Stamp of the Day

Be well. Stay safe. Fight for justice.
Work for peace.

 

In April of 2020, not long after the COVID-19 pandemic began, I had an inexplicable urge to dig into my late father’s stamp collection, which had been sitting unexamined on my shelves since about 2012.  I created a challenge for myself: each day find a stamp that was somehow connected to that day, write a short blurb about it, and post it on Facebook with a picture of the stamp.  I thought I’d do that for a few weeks.  But the pandemic continued and what started as short blurbs became a year of daily essays that not only discussed historic events, famous people, and obscure Americana but also recounted personal and family stories and examined how these decades-old stamps shed light on a host contemporary challenges. Thanks to my daughter Rebecca, every one of those 365 essays – from the early succinct ones to the later rambling ones – are collected on this website, where you can view them by date, by broad category, or by whether they were my “personal favorites.”  I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Historical Figures & Events

Delving into the people and events that shaped history

Culture & Society

Exploring Americana artifacts and other obscure areas of US history

Contemporary Issues

Discussing the pandemic, 2020 politics, and other recent happenings

Personal & Family Lore

Recounting stories from my childhood, “adulthood,” and family’s history

Featured Essays

Author favorites

Today, when violent right-wing fascists have attacked the US Capital, I find it heartening to see that on January 6, 1941, at a time when the Nazis and other fascists …

Sometime in the mid-1960s, my mother and I drove over the then-new Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which opened on November 21, 1964. As we crossed over "the Narrows," which separate Brooklyn from Staten …

"And now for something completely different" - a postage stamp encased in metal, complete with advertising on one side. This is not a commercial oddity. Rather, during the Civil War, …

The #stampoftheday for Sunday, April 26, is the 10-cent 1940 stamp honoring Jane Addams was a social reformer who was the co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. She …

My family moved to Summit, New Jersey in the summer of 1963. Six years later, Summit, celebrated the 100th anniversary of its incorporation as a separate township. Today's #stampoftheday, which …

I'm sure that there many of the people who defended the Capital were former Boy Scouts. I'm also sure that many of those attacked the building also were former Boy Scouts. I …