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 …
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
On September 1, 1939, 1.5 million German soldiers and more than 2,500 tanks invaded Poland, while more than 2,000 German airplanes began bombing Polish cities, air bases, fortifications, bridges, and …
For me, and many other people, today is the one-year anniversary of when I not only started working from home but also began to actively avoid as many face-to-face interactions …
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 thought this was supposed to be a work of fiction," a member of my book group wrote just before we met to discuss Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America." …
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 …