Several possible options today for #stampoftheday but I'm going to go with two related to the 1939 New York World's Fair, which opened on April 30, 1939 on over 1,200 …
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
Oklahoma, "where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain" (and where many strange and unsettling things also have happened), takes center stage as today's #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp, issued on …
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 …
A five-cent stamp issued in 1940, takes us on a magical and mysterious tour that not only includes the Beatles but also has vigilante tailors, dreams that solve intractable design …
John Glenn, the first American (and third person) to orbit the earth, wasn't my favorite astronaut in the mid 1960s. That honor belonged to the lesser known Wally Schirra, who …
We've all been there. Asked to say meaningful and appropriate remarks at some important occasion, we blow it. Maybe we went on too long. Maybe we said something we shouldn't …