Stamps Aren't Worth Shit Anymore

Again, don't be confused.  Today it is Katherine.

Friday I took my father's stamp collection to be appraised by one of the three certified stamp evaluators in Colorado.  I learned that stamp collecting is a dead art.  It is hard to get stamps to light up or beep and there doesn't seem to be a cool phone app that has anything to do with stamps.  People just don't care about stamps anymore.  My dad thought stamps would be eternal.  He thought they would grow in value.  My dad thought he was sitting on a bundle of money in his stamp collection.  My dad thought a lot of stuff.

When Dad died in 2007, his stamps were passed onto me.  He and I had mildly looked at stamps together when I was 12.  They've been in a closet ever since Mom gave them to me.  I got them out and looked at them a few months ago.  They were old.  There were a lot of them.   I decided I'd get an appraisal.  Couldn't hurt.

Dad was the first 12 year old Eagle Scout in America back in the late 1930's and the collection was part of his manic drive to get merit badges so he could earn his Eagle ranking before anyone else in the country.  It is a story all members of my family know well because Dad told it over and over and over again.

Dad's troop leader, Karl Meininger (the clinic one), was a lifelong inspiration to Dad.  When Dad was in hospice care, he talked to Mr. Meininger and other scouts as though they were there and I felt he was busy earning some sort of spiritual merit badge as I watched him speak and gesture to the invisible troop that seemed near him through the last weeks.  I like to think they were wonderful guides and Dad's now busy filling up some sort of celestial sash with badges.  He'd like that.

Dad, however, left a lot out of his Eagle Scout story.  He always talked about how poor his family was and how he had to kill rats at a drugstore to help make ends meet and how the Boy Scouts taught him to be a man (his father died when he was four).  He talked about camp outs and eating nothing but peaches and peas for a week when the troop was working on swimming badges by some river.  Dad never told the part of the story where he was a cruddy student and didn't do things meticulously because he was trying to get so many badges so quickly.  Basically, he could have done a lot better job on the Stamp Collecting Badge and he probably knew it.

I told Jim I thought there was no interest in the family for the stamps and I was going to get them appraised.  Maybe a stamp or two would be worth what my dad thought they were worth and he thought they were worth a bundle.  He said there were about a dozen really valuable stamps.  I had doubts.  I had seen other examples of Dad's childhood efforts.  Not really thorough or well developed.

Jim thought the appraisal was a great idea and he began having visions of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade discovering that  $250,000 of stolen money was actually invested in a rare stamp attached to a letter Audrey carted around through the film.  Unlike Jim, I had no visions of rare and wonderful stamps that would catapult us into any significant money at all.  I knew my dad.

Dad had his own code when it came to valuing possessions.  If he had spent time on something or paid his hard earned money for something, then that thing was very valuable.  If something belonged to someone else and that someone else had spent time and money on that something, Dad thought it was worthless.  My favorite example is the 17 year old awful Oldsmobile that Dad could no longer drive.  It remained immobile and in the garage until his death because no one would give him the $4000 for the car he wanted (It blue booked for $700 at the time).  If someone had offered him that same Oldsmobile for $4000, he would have called the seller a thief.  Dad thought his stuff was great--everybody else's stuff sucked.

Dad also felt his opinions outweighed most facts.  My favorite story is abut Vail.  My family drove up to Basalt often in the summer so Dad could fish on the Frying Pan and Roaring Fork rivers.  Almost everything we did in my family was because Dad wanted to do it.  We lived in a very Fisher King kind of place where keeping Dad happy was kind of the constant goal and fishing was his constant goal when I was a kid.  Every time we went on one of Dad's fishing expeditions, we drove by Vail twice.  Each time Dad would go off on what an idiotic idea it was to put a ski village there.  It wouldn't snow.  No one would drive that far.  No one would want a wanna-be European style village.  We all knew Vail would fail before they chopped a tree down for a ski run or laid a cobblestone for the streets.  Dad said so.

Because Dad was in construction, a friend offered Dad a chance to buy a condo right at the Crossroads where Pepe's is now.  My memory is that it would have cost Dad around $5,000 and he had the money, but he thought it was the stupidest investment ever.  He never let the facts get in the way of his opinions and so he turned down the offer.  He ended up liking the golf course in Vail, but that was it.  He thought Vail was a failed place even as he teed off in a golf tournament I once played with him.  He was pretty stubborn.

Last Friday we went for the stamp appraisal.  I didn't expect much and Jim was still holding out some glimmer of hope that Dad had at least one hidden treasure in the collection.

The stamp appraiser was a wonderful fellow, age 70, who lives in the Polo Club down by Cherry Creek.  The building had an inner courtyard that made me dizzy walking to his condo, but his condo was full of art and antique furniture with stamp collection books stacked everywhere.  A very cool living space.  I felt badly for the guy though.  My email about the age of the collection and my dad's connection to Karl Meininger probably had him thinking there could be a real find somewhere in Dad's collection.

This guy knew his stamps.  He went through the albums and identified three stamps that were worth about $500 put together, but that would be it.  Several problems though.  They were bad copies and not in very good shape and that's a problem.   Also--try to find anyone who really wants to buy an old stamp.  He explained that stamp collecting is dying.

He explained that none of the collectors can find young folks to take on their collections and keep things going.   Also the postal departments around the world have killed collecting.  Postal departments discovered they could make pretty stamps and people would buy them and then not use the stamps so they made more and more and more stamps.   This makes them less valuable.   The US Postal Department even went as far as to make "forever" stamps so even the year is meaningless.  Stuff like that can drive a stamp collector crazy.  Stamps aren't worth shit anymore.  They are worth what you pay for them and that is all they will ever be worth.

The man was kind and directed me to the Colorado Stamp Library to donate the stamps.  We drove to the two small buildings housing Colorado's Philately Library filled with a whole ton of little old men who identify and file stamps and maps.  They were happy to take the stamps.

Discovering the map room at the library was our happy ending.  Jim has started his fourth book.  He needs some road maps from the 1950's for some research and he knows a place to go study real live maps now.  That was good.

I learned that stamp collecting, like lots of entertainments and hobbies of the past, is going to die and those who are keeping it alive are few and far between and they are desperate to find some young caretakers for the stamps they love so much.  I don't see much hope here myself.  They don't either.

Mostly I learned that my daddy is forever my daddy and his treasure of stamps was like all of his treasures--important to both him and me because the treasure belonged to him.  Without my daddy, there is no treasure at all and I kissed the stamps good-bye.