A (Mostly) Typical Stamp Collecting Journey

As I have gotten to know other collectors and read their stories, I have come to realize that my philatelic journey has been fairly typical. I started "collecting stamps" when I was a child by peeling them off of the envelopes we got in the mail and, if I didn't tear them too badly, I put them in some envelopes. Somehow, I learned about soaking stamps. I say somehow because, as best I can remember, I started doing that before I even had an album. The lady in my church who was in charge of the missionary mail caught wind of my hobby and started cutting off the stamps from the mail and giving them to me. Despite all the many stamps and stamp albums I have, I can immediately find that first foreign stamp she gave me. Despite its minimal catalog value, it is one I treasure. My dad then realized what I was doing and bought me my first album. He would regularly buy me packets of stamps to add to my collection.

Life went on. I got into my teenage years, and there were sports, there were other school activities, there were girls. So, my stamp collection got pushed aside. I became an adult and there was continued education and then a career and a family to get established. Over the next couple of decades, I would pull out my stamps once in a while to look them over or mount a few in an album.

Here comes the part where my journey was not so typical. Many people picked up the hobby watching a parent (usually their fathers). My father picked it up from me!  Several years after my mother passed, my father remarried. His new wife's late husband had been a stamp dealer. Rather than sell his stock, he started picking through it, mounting into his own albums and sending me his duplicates. I got his collection after he passed away a few years ago.

So, about twenty years ago, I decided to make philately a regular, consistent hobby rather than just something to wile away a rainy day. My main interests now are South America (particularly, the liberators of Spanish-speaking South America), the Russian civil war period, and the cindarella issues of the post-USSR period.

I live in western Maryland with my beautiful wife, three adorable children, a hyper-active dog, a demon-possessed cat, two guinea pigs, and about a dozen chickens (that's my wife's hobby).