A bear so famous that he needed his own Zip Code to handle all his fan mail lurks behind the scenes of today' #stampoftheday, a 4-cent stamp honoring Forest Conservation …
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
Another rainy day in Maine so I'm again sitting on the screened in porch thinking about how to write about today's #stampoftheday, which, because it honors the Boy Scouts of …
You would think that after writing 337 #stampoftheday posts, that a stamp could no longer surprise me. While you'd usually be right. Today you are wrong. The stamp that surprised me …
Did Frances Elizabeth Willard, the long-time president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), ever go to a Seder? If she went, did she follow tradition and drink four glasses of …
The third wave of the great 1918-1919 influenza pandemic peaked early in March of 1919. Although the third wave wasn't as deadly as the apocalyptic second wave in mid 1918, …
In August 21, 1945, my father, along with almost 15,000 other soldiers, was on the Queen Mary, which was one of the first ships to bring soldiers back from Europe …