTW. If I had a stamp census now with my brothers, I wouldn't come last!
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My first stamp collecting memory is receiving an album (Harris Traveller I think), and some stamps as a Christmas gift from my parents. It was completely out of the blue, but 50 years later I'm still at it!
Eric
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Thanks, Michael, for bumping this thread!
My first memory from when I was probably 8 or so was watching Dad working on his US collection at his desk. My first memory of my own collecting was when I was 10 or 11 (1958 or 1959) and standing in the line at the grocery (IGA?) with Mom, waiting to get the next installment of the large stamp album that I got each week as part of a serial promotion the grocery chain was running. I don't remember how many sections that album ultimately contained, but it must have been at least 10 or 12.
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I can remember having a small album from Woolies 6d back in about 1950-51. Dad worked as a commissionaire for a merchant bank and one of his jobs was to sort the post and take it to the various departments, so he was always bringing home stamps from all over the world. My brother, older by 4 years got the pick and I got the rest.
Dad got us better albums as we got older and ultimately when earning we bought our own. Sadly my brother disposed of his sometime without thinking I might be interested.
I sold a lot of mine in the 60's (for 90 UK Pounds) to pay for driving lessons to get promotion. Don't we always regret things later.
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One day, a snooping first grader (me) found a red over-sized book. It had an image of an American Indian on the cover. I opened it up, and on the inside cover was a picture of a B-17 bomber in a battle scene from World War II. I knew this was my father's book. I flipped through the pages, and saw stamps. I put it away where I found it, and now and then would go and sneak more peaks into it.
In second grade, a boy in my class brought some stamps in to class. He showed them to anyone who wanted to look. I did, and he gave me one. I took it home, and showed my dad. He then went and brought out his long dormant stamp album and talked to me about stamp collecting. He put the album (Scott American) away, and that was that.
A month or so later, I caught the chicken pox. Out of school and stuck in bed, one night my dad came home and he gave me a Majestic Stamp Album and a packet of stamps and hinges. He talked to me some more about collecting stamps, and showed me how to put the stamps into the album. He had me try a few, and then it was supper time.
After supper, I looked at every page of that album. I was amazed that there were so many stamps. I marveled at the black and white pictures of the stamps.
Once in a while, my dad would bring home those bags from H E Harris of stamps on paper and showed me how to soak stamps. I caught on to it all very quickly, and my appetite was insatiable. So, from that one blue US "Hire the Handicapped" stamp the boy gave me in second grade, I went from 1 stamp to 300,000 in 55 years. (Scott reported this week that the 2018 catalogs will have listings for over 700,000 stamps, by the way.)
As for that Scott album, my dad gave it to me a couple of years later, but I was too young, and I mishandled it. I wish I still had it...
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I was introduced to stamp collecting by a classmate in the sixth grade. His father had been a missionary in Africa (either Liberia or Nigeria but I am unsure which) so he had a much broader perspective of the world than I as I had lived in rural Alabama towns and communities before moving to Bagdad, FL just before the sixth grade. I still have fond memories of visiting a local hobby store which had a counter and offerings for stamp and coin collecting in Milton, FL which I could get to by bicycle. I particularly remember lusting after a Scott Grand Award stamp album at the time but my fifty cent a week allowance put it way out of reach.
A couple of years later my grandmother bought me a lawnmower for $35 and I started mowing lawns for neighbors after school and on Saturday and eventually bought an H.E. Harris two volume Standard album for my first real stamp album with the money I earned. I earned stamp collecting and coin collecting merit badges as my first badges in Boy Scouts. I particularly remember looking for a rouletted stamp for the stamp collecting merit badge and eventually finding one in my grandmother's chest that was a tax stamp after searching for weeks through every option I could think. I was so excited when she told me that I could have the stamp! I ended up with just over 10,000 stamps in the album before selling it during my fund raising for college expenses.
Following college I bought a USA collection at a stamp show in 1975 and eventually moved the stamps from that collection into a Scott leather bound hingeless album which I have been working on ever since. I made a purchase of a Minkus based Supreme Global album in 2006 but never did much with it as family activities required more of a time commitment. Then in 2016 I discovered Jim Jackson's Big Blue 1840-1940 blog and Stamporama from a mention on his site and reignited my collecting interests and activities including a whirlwind foray into a Canada collection using the same Scott leather bound hingeless album only for Canada which I purchased in 2014 or so at a local stamp show. I have attended a variety of stamp shows over the years as the opportunity presented itself including shows in Ft. Walton, FL, Pensacola, FL, Atlanta, Birmingham, Jackson, AL, Houston, and in recent years Kent, WA, Everett, WA, Redmond, WA, and Renton, WA.
Recently I have joined my first ever local stamp club although I have been a member of the APS for over 25 years.
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In the 50`s my cousin and I collected and traded stamps. I remember sending to the Free Press Weekly (Published out of Winnipeg) for pks of stamps at 10cents and 25cents a pk. Living in a rural farming area it was an exciting day when these gems arrived in the mail. Now following a family, teaching career and Red Cross volunteer that hobby is just as meaningful as it was way back then Cousin and I still collect although we don`t get to visit as often.
.
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It all started as a cub scout at 7 years old in 1957. It was a project to start a collection. The details are fuzzy as to what I first did. But the hobby is still going strong in my bones, yet cub scouts lasted only that single year. (I did not want to be entertained by my mom, the den mother, with miscellaneous projects when there were ball games to be played.) However, the stamps did stick (pun intended).
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My memory is of just one particular stamp. It must have been in the late 50s and it was a beautiful map of the Portuguese colony of Angola. It was so much more colourful and shiny than my other stamps. I still always give a second look at the 1955 issue from Angola, Scott 386-393 for anyone interested.
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11:11:06pm
I have always enjoyed those Angola and Madagascar maps and sailing ships, as well as coats of arms. Usually cheap and wickely cancelled, a complete used set just looks so nice on its own album page.
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Mum was a collector so I don't have a clear first memory but I do remember that ran the school stamp club and I loved it - loved the swapping and trading. I also remember saving my pocket money for stamps and everyone sitting around the table soaking and sorting.
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I don't really remember how I started stamp collecting. It seems like I have collected forever ( 71 years old and counting ). I have a feeling that my parents started me off ( it's educational don't y'know ) My parents were big on education , having been forced to leave school at 14 for economic reasons, and both partly self-educated, as having a thirst for knowledge not common in working class families at the time (regrettably even more so today). Lack of education then was through circumstance and not inclination.
While I have occasionally gone "dormant" for all the usual reasons ( mainly girls ), I never really stopped. I have always been at the "cheap" end of the market ( mixtures, kiloware etc), as the bulk of activity has been when lack of money has kept me from other activities in downtime (mainly girls), then marriage, then house buying then kids.
I spent many years in the bus industry ( both management and driving), which inevitable meant long ( and usually unsocial) hours where a solitary pastime like stamps is very useful to to occupy the little spare time one has, which is usually when everyone else is at work anyway. My late working years were spent as a warehouse labourer - physically very demanding ( good for the heart muscle) but intellectually much less so. Never being one for sitting in front of the square screen ( except for documentaries and "deep" drama), the brainwork needed for stamps beyond the simple accumulation was very welcome.
In retirement I seem to have somewhat less time. Weather permitting I spend as much time as possible outdoors, in my garden, with the twin benefits of heavy exercise and the intellectual stimulation of raising plants ( from my own collected seed and vegetative propagation). Only the wet and the dark seems to propel me to stamp collecting.
However stamp collecting over the years has given me immense pleasure, and along with other positive influences ( especially the Scout movement ) has given me I think, a broadmindedness and tolerance that seems to be increasingly rare these days, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. It has also given me an immense supply of useless or inconsequential information which I am likely to trot out at the slightest provocation - much to the embarrasment of "her indoors" !
Malcolm
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Hi all,
Nothing grandiose here I'm afraid...
My story:
I remember it like it was yesterday, because it was early last year when I was bitten by the collecting bug!
I started in a weird way at the age of 50. Now I'm 51.
I for some reason saw a cool stamp when I was at the post office and thought, "Wow, I never even thought of collecting stamps, what am I missing here?"
I asked people to start keeping stamps for me and my father-in-law gave me a commerative stamp of the "founding of Florida" and for some reason that did it for me. I researched the heck out of that one stamp and from that I determined that stamp collecting was a great way to learn history and I was hooked.
Now I have already accumulated WAY more stuff that I can keep up with, so I'm trying HARD to just enjoy what I have and take it slow. 
I know, I'm a weird one to start so "old", but look at it this way, it's easier to afford things!
Thanks!
JR
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I don't know how, but I made it all the way through my (1960s) childhood without being exposed to stamp collecting in any way, except, maybe, seeing Kenmore ads in comic books, and not giving them a second thought.
It wasn't til 1974, I was 19, in the Air Force, when I was hangin out in a friend's barracks room, and he showed me some of his collection. I recall being impressed most with his Australian 'roos. I jumped headlong into the hobby. Got me a subscription to Linn's, started getting approvals, and became beguiled by the stamps of the Channel Islands, and picked up a White Ace album for them. I mounted all my stamps lovingly, and with care, using . . . Crystal Mounts 
.
I have no idea what became of that first album of mine, but I can say I no longer use Crystal Mounts.
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You could say that tuberculosis was what got me into stamp collecting.
In 1949, my family moved from New York State to New Mexico, to be close to my paternal grandparents, who had moved there in 1945 in hopes of finding a cure for my grandmother's tuberculosis.
When I was 10 or 11 years old, a friend of my father invited my family to visit his family in their community, called Cottage San. The "San" meant Sanatorium, from the community's history as a the location of two or three TB sanatoria. Here's a postcard picturing one of the sanatoriums:
During my visit, the two brothers, who were about my age, showed me their stamp collections. I'd never heard of anyone collecting stamps, but the idea was intriguing. Soon I was buying new issues at our tiny post office in Arenas Valley, six miles east-northeast of Silver City, and ordering approvals through ads in Boys' Life magazine. Here's my web page about the Arenas Valley post office.
My first stamp trading experience was with the same two brothers who introduced me to collecting. They also taught me to use the Scott catalogue, and soon I had bought my own copy; in those days, of course, it was just one octavo-size volume of perhaps 400 pages. My first Boy Scout merit badge was the one awarded for achievement in stamp collecting.
Bob
Postscript: New Mexico's warm, dry air proved to be the cure for my grandmother's TB. She died at age 95, not of TB but of terminal irritation and shrill vocalization. But she sure made good sugar cookies!
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I do not know if it is my first but probably the one that stands out the most. I must have been 4 years old, just potty trained and I had somehow managed to convince my dad to give me a stamp I liked, a 4 cent stamp from South Africa depicting a ram's head. I proudly carried the stamp around for a while till it was potty time. Then somehow the stamp slipped through my fingers and in the potty it went. My dad was quite unhappy as he was the guy to do the recovery mission to save the stamp. I guess back then this stamp must have been worth something. Today it is just a common 1 cent stamp.
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12:23:08pm
That South African can be had in eight or ten shade variations.
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"That South African can be had in eight or ten shade variations.
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The one that came out of the potty would be the 11th uncataloged shade.
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Since I told this story earlier... here's my very first stamp that got me started in 1966. One stained and worn Johnny Appleseed commemorative! And it is in the Minuteman album I kept as a teen. I just couldn't toss it away!
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I was just sending an SOR message back to Andrew and this thought came to mind, so I thought I'd share it. My first memory of when I started collecting stamps was back from when I was about 12 years old. I grew up in Australia, living on the north side of Sydney in a town called Hornsby. I have this vivid memory of meeting my good friend Dave Newman at the Hornsby train station and catching the train into down town Sydney, to go to a little arcade in the center of the central business district to buy some special stamps that I was after at the time. The train trip took an hour to get into the city, so it was no small undertaking, but we managed to get the right train in, get off at the right station, find the stamp store in the little arcade and actually buy the stamps that I wanted, and then successfully reversed the whole process to get home. When I think back I'm amazed that my Mum and Dad let me do that at the age of 12. There is no way that I would have let my kids do that at the same age.
hmmmm.....memories.
Tim.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Yeah, Tim, we went down memory lane pretty quickly, didn't we? We must be getting old for all of those memories to come back so quickly...
My memory of stamps at an early age is, first of all, sitting there as a youngster, watching my dad and step-grandfather working away at their stamp collections. When I was finally old enough, I got one of those kids' stamp albums; but I really remember my first Canadian album. That one was 100% with my dad. I remember my blank quadrille pages and a lesson in how to mount stamps as we went along. We started from Canada # Scott 69, since that was the earliest extra that my dad had in his collection of everything. From there, we spent weeks, months going through all of his extras for a few hours every evening, building my own collection. It was just me and my dad, looking over every stamp with a magnifying glass and picking out the best ones.
Even today, all of my "originals" have a little dot next to them in my collection.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I think I was around 8 when I got interested in stamps when I was watching my mom and dad work on theirs in the evening back in Norway,
They would give me an old stamp and the Gibbons catalog and atlas and if I could find the country and the stamp and tell them about the country and stamp it was mine.
It was an interesting way to get interested in stamps,history and geography and I still love all 3 of them.
There was an old whaling captain that I would visit and bring home made cookies to and when he found out I liked stamps he would always give me some from far away places like the South Pacific Islands and I would rush
home and look for it in the catalog and find the country in the atlas
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I started about 12 or so. Barth Healy was syndicated in my local paper, and I,d follow his discussions of upcoming new issues and create my own FDCs for them, each containing something important inside. I was just getting interested in girls (not always reciprocated, unfortunately), and I'd often pour my romantic adolescent heart out in these letters to myself,giving me a time capsule of young romance, or at least my failed attempts at it. I later donated a shoe box full of these missives and FDCs to a local orphanage while on a 20-year collecting hiatus. I'd love nothing better than to get these back and read all about my little former self.
I guess, at heart, I have always been a cover collector.
David
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08:54:01am
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Well, it was 50 years ago when I was in the 2nd Grade. One of the boys in the class brought in a bag of used US stamps and handed them around. The stamps had been pulled off envelopes. He asked me if I wanted one, to which I answered in the positive. He gave me one of the "Hire the Handicapped" stamps. It was torn and thinned on the bottom right corner, but it was my first stamp.
That night, I showed the stamp to my dad. It wasn't long after that when my dad gave me a Majestic Stamp Album and an Honor-built sack of stamps on paper. Now 50 years later and 299,999 stamps added to that one, it truly has been a lifelong hobby where I have met many great collectors and dealers through the years.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Not long after I started collecting stamps, our Grade 8 teacher assigned us to make a presentation about a hobby. I naturally chose to talk about my stamp collecting, and saw an opportunity: I made up small packets of duplicates and planned to sell them for .25 each in the hopes of both making some money and encouraging my classmates to become collectors. I remember only one thing about my presentation: I didn't sell a single packet.
Bob
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12:47:23pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
You have to do what the drug dealers in the schools do. Give away free samples. Once they are hooked, then you start charging!
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
24 Feb 2012
12:59:31pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
My parents collected stamps during the 1930s as did many others. It was a hobby that could be persued at home on a shoestring during the Great Depression. Shortily after the War started in Europe I was born and things like military duty and a victory garden took precidence, but still stamps were washed from paper and small packets arrived from different sources to be sorted and either mounted or saved in envelope halves. Somewhere near the end of the 1940s they bought a new Scott's International Album and I recall sitting around the kitchen table as they transferred stamps to the new album or mounted Dad's latest aquisition from his trips to Nassau Street and I stuck stamps that they gave me into children's albums.
Then I had my own album which I kept up till around the early - mid '50s.
One fond memory was going into F.W. Woolworths or S&S Kresge's "Five and Dime" stores with a quarter or 50 cents where I could buy a small cloth bag that had miscellaneous worldwide stamps or an envelope of Dennisson's Hinges that sold 1,000 for 25 cents.
Then came college and the military which led to a visit to the Tokelau Islands. And then;
http://stamp-collector.co.uk/MachinForum/viewtopic.php?t=489
(Modified by Moderator on 2012-02-24 13:08:40)
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01:48:29pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
As an only child growing up in the 30's with, fortunately, 2 working (on and off) parents, I was a quiet, often lonely child who had to "make" my own fun. Somewhere around 8 or 9 years of age, I discovered stamp collecting... probably as a result of those ads in comic books. You know, on the page that sold you x-ray glasses and shrimp eggs to grow your own monkey fish. I think I got a 10 cent worldwide album and a bag of stamps for a quarter. - Hinges? we don't need no stinkin' hinges- never heard of them... I used to glue the stamps directly to the album page. A little flour and water, stir and instant paste. What a mess! Later, I moved up to mucilage glue in the little bottle with the split nipple top. Equally as messy.
I stopped collecting after a few years when sports grabbed my interest... then girls, college, girls, the US army, girls, and a new career in that order. After marriage, I started collecting again, although my old material had gone into my mother's trash. I collected until the mid-70's when I stopped again to do the Little League coaching bit, some work travelling, and lots of household chores. I went back to collecting a couple of years ago, pulling my old albums from the closet. Playing catch-up is a losing game, so I gave up WW to focus on a handful of countries of interest.
So far as I know, no one else in my extended family has any interest in stamp collecting, although I am doing my best to get my grandchildren interested. It's a tough battle when they each have those handheld computer thingies to play all sorts of games.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
For me, back around 70+ years ago, the desire to get a boyscout merit badge was the motivating factor.I don't recall if I ever did get that merit badge, but I was hooked! It's great to read about the paths traveled-it recalls much of my my own. Thanks all for the postings and the memories.
Dan C.
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The past is a foreign country, they do things different there.
24 Feb 2012
03:33:47pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
It was the darkest years of the Second World War. I was around six years of age and had just learned how to read passably.
We lived in an "habitation" called Chapleau, in northern Ontario- a coal and water stop for the steam locomotives of the Canadian Pacific Railway. If memory serves, me, my sister and my mother were the only residents of that desolation, except when a train rolled in with my father (a locomotive fireman/wiper).
I practised my reading skills on hand-written letters and became enamored of postage stamps as they seemed to indicate there was intelligent life elsewhere on the planet where I so longed to be. That love has never left me.
Postage stamps expand my mind, especially so when I regard one with a scene I've never before observed, or from a place where I've yet to visit. Postage stamps? What's not to love?
John Derry
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Like Dan, my motivation was a Boy Scout merit badge, and I did get mine, and I really did have to earn it. I was tested about my knowledge of stamps and stamp collecting by the postmaster at Fort Bayard, New Mexico, which at that time was a Veterans Administration tubercular hospital. I had to explain the difference between definitive and commemorative stamps, and that I understood the uses of special delivery, airmail, and postage due stamps. I had show that I could handle stamps with tongs, measure perforations, and mount stamps with hinges. I no longer have my original merit badge, but I did find one on eBay a while back:
The requirements for a stamp collecting merit badge in the U.S. seem to require even more knowledge now than they did when I got mine. See the requirements here.
By way of sad contrast, take a look at how Scouts Canada has dumbed things down:
I wonder when the supposed grown-ups of Scouts Canada are going to drop their Hippy daze and learn that it requires a lot of pressure to make diamonds out of carbon.
Bob
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I was six years old when I was made to see a packet of stamps by my mother who is a teacher.She had so much to tell me.We received heaps of letters as people liked to send us letters.I still have many aerogrammes etc.Those days people sent letters and Christmas cards
How much to scan?
Now actively for the past five years, the internet has swollen my collection.
In the midst of it all, I still have the first stamps I received.
My hobby involves getting the items and then the display process.Never ending..I wish I have physical help.
These days I have revived sending Christmas cards to a lot of people.
There is even a Santa card project based in the North Pole, Canada.
I have added Postcards to the letter project which is boosting the stamp project.
The mighty postcard needs the humble stamp to travel.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
When I was 12 we visited family in Florida (my mother's aunt) and there were only all those old adults around. My grand-aunt's son (then in medical school) had a huge accumulation of foreign stamps & I was offered to chance to take any duplicates I found. That Christmas she sent me my first album (I still have the album and those stamps). I started getting approvals from Jamestown Stamp Co. and Kenmore Stamp Co. Still have the Jamestown Stamp Identifier that was provided. Later purchased stamps through HE Harris, as well as the bags of stamps in 5 & 10 stores (Kresge & Woolworth, as I remember). Now I am surrounded by boxes & boxes of stamps on paper and enjoy soaking even today (not the self-adhesives, tho', but I'm trying the various options I've seen in the American Philatelist and online).
Roger
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Roger,
That was fun for me to read!
VERY similar to me; My mom actually worked at S.S. Kresges (now known as K-Mart) and prior to that she worked at Woolworth's 5 and Dime. She would bring home those Red or green 'Bags o' Stamps' every now and then, to my delight.
I started at about 10 yrs. old getting approvals from Jameston, Mystic, Kenmore and a couple others I can't recall the names of.
By the way - did you know that you can STILL get those bags of stamps?! They are at Hobby Lobby! I was quite pleased when I noticed them there....
Randy
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10:26:33pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
There was a company in northern New Jersey called Stamp-o-Mat that sold very nice selections of 100 used U.S. for 79 cents (plus 4 cents tax). I started buying a packet every two weeks with my allowance when I was 10 years old. I also ordered the famous packs of 100 for a dime from Garcelon Stamp Co. and other New England companies, and dabbled in the approvals. Once I got ahold of a Harris Catalog and started ordering singles by scott #, I was hooked!
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Randy: don't know if there are any "Hobby Lobby" in this area. I'll have to keep an eye open for them.
And I had forgotten about Garcelon--yeah, I got approvals from them too. "Boys Life" was a great source of ads for getting approvals (along with the freebies that came to start you out).
Roger
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08:29:43pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I have heard of Hobby Lobby in Maryland. A lot of today's "hobby" stores still stock stamps and albums, even though they cater more to model cars, trains and crafts.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
......and coins.
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09:22:45pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Unfortunately, Hobby Lobby doesn't carry model trains anymore. I was not happy with their decision about that. I rarely go there anymore.
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
10 Mar 2012
12:25:33pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
" ... And I had forgotten about Garcelon--yeah, I got approvals from them too. ..."
Somewhere in my "Someday Isle" file I have placed one or two imprinted glassine envelopes from every dealer I met over the years. Sadly, all too many exist no where else.
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10:24:55pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Kenmore, Falconer, Jamestown, Harris, Garcelon, Mystic, plenty more too hard to remember.
Wasn't there a Stamporama approval dealer out of White Plains, NY back in the 1960s?
Charlie, that's kind of cool that you kept glassines from the approval dealers.
I won a box lot in an auction a while back that had a glassine from Kenmore when it was still in Kenmore, NY (by Buffalo). I sent it to them at their New Hampshire location.
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11:11:05pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Don't forget Littleton when they did both stamps and coins!
I am strangely drawn to lots that contain old glassine approval sets, even if it is not pre-1940 Europe. A lot of what I have been collecting is based upon what I did growing up. I am trying to purchase old albums I used to use that I since traded away.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
The year was 1947 and my dad asked me to look up a picture of a stamp in his catalog. What I eventually learned that my dad was a stamp collector, not a perfectionist. He had so many errors in his books that I could not tell him his mistakes. What I did do was ask to take certain countries for myself and fill them with the correct issues and the best quality I could afford. As it turned out I did get many outstanding issues which eventually allowed me to sell them and buy a house. It took a long time after this to recover and start collecting again. My expertise and enjoyment is in displaying what I have been able to re-collect since the dark days of selling top of the line stuff. Although I'm still missing some of the stuff sold I'm happy with what I have and continue to enhance my books.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
My first set of mint stamps were the Norse American set........it were those or a new Athearn locomotive..............the stamps won that day........still have those stamps, but trains have taken over as my primary collecting.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
When I was 8, in 1974, my father tried to pass on his love of coin collecting to me. It didn't take him long to figure out the coins he was giving me were being secretly spent on comic books and candy by his young apprentice, so he decided to introduce me to stamps.
Stamps were somewhat more interesting to me, and since they were useless as currency, I kept them and even put them into the Harris stamp albums he gave me (the Independence for U.S. stamps and the Travelers for the rest). I remember having far too many stamps of General Franco from Spain, and getting a little bored with the whole hobby, until I found in one of those little cloth bags full of stamps on paper, a stamp from some place called De-Haute-Volta. It was a tribal African mask, and for some reason it just fascinated me.
Once I figured out the Harris stamp album defined De-Haute-Volta as Upper Volta, I realized stamp collecting was something of a game. Finding out what stamp belonged where suddenly became important to me. Finding out WHERE Upper Volta was came next. Suddenly stamps were taking me outside their perforated borders and introducing me to the world. I specifically remember it started with one stamp with silly words on it and a really cool looking mask. I just recently dug that stamp, and the rest of my collection, out of a box that it had been stored in for the last 25 - 30 years, and its amazing how those stamps greeted me like an old friend. I think I'm back, although it might take me some time to process how stamp album pages from 2000 - 2012 take up as much space as 1847 - 1999.
Brad
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
03 Apr 2012
01:55:10pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I guess we all acquire an excess of certain long running sets such as the Francos and wonder what the heck to do with them once several lampshades have been decorated and the wife starts to complain.
One year I sat with the kids and a mess of older used X-mas stamps making personalized book marks that they could give to relatives who no doubt would toss them away in short order, but it was a fun exercise with my children. Well, some of the fun sort of dissolved when I discovred one daughter had made some really nice markers out of those matched plate blocks of the experimental X-mas with town precancels that she found but the less said about that the better.
I still find the early Franco series boring but the more colorful series that started in about 1955 and ran on until his much noted passing, (noted by late night commedians), has also produced several varieties and especially some quite noticible shades.
For some reason, long running series with multiple varieties just appeal to me. Sometime next month or the month after I plan to sort, classify, identify and mount all the different "Exporta's" from Mexico that I have accumulated and it may create its own mini album as there are so many paper and printing varieties, not as many as the Machins, but still as long and involvd as the Germania's or Wildings and equally as interesting.
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It's been over a year since the last response to this thread, but I have really enjoyed reading everyones stories. I hope more people will tell their stories now as well..
I started by helping my grandfather when I was about 4 years old. I would sit and sort the "pretty pictures" and then a year or so later I was able to start sorting the countries by name, even if I didn't know what the country was at the time. I would help gather up hundreds of stamps that had finished drying after my grandfather had taken them off paper.
This sort of went on until he passed away when I was 11 years old. I liked the stamps but really didn't know what to do with them on my own. They had all been left to me, so I put them away for a couple of years. Only looking at them once in awhile, but not really doing anything with them.
When I was 14, I was in a store and there was huge worldwide album that caught my eye. So I asked my mom if I could have it, and she bought it for me along with 3 or 4 comic books and a book of Shakespeare Plays. ( Which I never did finish reading ) Shakespeare that is.
I didn't have anyone to collect with, but I enjoyed working with my stamps, buying the little bags from the store, and sorting through the remainder of a 25 pound bag of stamps on paper that my grandfather had been working on.
A few years later I was at a local festival, and I found a group of stamp collectors promoting collecting and a local stamp club. One month later I was a member of the club and have been a member of one or the other stamp club for the last 37 years.
I enjoy going to club meetings, especially if I have something to do with the club as well as at the club. I'm a part time dealer right now in our local club. I've been president of one club, show chairman of another a couple of times, director and club reporter. I've helped at club auctions, sales books, junior tables, and security.
Besides collecting stamps, I love all stamp related books, reference and "story" and catalogues in any language. I also collect postcards, and the related books about them.
Now I am not home alone with my collection. My daughter is also a collector, started when she was about 2 or 3 years old. Dropped out for a few years and came back to it when she was about 20. She has exhibited as a junior all over Southern Ontario, and a few places in the USA. She has been awarded around 40 trophies, ribbons and certificates. Most silver and higher. Even an award when she was 7 for medicinal plants on stamps.
My mother also said, "If you can't beat them, join them." So for the last few years she has gotten in on the collecting bug as well. Just not as seriously as my daughter and I have.
So that's my story.
Hope I hear from you now, if you haven't written one.
Bye
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11 Jul 2013
10:57:43pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I was probably about 8 years old, and got an Atlas Stamp album and packets of stamps. Couldn't make the hinges work, so I used scotch tape as hinges. Bought stamps at Woolworth's, Marshall Field's, and approvals from every company I could find. My mother got me all the stamps that came into her office, and the neighbors also saved them for me.
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I am now almost 69 years young and I can remember my father introducing me to stamp collecting when I was 7 or 8, maybe earlier. I was hooked because it was what my Dad did and I wanted to impress him that I could keep up. Actually I surpassed him by leaps and bounds, but I never made an point of it. My favorite was the Over-run Countries Issues and soon after, the Farley's. I just could not get enough of them until I got introduced into the Washington/Franklins. 60 years later I am still learning about them and I doubt I will ever know all there is to know, but I am still into them. I think I have at least touched over 50,000 of them at one time or another and have boxes full that I have not even looked at yet. There was over 132 billion issued and there are some real treasures in there if you can find them.
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A Service Dog gives a person with a disability independence. Never approach, distract or pet a working dog, especially when (s)he is in harness. Never be afraid to ask questions to the handler (parent).
12 Jul 2013
07:36:25pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
My first memory is the CTOs that came in the cereal boxes. My first two stamps were Kampuchea and Botswana (I even remember the exact picture on them but I'd have to look them up). I don't remember what cereal it was but I used to love getting them. From there I started finding the little bags at Woolworth's and later Leisure World where they also had the manila stock pages - cheap back then!
When we used to go to the local flea market every weekend, there were about a dozen stamp dealers. I also remember going to the C.N.E. (Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto) every summer with my folks and loved the hobby building because there were always lots of dealers there. Picked up some nice things there plus lots of penny bags.
Kelly
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08:58:17pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I was very young, maybe 5 or 6, when I remember my mom bringing home stamps from her work. She worked with a worldwide shipping company so they got mail from all over. I vividly remember at around 8 years old I got a set of Iran blocks on pieces, all with nice SON cancels; I still have them! Those would be my first memory of actual stamp collecting.
Cheers,
Peter
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12:37:59am
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I was a child living in New York. I noticed one day that an envelope that my Mother received looked "different" It didn't only have a postmark on it, it also has some kind of label, with a picture of Benjamin Franklin on it.
It fascinated me. It said 5 cents on it. Wow! that was a lot of money to a child back then.I told my Mom that 5c was a lot of money. She said "that's nothing son, look at this letter that Aunt Maude sent us ,from Illinois. It has a 10c sticker on it which shows a picture of George Washington.
I asked her why did the sticker say 10c & have 2 "X's" on it? She said she thought the X's were Latin for 10.My Mom was quite intelligent. Well, I saved those 2 stickers. Unfortunately most of the letters after that, still came only postmarked without, those little stickers.
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My first memory is riding my bike to the local stamp store in Metuchen, NJ, near where I grew up, with a couple of friends. That sticks out to me about getting excited about looking at an album to put my stamps in and to trade with friends on a local level.
I have to confess I miss that here in Orlando.
Somehow work gets in the way.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I'm not sure which was the "first" memory, but these are all early memories and around the same time:
1. Giving my father the cash and order form for an order through the H.E. Harris catalog. He got me started and didn't mind converting the cash to a check and sending off the order. The stamps were proudly mounted (with hinges) in a Minkus All-American album.
2. The annual two-hour trip to St. Louis (nearest city) for clothes shopping also included a stop at the stamp counter at Famous Barr.
3. Partnering with another 2nd grader to create a catalog of duplicate stamps for sale or trade. We even got to use the school's mimeograph!
4. Being scolded by my mother for trash can diving for stamps when I went to the Post Office with my father. She said the men used the trash cans for spittoons. It was years later before I knew what that meant.
Lars
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I still have stamp #1 in my collection. When I was 10 years old, I found a torn-off corner of an envelope with an Italian stamp on it. It was dirty and crumpled, but I thought it was kind of neat so I kept it. Maybe a week later, a packet of 5 common definitive stamps came in a box of Corn Flakes. I was off and running! I had long been a fan of geography (received a globe for Christmas when I was 6, a road atlas when I was 8) so stamps meshed neatly with that. Now I have a fancy mint Canada collection and a great big pile of worldwide cheap stuff. I have more fun with the worldwide cheap stuff ...
Ryan
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I was about 10 years old, in 4th grade, when my grandfather gave me an "Illustrated Around-the World" stamp album and some stamps. The album was primarily U.S., and although he was not a collector himself, he seemed to know a lot about the hobby. He showed me how to use a watermark detector, a perforation gauge, and a Scott's catalog.
I didn't understand the catalog, but remember being thrilled to find that I had a Turkish stamp from the 1920s that matched one of its illustrations. The album only had a few "A" countries, with room for supplements. "You don't want those foreign stamps," Grandpa said. "American commemoratives are the best."
I still have that album, and I still use it for my U.S. commemoratives -- only to 1960. It has nice write-ups to go with the stamps.I agree with him that commemoratives are the best, but my interests have expanded to worldwide commemoratives. You learn a lot about history, geography, and culture through them.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Remember visiting the Grandparents for "Sunday Lunch" and "Papa" would sit me on his knee and show me a stamp under his old-fashioned "Microscope. He would then give (both my sister and I) a stamp in a little envelope (possible glassine??) to add to our stamps books he had set up for us in an ordinary ruled line exercise book. My sister STILL has her book.....mine long gone (but not the stamps!(
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11:25:04pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I must have started when I was around 10 or so with a small stock book. I started slowly soaking stamps off envelopes and even damaged a few being too aggressive...I finally moved on to a Harris Worldwide album and started using hinges and getting approvals from the various companies that advertised in ads behind magazines. As I got into sports, girls and music I sorta stopped collecting but still kept old stamps and had my mom and sisters save stamps for me. During my college years and a few years after that I did not do much with my collection but I still would keep the stamps off envelopes. After my first child was born and we were living in Boston around the Bicentennial I would stop in some stamp store in downtown Boston...S.L. Stone I believe was the name. Then I started buying some stamps again as much as I could afford. Off and on that continued until the early 80s collecting mainly US but some European countries like Greece. After the kids graduated and left home I started slowly trying to fill holes in the old album and started again. I even joined a local stamp club.
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My First Memory's of Collecting Stamps is ?Sitting at the kitchen table when I was about 13 years old with my parents sorting stamps I had bought from a stamp company probably "Global Stamps" and putting them in my Album. My parents were not stamp collectors but they sure took an interest in me collecting them.Back then you could get a package of 50 or a hundred for 10-20 cents. Found in the back of Magazines. I started out collecting WW but after about a year I stopped collecting WW and went to U.S. Only. After a year putting them in a starter Album. My Parents bought me a New Minkus All American Stamp Album which I still have with the stamps I put in it way back then. Aunts, Uncles, Neighbors everybody saved stamps for me from the mail, in their attics and anywhere they found a stamp. At about 18 Girls, USAF and college and family got in the way and I just forgot about stamp collecting. I'm now 68 years old and have just returned to Stamp collecting about 4 years ago when my wife bought me the American Heirloom Collection from Mystic Stamp Co. for my 64th Birthday. It has grown from three volumes to five. She has no interest in stamps but thought I would like to get back into the Hobby after talking to a mutual Lady friend who is a collector. I cherish the memories of hunting through those cheap stamps with my Parents for that one or two stamps I didn't have. Now my collection has grown to around 10,000 stamps which includes singles, plate blocks and souvenir sheets. I'm pretty solid Mint from 1940-1980 but have a long ways to before 1940 and after 1980.
I've read all the posts in this thread. It's been great reading all the different posts and how everyone got started in collecting stamps and where they are now. I hope they keep coming.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I started collecting in 1965 when I was 7 years old. My older brother had collected stamps and my mother had helped him quite a bit. She found out that he had been selling off the good stuff to buy pot for "the band", hey, it was the 60's. She took what was left and gave it to me as most of it was bought with her money. The good stuff was all gone. I know he had U.S. #1&2, and he had all the US zeps, some in blocks. At seven I was still fascinated with what seemed like a million stamps. What I started with was a Scott's US album with very common stamps. The oldest stamp was a #26. Their was a WW album with mostly common stamps. I also got a shoebox with stamps on and off paper and a coffee can full of 3 cent purple statue of liberty stamps all on paper. Over time I learned to look things up in the Scott's catalogs at the library. My original haul had 7 stamps cataloging between 50 cents and 9 dollars. They were the most valuable in the lot. I have tracked them in a notebook throughout the years. I stopped adding new entries to the notebook in 1977. Every once in a while I come across that old tattered notebook. I was better organized 40 years ago than I am now.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Anyone remember the Nestle Quick stamp offer back in the 1950's?
That was my very first collection. Unfortunately, I didn't keep that old paperback album.
I was very fortunate as a youngster in that my neighbor, a WWII Army veteran, was a worldwide collector. He found out that I was interested in collecting and helped me to learn more about collecting, acquire a nicer album and hinge more world-wide stamps in that album. I never tired of his showing me his massive 3-volume Scott International album collection. He was a great mentor. Thanks and rest in peace, Mr. Gdula!
As many here, I set aside the albums in my teens and early twenties. One day in the early 70's while stationed in the greater Norfolk area, I stopped at a large hobby store to look around. I saw beautiful stamps, a large selection of awesome albums, Scott catalogues ... and I was hooked again! Still avidly collecting in my mid-60's; I can't imagine life without this wonderful hobby!
Wishing everyone a very happy, healthy and great stamp collecting 2014!!
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04:45:44pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I bumped this oldie back up as it contains discussions of people's early stampin' memories, including names of the old approval dealers.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Mission Stamp Co. is another.
WB
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Auctions - Approvals
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Back in the sixty`s I bought some Canada Scott No. 4, Beaver from J.N. Sissons in Toronto at auction.
Then after I was married and we wanted to buy a house I sold them at auction Sissons and received enough for a down payment on a house in 1971.
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I have shared this memory before. It was 1966 and I lived in Izmir Turkey as a US military dependent. There was no TV in Izmir in those days so we read a lot of books. I was reading the book Johnny Appleseed and my father remarked that the 1966 Johnny Appleseed commemorative stamp was on a package we had just received from my grandparents. I was in love with the officialness of this image on a stamp which sparked my interest in stamp collecting at the early age of nine. I still have that stamp!
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I have a lot of memories of dealers I did business with over the years, started collecting in 1962. Many of course are no longer around. Might be interesting to throw out a few names and see if anyone recalls the, bought from them or knows what became of them. A couple:
J. Sanders, Philatelist. That is how that firm titled themselves. Based in Southampton, UK I bought from their approval books in the late 1960's. I think they were on Commercial Road. I did Google Earth search a year or so when I recalled their address and there was still a stamp shop at that address!
Kristinn Ardal- this dealer based at Keflavik Airport, Iceland, advertised in Linn's and Meekels for many years from the late 59's and I think I still saw ads from them as late as the mid 80's. He (or she?) sold Iceland stamps and Scandinavian material from a regularly issued price list. Iceland seemed an exotic place to get mail from as a young collector. I always assumed this dealer was a male- I did find someone in Iceland on Facebook with that name and it was an older female.
If any interest I can bring up several more. The life span for dealing is incredibly long for stamp dealers. I collect old stmp magazines and I was amazed when looking over issues from the 1920's to see names I recalled from the 1960's!
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Like many I started collecting at the age of 7 or 8, living in San Jose Ca. My father had collected since he was a kid. I thought his collection was amazing and he got me started with a WW Regent album and a U.S. Minuteman Album. He had lots of duplicates so that was my main source early on. I did buy some approvals from the usual suspects but never thought they were a very good deal. We moved to NY a couple years later and dad started visiting the shops on Nassau st. so I was able to build off the duplicates he got there. Visiting the National Postal Museum and meeting up with neighbor Pat Hearst were the biggest inspirations in my early collecting years.
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Trip to Woolworth, bought one of those cloth bags with stamps on paper inside it. Just a few dollar's but many hours of fun for a new guy!
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06:04:16am
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
My earliest memory is having an empty Kellogg's Corn Flakes packet with some stamps in it. I was shaking them up and picking some out. The Statler Brothers song "Flowers on the Wall" is stronly linked to that memory. I was also the younest of five boys who collected stamps. We used to have a stamp census every now and then and we would compete with each other as to who had the most stamps from particular countries. I always came last. I also remember my mother telling me that I could have one stamp from her album for some reason. I picked a black swan stamp from Australia (not Western Australia). I also remember putting some stamps into a tin and looking at them a few weeks later. They were "overgrown with rust". Lessons learnt.
BTW. If I had a stamp census now with my brothers, I wouldn't come last!
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08:08:08am
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
My first stamp collecting memory is receiving an album (Harris Traveller I think), and some stamps as a Christmas gift from my parents. It was completely out of the blue, but 50 years later I'm still at it!
Eric
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Thanks, Michael, for bumping this thread!
My first memory from when I was probably 8 or so was watching Dad working on his US collection at his desk. My first memory of my own collecting was when I was 10 or 11 (1958 or 1959) and standing in the line at the grocery (IGA?) with Mom, waiting to get the next installment of the large stamp album that I got each week as part of a serial promotion the grocery chain was running. I don't remember how many sections that album ultimately contained, but it must have been at least 10 or 12.
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I can remember having a small album from Woolies 6d back in about 1950-51. Dad worked as a commissionaire for a merchant bank and one of his jobs was to sort the post and take it to the various departments, so he was always bringing home stamps from all over the world. My brother, older by 4 years got the pick and I got the rest.
Dad got us better albums as we got older and ultimately when earning we bought our own. Sadly my brother disposed of his sometime without thinking I might be interested.
I sold a lot of mine in the 60's (for 90 UK Pounds) to pay for driving lessons to get promotion. Don't we always regret things later.
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12:46:53pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
One day, a snooping first grader (me) found a red over-sized book. It had an image of an American Indian on the cover. I opened it up, and on the inside cover was a picture of a B-17 bomber in a battle scene from World War II. I knew this was my father's book. I flipped through the pages, and saw stamps. I put it away where I found it, and now and then would go and sneak more peaks into it.
In second grade, a boy in my class brought some stamps in to class. He showed them to anyone who wanted to look. I did, and he gave me one. I took it home, and showed my dad. He then went and brought out his long dormant stamp album and talked to me about stamp collecting. He put the album (Scott American) away, and that was that.
A month or so later, I caught the chicken pox. Out of school and stuck in bed, one night my dad came home and he gave me a Majestic Stamp Album and a packet of stamps and hinges. He talked to me some more about collecting stamps, and showed me how to put the stamps into the album. He had me try a few, and then it was supper time.
After supper, I looked at every page of that album. I was amazed that there were so many stamps. I marveled at the black and white pictures of the stamps.
Once in a while, my dad would bring home those bags from H E Harris of stamps on paper and showed me how to soak stamps. I caught on to it all very quickly, and my appetite was insatiable. So, from that one blue US "Hire the Handicapped" stamp the boy gave me in second grade, I went from 1 stamp to 300,000 in 55 years. (Scott reported this week that the 2018 catalogs will have listings for over 700,000 stamps, by the way.)
As for that Scott album, my dad gave it to me a couple of years later, but I was too young, and I mishandled it. I wish I still had it...
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I was introduced to stamp collecting by a classmate in the sixth grade. His father had been a missionary in Africa (either Liberia or Nigeria but I am unsure which) so he had a much broader perspective of the world than I as I had lived in rural Alabama towns and communities before moving to Bagdad, FL just before the sixth grade. I still have fond memories of visiting a local hobby store which had a counter and offerings for stamp and coin collecting in Milton, FL which I could get to by bicycle. I particularly remember lusting after a Scott Grand Award stamp album at the time but my fifty cent a week allowance put it way out of reach.
A couple of years later my grandmother bought me a lawnmower for $35 and I started mowing lawns for neighbors after school and on Saturday and eventually bought an H.E. Harris two volume Standard album for my first real stamp album with the money I earned. I earned stamp collecting and coin collecting merit badges as my first badges in Boy Scouts. I particularly remember looking for a rouletted stamp for the stamp collecting merit badge and eventually finding one in my grandmother's chest that was a tax stamp after searching for weeks through every option I could think. I was so excited when she told me that I could have the stamp! I ended up with just over 10,000 stamps in the album before selling it during my fund raising for college expenses.
Following college I bought a USA collection at a stamp show in 1975 and eventually moved the stamps from that collection into a Scott leather bound hingeless album which I have been working on ever since. I made a purchase of a Minkus based Supreme Global album in 2006 but never did much with it as family activities required more of a time commitment. Then in 2016 I discovered Jim Jackson's Big Blue 1840-1940 blog and Stamporama from a mention on his site and reignited my collecting interests and activities including a whirlwind foray into a Canada collection using the same Scott leather bound hingeless album only for Canada which I purchased in 2014 or so at a local stamp show. I have attended a variety of stamp shows over the years as the opportunity presented itself including shows in Ft. Walton, FL, Pensacola, FL, Atlanta, Birmingham, Jackson, AL, Houston, and in recent years Kent, WA, Everett, WA, Redmond, WA, and Renton, WA.
Recently I have joined my first ever local stamp club although I have been a member of the APS for over 25 years.
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04:26:54pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
In the 50`s my cousin and I collected and traded stamps. I remember sending to the Free Press Weekly (Published out of Winnipeg) for pks of stamps at 10cents and 25cents a pk. Living in a rural farming area it was an exciting day when these gems arrived in the mail. Now following a family, teaching career and Red Cross volunteer that hobby is just as meaningful as it was way back then Cousin and I still collect although we don`t get to visit as often.
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It all started as a cub scout at 7 years old in 1957. It was a project to start a collection. The details are fuzzy as to what I first did. But the hobby is still going strong in my bones, yet cub scouts lasted only that single year. (I did not want to be entertained by my mom, the den mother, with miscellaneous projects when there were ball games to be played.) However, the stamps did stick (pun intended).
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My memory is of just one particular stamp. It must have been in the late 50s and it was a beautiful map of the Portuguese colony of Angola. It was so much more colourful and shiny than my other stamps. I still always give a second look at the 1955 issue from Angola, Scott 386-393 for anyone interested.
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
22 Oct 2018
11:11:06pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I have always enjoyed those Angola and Madagascar maps and sailing ships, as well as coats of arms. Usually cheap and wickely cancelled, a complete used set just looks so nice on its own album page.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Mum was a collector so I don't have a clear first memory but I do remember that ran the school stamp club and I loved it - loved the swapping and trading. I also remember saving my pocket money for stamps and everyone sitting around the table soaking and sorting.
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05:55:17am
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I don't really remember how I started stamp collecting. It seems like I have collected forever ( 71 years old and counting ). I have a feeling that my parents started me off ( it's educational don't y'know ) My parents were big on education , having been forced to leave school at 14 for economic reasons, and both partly self-educated, as having a thirst for knowledge not common in working class families at the time (regrettably even more so today). Lack of education then was through circumstance and not inclination.
While I have occasionally gone "dormant" for all the usual reasons ( mainly girls ), I never really stopped. I have always been at the "cheap" end of the market ( mixtures, kiloware etc), as the bulk of activity has been when lack of money has kept me from other activities in downtime (mainly girls), then marriage, then house buying then kids.
I spent many years in the bus industry ( both management and driving), which inevitable meant long ( and usually unsocial) hours where a solitary pastime like stamps is very useful to to occupy the little spare time one has, which is usually when everyone else is at work anyway. My late working years were spent as a warehouse labourer - physically very demanding ( good for the heart muscle) but intellectually much less so. Never being one for sitting in front of the square screen ( except for documentaries and "deep" drama), the brainwork needed for stamps beyond the simple accumulation was very welcome.
In retirement I seem to have somewhat less time. Weather permitting I spend as much time as possible outdoors, in my garden, with the twin benefits of heavy exercise and the intellectual stimulation of raising plants ( from my own collected seed and vegetative propagation). Only the wet and the dark seems to propel me to stamp collecting.
However stamp collecting over the years has given me immense pleasure, and along with other positive influences ( especially the Scout movement ) has given me I think, a broadmindedness and tolerance that seems to be increasingly rare these days, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. It has also given me an immense supply of useless or inconsequential information which I am likely to trot out at the slightest provocation - much to the embarrasment of "her indoors" !
Malcolm
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Hi all,
Nothing grandiose here I'm afraid...
My story:
I remember it like it was yesterday, because it was early last year when I was bitten by the collecting bug!
I started in a weird way at the age of 50. Now I'm 51.
I for some reason saw a cool stamp when I was at the post office and thought, "Wow, I never even thought of collecting stamps, what am I missing here?"
I asked people to start keeping stamps for me and my father-in-law gave me a commerative stamp of the "founding of Florida" and for some reason that did it for me. I researched the heck out of that one stamp and from that I determined that stamp collecting was a great way to learn history and I was hooked.
Now I have already accumulated WAY more stuff that I can keep up with, so I'm trying HARD to just enjoy what I have and take it slow.
I know, I'm a weird one to start so "old", but look at it this way, it's easier to afford things!
Thanks!
JR
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I don't know how, but I made it all the way through my (1960s) childhood without being exposed to stamp collecting in any way, except, maybe, seeing Kenmore ads in comic books, and not giving them a second thought.
It wasn't til 1974, I was 19, in the Air Force, when I was hangin out in a friend's barracks room, and he showed me some of his collection. I recall being impressed most with his Australian 'roos. I jumped headlong into the hobby. Got me a subscription to Linn's, started getting approvals, and became beguiled by the stamps of the Channel Islands, and picked up a White Ace album for them. I mounted all my stamps lovingly, and with care, using . . . Crystal Mounts .
I have no idea what became of that first album of mine, but I can say I no longer use Crystal Mounts.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
You could say that tuberculosis was what got me into stamp collecting.
In 1949, my family moved from New York State to New Mexico, to be close to my paternal grandparents, who had moved there in 1945 in hopes of finding a cure for my grandmother's tuberculosis.
When I was 10 or 11 years old, a friend of my father invited my family to visit his family in their community, called Cottage San. The "San" meant Sanatorium, from the community's history as a the location of two or three TB sanatoria. Here's a postcard picturing one of the sanatoriums:
During my visit, the two brothers, who were about my age, showed me their stamp collections. I'd never heard of anyone collecting stamps, but the idea was intriguing. Soon I was buying new issues at our tiny post office in Arenas Valley, six miles east-northeast of Silver City, and ordering approvals through ads in Boys' Life magazine. Here's my web page about the Arenas Valley post office.
My first stamp trading experience was with the same two brothers who introduced me to collecting. They also taught me to use the Scott catalogue, and soon I had bought my own copy; in those days, of course, it was just one octavo-size volume of perhaps 400 pages. My first Boy Scout merit badge was the one awarded for achievement in stamp collecting.
Bob
Postscript: New Mexico's warm, dry air proved to be the cure for my grandmother's TB. She died at age 95, not of TB but of terminal irritation and shrill vocalization. But she sure made good sugar cookies!
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
I do not know if it is my first but probably the one that stands out the most. I must have been 4 years old, just potty trained and I had somehow managed to convince my dad to give me a stamp I liked, a 4 cent stamp from South Africa depicting a ram's head. I proudly carried the stamp around for a while till it was potty time. Then somehow the stamp slipped through my fingers and in the potty it went. My dad was quite unhappy as he was the guy to do the recovery mission to save the stamp. I guess back then this stamp must have been worth something. Today it is just a common 1 cent stamp.
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
07 Nov 2018
12:23:08pm
re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
That South African can be had in eight or ten shade variations.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
"That South African can be had in eight or ten shade variations.
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The one that came out of the potty would be the 11th uncataloged shade.
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re: What is Your First Memory of Collecting Stamps?
Since I told this story earlier... here's my very first stamp that got me started in 1966. One stained and worn Johnny Appleseed commemorative! And it is in the Minuteman album I kept as a teen. I just couldn't toss it away!
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