My Childhood: My First Stamp Collection

Sometimes I had fun looking through my mothers magazines. You know, women’s magazines with titles like Woman’s Day, Home & Garden and Ladies Home Journal. I read every article in fascination, as the viewpoint of the author seemed different than that of the articles that I was used to reading.

One day I was scanning through one of mothers Woman’s Day magazines, when I saw an advertisement for "free stamps". This sounding intriguing, so I wrote a letter to the company, requesting the stamps.

They arrived a few weeks later, along with something called "approvals". This was a packet of about one hundred different stamps. My job was to pick those I wanted. I was supposed to return those I didn’t want along with payment for those I decided to keep.

I was delighted. A whole new world opened up to me. Suddenly, I was interested in stamp collecting.

I soon realized I needed a stamp album. There is nothing worse than having several hundred (or thousand) stamps in a loose pile. You can’t show them off when they’re like that, after all.

I remembered the local 5&10 had some stamps, maybe they had an album also. So I broke into my piggy bank and walked down to the store.

And found not only stamp albums, but real stamps. Lots of them. In little packets, separated by type and country. They also had big bags of stamps, still attached to the paper.

That day I purchased two stamp albums - one for the United States and one for foreign stamps. I also bought a couple of the packets - including the prize, some round stamps from the little island country of Tonga.

Over the next few months, I probably spent about one hundred dollars on stamps. I purchased a few more through the mail, and lots more through the local 5&10 store.

I carefully placed most of these in the stamp album, using little hinged pieces of paper called stamp hinges. One side of these hinges is coated with glue. You’re supposed to wet them, and attached them both to the stamp and the album.

After six months or so, I lost interest in my stamp collection. I carefully packed everything away into a box, and didn’t even look at it again for years.