UNHINGED
Irwin Weinberger and I sometimes drive home together from gigs. We’ve been doing this for so many years I know everything about him. He collected stamps. That came up on trip #401.
We talked stamps for an hour, coming back from Akron. Slightly boring? No, very boring. I had some first-day covers and canceled stamps my dad got from work. The stamps were in manila envelopes marked “For Ted.” (My dad was Ted, not Toby, at work.) My father worked for a key-manufacturing company.
Mr. Polatsek, an old guy in my neighborhood, gave me stamps. The first stamp was Wisconsin Worker’s Compensation (1961). He visited the local elementary school and passed out stamps to all the kids. He once took me to a stamp show at the Manger Hotel. It was old guys and me. I ran into Mr. Polatsek again years later — when he was actually old — and asked him about his collection. He said it had been stolen. He said, “Now I only collect pictures of my grandchildren.”
In college, I got stamps in the mail, forwarded by my mother. I told her to stop sending the stuff: W.C. Handy (1968), Leif Erikson (1968). It was embarrassing for a quasi-hippie to get stamps from his mom in the mail.
Irwin, I’ll look at your stamps when I get really, really old. Meanwhile, readers can read about Irwin’s stamp collection at his new blog.
Irwin
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Footnote . . . From one of my plate-block books: “We have heard from collectors who reside in the tropics, where provision of stamp gum is almost impossible, that they have had very good results by dusting a little corn starch or unscented talcum powder (free from oils and perfumes ) on the gummed side of their stamps. We do not recommend this procedure, but pass it on to collectors for this own experimentation, should they reside in unusually humid communities.”
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Yiddishe Cup plays a concert in Metro Detroit, at Cong. Beth Shalom, Oak Park, Mich., 4 p.m. Sun. (April 17). $10. More info here. Motown and matzo.
6 comments
My dad collected stamps. When he passed away I ended up with a mountain of stamps, some in meticulously-kept albums, many in manila envelopes. Those were for use as postage, but he’d bought so many I’ve got postage for years — So every stamp is a “Forever” stamp. When I send out a commemorative — like 1983’s “German Immigration Tricentennial” or “Mary Walker, Army Surgeon and Medal of Honor Winner”, I get a little reminder of Dad.
To David Korn:
I should go that route — use many 4-cent stamps for 2016 postage. (Forever stamps went down in price, I just read. Doubt they’ll ever go down to 4 cents.)
I had a tenant who plastered old stamps on her rent envelope:
http://www.yiddishecup.com/blog/?s=postage+due
Maybe that’s the thing that we have in common Bert. We are both postage stamp nerds. I loved everything about it though. It would be fun to get back into it one day. Maybe when we are both retired and in the old-age home we could trade stamps and compare notes. Thanks for the plug about my blog. I guess it met your “stamp of approval”.
My mom was a fanatic stamp collector, sending for stamps from around the world and, when I ended up in Japan, peeling them off my letters. My boyhood hobby, though, was coin collecting. I searched through the change my dad brought back nightly from the store — and I used to sort and count my piles of loot a la Scrooge McDuck. Not much has changed…
I still have my coin collection. Recently a local Yeshiva boocher friend who is into coins convinced me to buy
plastic protector sleeves for them and organize them.
He had many hours of fun going through the collection.
I have some old silver dollars my parents gave me, lots of silver coins, one or two Indian heads if that’s politically correct to call them. Native American heads?
Down here in Western North Carolina the most popular stamp is the Johnny Cash one.
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