Collecting postage stamps

by James K. Sayre

Fifth grade was a time of great awakening for me. Having a small but steady income from delivering a route of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette each morning, I moved into some activities that cost a little money. I don't remember exactly how I got started collecting stamps; maybe I was intrigued by the ads which I saw in the back of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines. I sent off a quarter taped to a piece of cardboard and got the special offer of 100 genuine foreign postage stamps back in the mail, along with something new called "approvals." These were interesting sets of stamps; you took the ones you wanted to buy, and mailed back your payment along with the rest of the approvals.

Somehow I learned that Kaufman's Department Store in downtown Pittsburgh has a stamp and coin department, so I started taking the #38 streetcar from downtown Mt. Lebanon to downtown Pittsburgh to buy some stamps.

My stamp collection of both American and foreign stamps grew into about 9th grade or so, when I was encouraged to spend more time at my school studies. 9th grade was one of the low points in my academic career; I made very mediocre grades. Our whole 9th grade class went from being at the top of a 3-year junior high school to being at the bottom of a 4-year high school. I was in the midst of adolescence and was not very motivated. However, in my sophomore year in high school, things perked up a bit; I was placed into the Advanced Placement (AP) class in both biology and mathematics, so I had some interesting learning challenges. And in these AP classes all the kids in the class were very smart and I could actually enjoy learning new materials.

One of the little treasures for a young stamp collector was the classic booklet, "How to Collect Postage Stamps," made by the Littleton Stamp Company, Littleton, New Hampshire. It was pocket-sized, being three inches by five inches and thirty-two pages long. I managed to keep my copy. Now copies of it for sale can be seen on EBay.

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Web page last updated on 23 March 2009.