The #stampoftheday for April 28 is 1958’s 3-cent stamp marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of James Monroe, fifth President of the United States, who served from 1817-1825. (Happy birthday Jimmy!). Fun fact: when he ran for reelection in 1820, Monroe was unopposed. He received every electoral vote except one, which was cast for John Quincy Adams. He did not spend the next four years telling everyone who would listen that he had won in an historic landslide.

Unlike many of the older first-day covers in my dad’s collection, which were addressed to other people (and that he later bought) this first-day cover is addressed to him in Monsey, New York. We moved there in the fall of 1957, a few months after I was born (and not long after my dad had taken a new job_. At the time, Monsey was a fledgling suburb in fast growing Rockland County, which had just been linked to Westchester County with the opening on the Tappan Zee Bridge in 1955. Today, of course, Monsey is home to a large Hasidic community.

Bonus #stampoftheday, which I stumbled onto this afternoon, are some first-day covers from the the Fifth International Philatelic Exhibition (FIPEX), which opened its doors to about 60,000 visitors on April 28, 1956. This even was planned in conjunction with the opening of the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle (a building whose history is the subject of a detailed discussion in The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s). In all, there were 121 dealer booths and the US Post Office had its own 10,000-square-foot booth with 16 windows to accommodate lines up to 100 feet long. And over the course of the show, which ran until May 6, over 268,000 people attended FIPEX, a 37 percent increase over the previous CIPEX held in 1947.