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

Before there were Google Maps, before there was MapQuest, there was something my daughters called "GrannieQuest." GrannieQuest was a remarkable, personalized navigation service. If you were driving somewhere, you would call …

Like many people, I cried more than once today. I cried so much, that I can't remember everything that caused me to tear up. I cried when I watched the videos of …

A 3-cent stamp issued in 1952 on the 125th anniversary of the granting of a charter for the B&O Railroad brings Tom Thumb, Cooper Union, and McSorley's Old Ale House …

Today, on the 19th anniversary of four coordinated terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 airplane terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center (WTC), the #stampoftheday, is reminder that the …

On April 18, 2020, I wrote a short, paragraph-long Facebook post that started: "though I've had them for years, it's only in the last year that I started to look …

Believe it or not, chicken is the focus of today's #stampoftheday, which is a posting I've been looking forward to since I first saw this stamp in my late father's …