“Don’t mind me, I’m just having a conversation with your father,” said Joseph Mullin, executive director of Spellman Museum of Stamps & Postal History when he looked over the collection in January 2020, about three months before I started writing my #stampofthe day posts.

“Not a problem,” I replied, “do you mind if I listen in.”

I had driven past the sign for the museum – which is located on the campus of Regis College in nearby Weston – for many years but never stopped there until that visit, which was part of my early, pre-#stampoftheday efforts to try and understand and value the collection, explorations that helped set the stage for the more the more than 300 posts I’ve written since I started this project 111/2 months ago.

Today’s #stampoftheday – a 3-cent stamp picturing the Statue of Liberty that was issued in 1954– honors that visit, the museum, and it namesake, a Massachusetts native who was the powerful and influential Archbishop of New York from 1939 until he died in 1967.

As I’ve written in earlier posts, my father’s collection had sat on my shelves since about 2014 when my mother convinced me to take it home as she began the process of moving from a house in Fearrington Village to an apartment at Carolina Meadows, the continuing care committee where she lived until she passed away almost exactly two years ago.

I had never looked at these when my father was alive, in part because he seems to have stopped working earnestly on the collection late 1960, three years before we moved to Summit. When we moved, he took the collection with him and it sat for decades in the cabinets below the built-in bookshelves at one end of the house’s long living room. At some point in the late 1990s, it appears that he took the collection to the “Garage Mahal,” the office he set up in the studio apartment in Fearrington that had become their part-time home by 2000.

My father died in early 2001 and the collection sat undisturbed for 13 years. When I brought the collection back to Boston in 2014, my intention was to see if I could sell or donate it. But I knew I couldn’t do that while my mother was alive, so the collection sat on my shelves until fall 2019, several months after she had died. I met with an acquaintance who is a stamp dealer who explained that while stamp collecting’s popularity has been falling for many years, the collection was worth a bit of money, perhaps a few thousand dollars at the most.

Prodded by my sister and brother-in-law to get a second opinion, in early December 2019, I travelled to Newton, where I spent a fascinating few hours with Stanley Richmond, who I later learned is in the Stamp Dealer Hall of Fame and was the first person to pay more than $100,000 for a US stamp, the infamous “inverted Jenny”.

One Saturday afternoon in January 2020, I loaded up a couple of canvas tote bags and headed over to the Spellman Museum, where, for a small fee, Mullin will look at over your collection. His explanations, along with the wise advice that a collector gave my sister, helped me begin to appreciate not only what is in my late father’s collection, but also some of the care, interest and unique eye my father brought to stamp collecting.

The museum, which owns and houses more than 2 million stamps, is a wonderfully odd place. Spellman, its namesake, not only was a major conservative figure in both the church and US politics in the mid-20ths century but also was an inveterate stamp collector, starting in the early 1900s when he was a parish priest in Newton. While there, he asked Sister Fidelma Conway, to help him mount stamps he had collected and to help manage his collection. When he became archbishop of New York, he left the ever-expanding collection in her care.

In the early 1950s, Spellman’s interest in politics and stamps combined when he was part of a successful campaign to issue the first US stamp that included the words, “In God We Trust.” The first stamp to include this was an 8-cent airmail stamp, picturing the Statue of Liberty that was issued in April 1954. (My father’s collection doesn’t include that stamp but it does include the somewhat similar 3-cent stamp, issued a few months later, that is today’s #stampoftheday.

The 8-cent stamp was released at “the biggest ceremony of its kind in the history of the United States Post Office,” the department announced in early April 1954. That ceremony, which was broadcast nationally on radio and television featured remarks by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield. Spellman, who was an ardent anti-Communist, participated in the event along with the president of the Synagogue Council of America and the general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ. Describing the message the airmail stamp would take abroad, Summerfield asserted, “in 16 years, we have seen the first of radar, jet planes, guided missiles, atomic bombs, and all the misery and slavery and tragedy the world’s greatest powers have wrought, but we still retain our faith in the partnership of God and liberty that has preserved our country.”

Later that year, National Philatelic Museum in Philadelphia named Spellman “Philatelist of the Year” not only for his efforts to have “In God We Trust” placed on postage stamps but also for sponsoring a major exhibit at the museum that commemorated the 25th anniversary of the first stamp issued by the Vatican and featured more than 30,000 stamps from Spellman’s collection. Five years later, he sponsored a similar exhibition in a special exhibition room at the Chrysler Building in in New York City, an exhibition that provides the thinnest of reeds for today’s #stampoftheday, because it was described in a March 31, 1959 article in The New York Times.

The New York exhibit came 11 years after Spellman had given his collection to the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, who founded and run Regis College in Weston. By the late 1950s, the collection was proving to be a major burden. So in the late 1950s he agreed to raise money to build an independent stamp museum on the college’s grounds. Ground was broken for the project in 1961 and it was completed in the fall of 1963. Sister Conway, who died in early 2005, was the museum’s first and long-time executive director.

There you have it. Thanks to a very conservative priest, I’ve come to a much deeper understanding of my father’s stamp collection. I hope you’ve been enjoying these posts have as much as I like writing them.

Stay safe, be well, fight for justice and work for peace.