How do you get started? Philatelic memories.

My mother got me started about 5 decades ago. She was trying to figure out a way to keep her son out of trouble. Little did she know the catastrophe she was about to start.

She gave me this orange stamp (pic is pilfered, not the original) and I was hooked.



Thanks Mom!

When I was a schoolboy, I started collecting stamps that we got on our mail. Most were 55 cent stamps of Queen Juliana. One day, my father gave me money to buy the low values at the post office in our village.

Some time later, when we visited my maternal grandmother, my father took me to the post office in the village in which my grandmother lived. There, he bought me the high value stamps up to 2 gulden 50 cent.

I think it was later that same day that we returned to the post office to buy the 5 gulden stamps. As we wanted to pay, he also decided to buy me the highest value stamp of 10 gulden.



At the time, 10 guilders were a lot of money. Today, it buys you two loafs of bread, or 18 croissants.

PhotoJim , Thanks for starting this thread, I’ve been meaning to start one myself.

In 1974, when I was 9, I received a letter from my grandmother which was franked with a US Scott #1548 Legend of Sleepy Hollow stamp. This stamp absolutely fascinated me and, the next day at school, I checked out a book about stamp collecting. After reading it, I decided that I was going to become a stamp collector. History, even back then, is a passion of mine and stamp collecting would fit in quite nicely. I even ended up learning all the US presidents in chronological order due to the Prexie set.



After making my decision to collect,  I got my mom to take me to the local post office where we bought copies of all the different new issues they had on sale as well as a 1973 commemorative year set in a nice folder and a copy of the book Stamps & Stories, a USPS publication that had all the US stamps pictured in color and identified by Scott number. The clerk at the post office told us that Cole’s Book Store in the local mall also sold stamps and stamp supplies and off we went.

When we got to Cole’s, we found the stamp section, which was prominently located at the front of the store, and I set to work picking out what I thought that I needed. She bought me a Harris Freedom US album, a Harris Explorer worldwide album, a pack of Dennison hinges, a little 4 page stockbook with manila pages and a Harris mixture of worldwide stamps on paper in an orange bag. 

Within a few weeks, I had discovered an ad for approvals in a comic book and sent off for those. Every spare cent that I could lay my hands on was spent buying approvals or was spent at Cole’s buying packets of topical stamps or those orange Harris mixture bags, even though they invariably contained mostly Machins or Franco stamps. I found several kids at school who also collected and we all began trading back and forth. Within a year, I had graduated to the Harris Liberty and Ambassador albums. 

One day, my dad mentioned that he had a friend who collected and had said that he’d like to meet me. We went over to his house and it was from him that I began learning about serious philately. He had a son about two years older than me who he had tried to get interested in stamp collecting, but to no avail. He ended up giving me a Minkus worldwide album and several thousand stamps that he had bought for his son, who didn’t want them. We met on various occasions and he taught me pretty much everything I knew about philately at the time. He always sent me home with several glassines full of stamps and always gave some to my dad to give to me whenever they got together.

By the time that I was a sophomore in high school, my interest in stamps was beginning to wane and I was focused on girls, cars and my fledgling baseball career. By the time that I entered college, my collection had been relegated to a closet where it remained for the next 20 years or so.

In 2006, I was in a Barnes & Noble bookstore and happened to see a copy of Linn’s Stamp News and purchased it mainly for nostalgic reasons. When I got home, I read it from front to back and decided to get my old collection out. I then subscribed to Linn’s and  began buying stamps from the advertisers and on eBay and got my eldest daughter involved in helping me sort, soak and identify. After about six months, though, the collection was returned to the closet as I was trying to run two businesses and just didn’t have the time to fool with it.

About three years ago, serious health issues caused me to have to sell my businesses and retire early. As I was no longer able to physically do many of the things that I used to enjoy (backpacking, mountain biking, rock climbing) and I was no longer going to work each day, I began falling into a deep depression as the boredom set in. My therapist told me to try to find a hobby that wasn’t physically taxing to help occupy my time and that’s when I remembered my stamp collection. I got it back out and pretty much picked up where I left off in 2006 and, within a few weeks, the depression was gone. I began spending more and more time working on my stamps and told my wife that I hadn’t retired, I had simply gone from one full time job to another!

I’m sorry to have been so long winded with my reply, but I enjoyed recounting my stamp collecting history and hope that, if you made it this far, you weren’t bored silly!

Now we know what is wrong with khj , he is off of his meds...

These stories are great!

coastwatcher, that was very serendipitous about your father's friend. I bet he was super excited to find someone else who was interested in the hobby. I tried to get my niece into it and she was interested for awhile, but it didn't stick. My nephew was never really interested.

It's such a great hobby. I learned so much about world geography, politics and languages from stamp collecting. I even managed to learn the Greek alphabet.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the USPS Stamps & Stories book mentioned in my above post, I couldn’t find the 1974 edition that my mom bought me on our first trip to the post office, but here is the 1975 edition that she bought for me the following year.

I've been under the impression you started as a child. Now I find you were well into adulthood.