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

Stifled in his job in Boston (and probably chafing at the city's restrictive culture), a young man moves to New York, where he thinks he can find a job (and …

Though I've had them for years, it's only in the last year that I started to look at my late father's stamp collection which goes from the late 1800s until …

In 1975, like many in the cast, I grew a beard for our high school's production of "Fiddler on the Roof." (I played the rabbi.) Except a few brief interludes …

Acadia National Park, a place I've loved over the years, takes center stage as today's #stampoftheday because on July 8, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson created Sieur de Monts National Monument, …

Are you old enough to remember paperboys? I am. So I smile when I look at today's #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp, issued in 1952 in honor of America's newspaper boys. …

As the great gospel song says, I "woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom." I didn't realize that was the case until late in the day but looking …