The #stampoftheday for May 20, is a 10-cent stamp, issued in 1927, to honor Charles Lindbergh’s famed trans-Atlantic flight which started in New York City on May 20, 1927. The stamp, which was issued in June 1927 (and reissued in May 1928), was the first U.S. stamp to honor a living person. The Post Office reportedly issued it after receiving thousands of requests from people who wanted a stamp to honor the first solo trans-Atlantic flight, which had captured the imagination of the nation and the world. Ironically, about a year after the stamp was issued, the Post Office reduced postal rates and the stamp became functionally obsolete.

The flight, of course, not only helped spur interest in the growth of aviation it also made Lindbergh famous and quite wealthy. In 1932 his infant son was kidnapped and murdered, a tragedy that was widely covered by the press and drove Lindbergh and his wife to live in Europe for several years. In the late 1930, his vocal non-interventionist stance, including some incendiary statements about Jews and vocal support for the anti-war America First Committee, led many to suspect he was a Nazi sympathizer. (Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” is a skillful and prescient novel that imagines what life would have been like for Jews in Newark had Lindbergh been elected president in 1940.)

The stamp shown here, like many of the older, rarer stamps in my father’s collection (such as some of the 1948 Israeli stamps from my May 16 post), was not in one of his carefully constructed albums, but rather was in one of several large envelopes or old cigar boxes that had a combination of older, more valuable stamps that he began purchasing from dealers in the 1970s, along with stamps from those years that he never got around to putting into albums or organizing in any fashion. I’ve only just begun to explore what actually is in those piles.

Stay safe and be well!