Volume 23, Number 9

November 2009

 UPCOMING EVENTS

Johnstown Stamp Show – Saturday, November 14, 2009; 10:am – 4:00pm; Senior Activities Center, 550 Main St., Johnstown.  Sponsored by the Johnstown Stamp Club. 5 dealers, USPS substation.  Contact Charles D. Holtzman, Jr., chazhjr@msn.com; 814-532-0199.

The Quarterly Wilkinsburg Stamp Show – Sunday November 21, 2009; 10:00am to 4:00pm; Churchill Borough Building, 2300 William Penn Highway.  (take the Churchill Exit building is about 2 blocks on the left).  Sponsored by James J. Reeves.  Call 800-701-7091 for more information.

Cranberry Stamp and Postcard Show - Sunday, December 6, 2009; 10:00am - 4:00pm.  Four Points Sheraton Inn, 910 Sheraton Drive, Cranberry, PA (North of downtown Pittsburgh, at the interchange of I-79 and the PA turnpike) About 8 stamp and cover dealers from the local area, good selections, a nice program.  Sponsored by Sandra & Jan Harris.  Call Jan Harris at 412-851-1674 for more information.

Soaking Modern Stamps

The USPS has eliminated the requirement for a water-soluble layer in contracts with printers in a cost cutting effort and they are unlikely to reverse this decision.  This renders the time-tested method of soaking stamps in water obsolete.  However, there is a method called the “weak paper” method that works quite well.  Proceed as follows:

Fill a container with water at room temperature.  Place the cut square with the stamp on surface of the water face.  Wait five seconds.  Remove the cut square.  The paper will have absorbed water but the stamp very little.  Gently turn back the paper from the four corners of the stamp.  Quickly pull the remaining paper from stamp.  There will be some paper residue on the stamp but it will look like it was soaked the old fashioned way. 

John Rose demonstrated this technique at the APS Pittsburgh show and at WESCOPEX and it works.  The more porous the envelope paper the better this method works.

Christmas Mail-by Dates

The USPS has announced the following deadlines:

Dec. 4   Military mail to Iraq and Afghanistan

Dec. 16  Parcel Post

Dec. 21  First Class Mail

Dec. 21  Priority Mail

Dec. 23   Express Mail

Neither Rain, Snow, Sleet nor Hail but G-20 is a Different Story!

The USPS closed the Gateway Finance Station, and the Grant Street and Fourth Avenue offices during the G-20 summit meeting in Pittsburgh this past September.  The USPS also removed collection boxes in the restricted area.  

Honoring Veterans

You will probably see volunteers selling poppies this month to raise funds for veterans.  This symbol became popular largely because of the poem “In Flanders Fields”.  The poem was written by a Canadian citizen, John McCrea in 1915.  Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae (November 30, 1872 – January 28, 1918) was a poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during World War I and a surgeon during the battle of Ypres. He died of pneumonia while in the service during the war. John was honored on a Canadian stamp issued in 1968. 

Remember our veterans.

All gave some,

Some gave all.

Armistice Day – November 11, 1918

The Armistice to end World War I was signed in a railroad car in France on November 11, 1918.  The car was destroyed in World War II.  The museum has replaced it with an identical car and furnished it as it looked in 1918.  The above postcard is a picture of the original car taken before WWII.  The replica car is now on display in the French museum at the site where the signing took place.

WWII Patriotic Postcards

Stamps of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair

In 1933 the city of Chicago staged its second world’s fair, A Century of Progress, to celebrate its centennial. In just one hundred years the city had grown from a small community formed around a trading post and a federal fort to the fourth largest city in the world. The city boosters were proud of their skyscrapers and industrial wares even though the city’s reputation more often conjured images of organized crime.

The U.S. Post Office Department issued three stamp designs for the 1933 fair, with a total of seven varieties. On May 25, 1933, a 1-cent stamp for the postcard rate and a 3-cent stamp for the letter rate promoted the fair just days before it opened (Scott 728 and 729). The green 1-cent stamp depicted Fort Dearborn, which had protected the mouth of the Chicago River in the pioneer days and had been restored in 1816. A replica of the fort was a popular attraction at the fair. The violet 3-cent stamp’s vignette featured the fair’s streamlined Federal Building (Arthur Brown Jr. and Edward H. Bennett, architects). Its three fluted towers represented the three branches of federal government: executive, legislative, and judicial, and inside it housed government exhibits. The 3-cent denomination was in Roman numerals, the first U.S. stamp since the 1847 10-cent George Washington to feature that element.

On June 1 James A. Farley, postmaster general, opened A Century of Progress as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s official representative. He probably visited the post office display with its complete set of U.S. proofs in the Federal Building and one of the many postal stations where fairgoers could purchase stamps and obtain special postmarks, including one in a railway mail car exhibit.

For the American Philatelic Society convention, held August 21 to 26 at the Medinah Michigan Athletic Club in Chicago’s central business district, the post office issued the same two stamp designs but in a different format (Scott 730 and 731). The original stamps were printed in plates of four hundred with four panes of one hundred on a rotary press and perforated. On August 25, un-gummed souvenir sheets of twenty-five stamps were flat plate printed in the U.S. government exhibit. They were printed in plates of 225 subjects in nine panes of twenty-five each. These had inscriptions in the margins “Printed by the Treasury Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing—Under Authority of James A. Farley, Postmaster-General, at Century of Progress,—in Compliment to the American Philatelic Society for its Convention and Exhibition—Chicago, Illinois, August, 1933 (plus plate #).”

Two more varieties appeared March 15, 1935, after collector protests following the discovery that complete sheets had been presented as gifts to government officials. The special printing of several stamp issues to make these presentation varieties available for collectors is often called “Farley’s Follies.” The special printing of the world’s fair stamps (Scott 766 and 767) were flat plate printing without perforations from sheets of nine panes of twenty-five stamps, each with vertical and horizontal gutters between the panes.

The 50-cent green Graf Zeppelin stamp (Scott C18) depicted the famous German airship over the Atlantic Ocean with the hangar at Friedrichshafen at right and the Federal Building of A Century of Progress at left. The Federal Building is similar to the one on the 3- cent stamp. Victor S. McCloskey, Jr., designed both stamps, but different engravers translated the models to dies. The Federal Building on the zeppelin issue had different proportions with a shorter center tower and an elevated entrance. Perhaps to reflect the popularity of the fair, it shows more fairgoers on the steps. The stamps had flat plate printing in plates of two-hundred subjects with four panes of fifty each.

The Zeppelin Company agreed to fly to Chicago and the fair if the U.S. Post Office Department issued a special postage stamp to help offset the expenses of the flight. As a result, 42½ cents of the fifty cents went to the Zeppelin Company. The stamp had its first day of issue on October 2, 1933, in New York City, in time for mail to be sent by ship to Germany for transport by the zeppelin. Washington, Miami, Akron, and Chicago also had first days of issue. U.S. mail could also be dispatched from Miami, Akron, and Chicago for various legs of the flight, using a combination of one to four stamps to pay the different rates. Envelopes received different rubber-stamped postal cachets as evidence that the mail had been carried on different legs of the flight.

The three stamp designs not only promoted the Chicago world’s fair, they also promoted the idea of progress. The 1- and 3-cent stamp images contrasted the old federal government to the New Deal government of 1933, emphasizing the changing and improved role of government services. The zeppelin embodied technological progress as the world’s largest flying craft. Further, a Chicago Daily Times newspaper editorial (October 26, 1933, page 5) praised the Graf Zeppelin visit to Chicago as emphasizing the internationality of A Century of Progress and the kind of progress the fair was designed to celebrate.

Ed: The text of this article is from an “Object of the Month” article by the National Postal Museum.  http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu

Scott Prefix Game

 Match the stamp category with the prefix used in the Scott Catalog for that category. 

 Choices; B, C, D, E, F, FA, GY, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, RA, S, T, U, UX, WX 

Answers below

2010 STAMP PROGRAM

• Lunar New Year. Year of the Tiger

• Black Heritage. Oscar Micheaux, film maker.

• Olympic Winter Games.

• Legends of Hollywood. Katharine Hepburn.

• Distinguished Sailors. Navy veterans

• Kate Smith.

• Negro League Baseball.

• Sunday Funnies. Dennis the Menace, Calvin and Hobbs, Archie (with Betty and Veronica), Garfield the Cat, Beetle Bailey.

• Cowboys of the Silver Screen. William Hart, Tom Mix, Gene Autry, .Roy Rogers

• Abstract Expressionist Paintings.

• Nature of America. Hawaiian Rain Forest.

• Animal Rescue.

• Love.

• American Treasures Series. Winslow Homer's "Boys in a Field."

• Literary Arts. Julia de Burgos, Puerto Rican poet.

• Flags of Our Nation.

• Holiday Evergreens

• Christmas. Madonna

No Postal Rate Increase in 2010

Linn's Stamp News of November 2, 2009 quotes Postmaster General John E Potter that there will be no postal rate increase for the United States Postal Service in 2010.

Scott Prefix Game Answers