In 1962, when the U.S. Post Office Department released a jingle to go with its first ever Christmas stamp. Set to the tune of Jingle Bells, it went: "Christmas stamps, Christmas …
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
For several reasons, I have a soft spot in my heart for the two 2-cent stamps that make up today's #stampoftheday offering. The stamps were both issued on August 3, 1927. …
What do Robert Louis Stevenson, Sally Rand's Nude Ranch, monkeys racing tiny automobiles, Diego Rivera, and Indiana Jones, all have in common? The answer is that they are all connected to …
Baseball, which is near and dear to my heart, takes the field as today's #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued on June 12, 1939, issued in conjunction with the opening of …
Political leadership, for good and for ill, is one of the messages I receive from today's #stampoftheday, a 10-cent stamp picturing Daniel Webster, who in the first half of the …
I've been thinking a lot about my father, who died 20 years ago this week. As has been obvious from these #stampoftheday posts, he was, for a time, an avid stamp …