When I started preparing this post, I thought that today’s stamp was an innocuous offering that I had to include to continue my 185-day long streak of writing a daily #stampoftheday ” piece.

It’s easy to see why I thought so little of this 7-cent airmail stamp, which was issued on October 22, 1960. The ever-useful Mystic Stamp website, merely says this stamp is #C61 in the definitive Scott catalogue numbering system and “is identical to C60 except it is a horizontal coil and is only perforated on two sides.” Of course, that led me to the write-up of C60, which had been issued about two months earlier, on August 12, 1960. But the Mystic site only said, that stamp “was the same as C51, but the color was changed” from blue to red. Now hot on the trail, I looked up C51 which had another uncharacteristically terse writeup. The stamp, I learned, was “issued as required by law to meet the increase in airmail postage for letters that became effective on August 1, 1958.”

Since I couldn’t find another stamp in my late father’s collection that was issued on October 22, commemorated an event that occurred on October 22, or showed someone who was born or died on October 22, I figured I’d have to leave it there. Writing about a stamp had no back story would keep the streak going but I would have done so with the stamp equivalent of the bloop single or infield dribbler that allows a batter to keep a hitting streak going.

Then I took another look at the stamp, which portrays a four-engine jet plane in a stylized, mid-century way. That made me realize that this stamp, in all its iterations, was issued at the time when commercial jet aviation was “taking off” in the United States and the world.

Experimental jet planes had been around since the early 1940s but they hadn’t been built in large numbers until 1944, when Nazi Germany began producing them, fortunately too late to turn the tide in World War II. Other countries soon followed suit; the first American fighter jet was put in service in 1948 and the first of the signature B-52 bombers began flying in 1952.

1952 also was the year of the first commercial jet service when the state-owned British Oversees Airline Corporation began flying the De Havilland Comet 1 plane on its London-to-Johannesburg route. (Less than a year later, the post office issued the first stamp showing a jet plane, a 1953 stamp celebrating 50th anniversary of powered flight that showed both the Wright Brothers’ plane and what appears to be a jet plane.) However, commercial jet travel didn’t come as quickly as planned because in 1954, BOAC which expanded jet service to other routes, ended that service after design flaws caused several fatal crashes. However, the military continued to use jet planes and in 1957, the post office issued a stamp showing a fighter jet to honor the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force and its predecessor, the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Finally, in October 1958, just a few months after the blue version of today’s stamp was first issued, BOAC began offering commercial service on Comet 4 jets. A few weeks later Pan Am began offering the same service on Boeing 707s, four-engine planes that look similar to the stylized plane on the stamp. Others quickly followed suit. In 1959, American Airlines began offering the first regularly scheduled transcontinental jet flights. These planes took only about 5 hours to travel between New York and San Francisco, about took only 5 hours, 3 hours less than took on piston-engine DC-7s that had been making those flights.

By 1960, the year today’s stamp was issued, commercial jet aviation had taken hold. Airline traffic, which had grown from 19 million enplanements in 1950 to 42 million in 1955, 62 million in 1960, and 170 million in 1970. And though it’s hard to believe today, back then travelling by plane was such a big deal that people would dress up for an airplane trip.

The growth of jet travel also transformed America’s metropolitan areas. Since the jets needed longer runways (and since aviation was attracting more passengers), many cities significantly expanded their existing airports and some built new ones in outlying areas. Real capital spending on airports increased doubled between 1956 and 1960 and doubled again in the 1960s. The new jets also were significantly noisier than the planes they replaced, which had dramatic impacts on the people who lived and worked in neighborhoods close to the rapidly growing facilities. While those airports provided service that greatly helped their region’s airports, the expansion and the noise greatly harmed people in nearby neighborhoods, such as East Boston, a low-income, largely immigrant enclave next to Boston’s Logan Airport. In addition, airports built in once-rural areas, such as Chicago’s O’Hare airport, led to major commercial development on nearby farmland.

While travel by jet continued to grow, so did popular resistance to the growth of airports. Since the late 60s and early 70s, this opposition has effectively halted expansion of existing airports and the construction of new ones. In fact, since 1970, only two major new airports have opened in the US: Dallas-Fort Worth (1973) and Denver (1995). And for several decades, little land and relatively few runways were added to America’s existing airports. However, spending on airports, continued to grow as airport operators rebuilt terminals and other facilities to accommodate newer wide-body jets and continued growth in passenger traffic.
So the red stamp showing a jet plane isn’t innocuous. Rather, it signaled a transformative change in the way we move people and goods, not only in the US but across the world. And that means, the #stampoftheday streak continues with something that is more than a blood hit or an infield single.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.