by Lloyd A. de Vries, Manager
The Virtual Stamp Club

We had a meltdown this week in The Virtual Stamp Club’s Facebook Group, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the days of the DelphiForums message board. Stamp society politics? Shady business practices? Nope. It started over the designs of the U.S. stamps promoting World Stamp Show-New York 2016 (shown here).

I wrote about the controversy, and some of the disappointment in the designs, in this weekend’s radio feature. You can read the script and listen to the VSC version here. However, there’s just so much I can cram into a 60-second audio feature or even the slightly longer version on this website.

Because there are some issues with this stamp design that go beyond art.

One is that you can’t please everyone. They may not know art, but they know what they like. For many collectors, this wasn’t it. For others, it was.

Another problem is that the U.S. Postal Service design folks are making assumptions about what stamp collectors want without really knowing what stamp collectors want, or asking. Yes, there are some serious stamp collectors on the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, but I don’t know how much input they had, or, frankly, whether they would tell Postal Service design professionals they didn’t like a design. The majority of CSAC members are not stamp collectors.

But the biggest problem may be that there are two distinct groups of stamp collectors reacting to this design: Collectors of high-end classic stamps and those who like modern issues, especially the pop culture subjects. These two groups don’t mix well, or often. The former doesn’t spend as much time online, and when they do, it’s often in small, clubby discussion areas, with restricted memberships and subject matter. The latter hang out in mass-market forums like Facebook. Members of the two groups may spend about the same on their collections, but the former spend more per stamp or cover.

The NYC 2016 show is definitely under the control of the former group. In fact, its leadership is almost entirely drawn from the Collectors Club of New York. Some of NYC 2016’s officials have told me privately, in other contexts, they don’t care to “get into it” online, where tempers often get hot and some participants can hide behind their computer monitors. The online world can be rather “bare knuckle.”

My guess is that this stamp design was tailored to the classic collectors, not the much larger group of modern-issue casual collectors. There is nothing wrong with that. It just means that this stamp design won’t appeal to the majority of collectors and non-collectors who just like interesting stamps.

As I said, you can’t please everyone.

The only question I have is, what is the purpose of these stamps? To reassure the show’s organizers about their relationship with the Postal Service, or to promote the show to people who might not know about it?

On the other hand, how many people these days see stamps on their mail? Or even see much mail? The full pane of 20 stamps, at least, gives the dates of the show, and more people are likely to see the full pane than one of these stamps on their mail.

Good!

Don’t get me wrong, I love Hanukkah. I light the candles every year and have had my own menorah, the same one, since I moved out on my own. (That’s it on the Dragon Card on the right.) I give and receive gifts, I sing and play the music, and I produce first day covers when the U.S. does issue the stamp.

However, it’s a minor, post-biblical holiday whose importance is inflated by its proximity to Christmas.

Jewish homes don’t have Christmas trees, but they have menorahs. Jewish kids don’t receive gifts from Santa, but they get them from parents and relatives. Public school music ensembles, at least in this area, always include a Hanukkah piece in their holiday concerts – a former of musical quota system. And every other year, we get a Hanukkah stamp.

Bah, humbug.

Now, there must be a market for Hanukkah stamps, because the U.S. Postal Service wouldn’t keep issuing them if there weren’t. Remember the Thanksgiving stamp? It was such a turkey that only one was ever issued. The USPS tried Cinco de Mayo twice with similar results. Eid, on the other hand, sells well, and not just to Christians who think that’s a stylized Christmas tree design.

I suspect many of the people buying the Hanukkah stamp are Christians, for use on holiday cards they send their Jewish friends. Jews are as likely to send cards to their Jewish friends in late summer, for their High Holy Days, as they are to send Hanukkah cards.

And that’s the point of this essay: I think the U.S. should issue a Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) or High Holy Days stamp. Israel calls its stamps “Festivals,” which include not only Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) but also Sukkot (harvest festival) and Simchat Torah (finishing and beginning again the reading of the Old Testament).

The four holidays that comprise the fall festivals would give the USPS a wealth of possible designs, instead of menorahs and dreydls. These HHD stamps could still be used two months later to send “Season’s Greetings.”

“Wait!” you say. “The U.S. doesn’t issue stamps commemorating religious holidays.”

Really? What are all those Madonna and Child stamps, which the USPS calls “Traditional Christmas” issues? The Santa Claus stamps? What about the Eid stamp, which marks a Muslim holiday? Oh, and don’t forget the Hanukkah stamps.

I’m not saying the USPS shouldn’t issue those stamps, just that there’s really no reason not to give Jewish Festival stamps a try, and skip Hanukkah in 2015.

All that being said, I still wish everyone a healthy and happy holiday season – Christmas, New Year’s, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice and everything else.

Maybe. Elsewhere here in the VSC blogging system, Roberta Shaffner wrote:

A USPO Stamp for the great MGM film star, Van Johnson is a strong
possibility, as his l00th birthday in 2016 is approaching. According to news
from Mr. Johnson’s hometown, The Newport Patch in RI has posted on its
website that a stamp honoring Van Johnson, Newport’s Native Son is
likely. His many fans dearly hope so, and the fact that the Citizens Stamp
Advisory Committee is “considering” him is a positive indication.

Well, maybe yes, but maybe no.

First, the Patch article in November follows articles in August by the Smithville (Missouri) Herald (I’m not sure of the connection there) and the Providence (R.I.) Journal two weeks later. Both were written by the same freelancer. The Patch article has many of the same quotes, although it has a different byline. Ms. Shaffer is credited in all the articles with being one of the driving forces behind the stamp, by the way.

Second, someone connected with the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee leaked a list of upcoming stamp subjects for the next several years to the Washington Post in January 2014, and I don’t see Van Johnson on it. He may be there; the list is in a format that’s hard to search, but Elizabeth Taylor is listed as the Legends of Hollywood stamp for 2016. Johnson also isn’t listed as a beyond-2016 subject. The “Deep CSAC” list has been remarkably accurate, although not perfectly.

None of the articles say the U.S. Postal Service has announced or confirmed a Van Johnson stamp. CSAC receives something like 40,000 suggestions a year, and the USPS has a charming way of not promising anything while appearing to hold out hope for stamp subject proponents. “Serious consideration” is one of its favorite stock phrases. Supporters, however, don’t catch the waffling, the non-committal.

Does that mean there won’t be a Van Johnson stamp in 2016? No. It means most of us don’t one way or the other at this point. Maybe not until 2016.

I needed some Batman and Celebrity Chefs stamps and Winter Fun envelopes for first day covers. My own small post office didn’t have enough Batman, had sold out Chefs and hadn’t gotten the envelopes. So I went to a “premium” post office in the next town.

The two clerks at the counter had never heard of the envelopes, but while I was waiting for them to get more Batman from the back, I noticed the Snowflake envelopes hanging on two pegs to the right of the counter. On one of the pegs, under Snowflake envelopes, were packages of the Winter Fun envelopes. I took two, pointed it out to the two clerks, who replied, “Oh but WE don’t have them.”

If I’d been closer to the wall, I would have banged my head against it.

My first thought was one I’ve had many times: “Can you imagine any other large retailer where the clerks don’t know their store’s stock? Where the clerks show no embarrassment for not knowing their products? This time, however, I paused, and realized, yes, sadly. Nearly all of them.

Countless times in the past few years, I’ve gone into a supermarket or another large store, looking for a particular item, often advertised in the retailer’s flyer. After ten minutes of examining the shelves and the shelf labels, and looking behind the items that are in the place reserved for the one I want, I’ve flagged down a clerk or gone to the “courtesy” desk and asked for the item. The clerk takes me back to where I’ve been looking, glances at the shelf, and says, “We don’t have it.”

Thank you, I knew that 15 minutes ago. Do you have any in the stockroom? “No.” How do you know? I think. Or is what you know that you want to get back to doing nothing productive on company time?

One exception I’ve found is Target, where not only are their call stations to get a clerk (often a feat itself in other stores) but when the see the empty spot on the shelf, they pull out a scanner and can tell me if there are any more in the back or which Target stores nearby have what I want.

But that’s not how it works in most large stores. Many small stores, too, but the consequences of poor customer service are more immediate in small stores.

When I was looking to buy my first personal computer, I went to several local computer stores on the shopping corridor highway. At one, I stood there for 15 minutes while the clerk played a video game on a computer, never acknowledging my presence. I walked out. A few weeks later, the store was out of business.

Gloating is mine, saith the Lloyd.

Back to the Postal Service: The USPS puts out its Postal Bulletin every two weeks, which among other things, tells about upcoming new issues. At least until recently, ever clerk was supposed to read it. But some clerks tell me now that their Internet access at work has been cut off, so they can’t read the Postal Bulletin. Whether that was those specific offices or district, or universal, I don’t know. Would all clerks read it if they had Internet access? Doubtful. They didn’t when they were given printed copies.

[Let me hasten to add that there are many retail postal clerks who do read the Bulletin; some philatelic clerks even subscribed to Linn’s Stamp News.]

Bad customer service is the norm for most retailers now. It costs less to hire just barely enough workers to operate the stores. Apparently, the marketing experts feel that if the price is low enough, we’ll put up with poor service

With its recent money woes, the USPS is adopting many private-business practices… including this one..

I must be forgetting something significant: I have an hour or so before I have to leave for APS StampShow in Hartford (stopping in Westchester to visit my mother on the way), and… I’m all but packed. But it gives me some time to ruminate (think deep, wise thoughts) on the just-completed Americover 2014, the annual show, convention and fun-fest of the American First Day Cover Society.

I spent most of the four days (three of the show, the tour the day before) answering questions. The most prevalent was, “Where is the show next year?”

“We don’t know yet. We ran into a glitch with the hotel we thought was eager to host us again. We have to check out other venues now.”

“Well, have you considered…” and then the person would throw out a bunch of cities, big and small, practical and not.

Funniest of all were the people who would ask me about next year on Thursday, and then ask me on Saturday if we’d set the new venue yet.

But Americover Programs Chair Foster Miller got a question this past weekend that takes the prize: “What time is the 11 o’clock seminar?”

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Besides answering questions, there is an awful lot of work that goes into Americover during Americover. If I start naming names, I’ll leave out someone deserving of recognition, but I do want to mention a few who are often overlooked: Kerry Heffner handles exhibits, from soliciting them to coming up with the prizes to mailing the exhibits back to their owners, complete with palmares (list of awards) and those prizes.

Cynthia Scott handles all the “back room” processing before the show opens: Registration, event ticketing, and putting together the name tags and other goodies in your registration packet.

Howard Tiffner is bourse chair, which means he corrals and then herds the dealers and is in charge of setting up and taking down the bourse and exhibits area. One of the great things about being a stamp dealer is the independence to operate exactly how you want…unless you’re the bourse chair trying to make all those dealers happy.

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Some dealers always have good shows, no matter how much or how little they make. Others always have bad shows, no matter how much or how little they make. After awhile, you learn to spot who is who.

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Several years ago, as Publicity Chair, I put out a press release announcing the following year’s show, starting with “After another successful Americover….” Someone jumped on me: “How can you say that?! You call that a successful show?! Sales were off, traffic was slow, it rained all weekend, and I lost money at the casino each night.”

I replied that no one had died, no one got in a fist fight, no one was arrested for stealing, and no bull defecated in our bourse area (as happened at Americover 2000). I call that a successful show, I said.

Many years ago, as a high school senior, I was handling publicity for the adult band-boosters association raising money to send our band to Europe for a week. The job included writing an article for the local paper after each meeting. One week, the chair and vice chair, an attorney and a physician, got into a screaming argument for… well, it seemed like an eternity. And that was about all that happened at the meeting, since everyone else couldn’t wait to leave.

“How am I going to write this up for the paper?” I thought. “I can’t tell what really happened!” And then it hit me:

“After a spirited discussion…”

Wednesday evening, many of those attending Americover 2014 gathered in the lobby of the DoubleTree Somerset to renew old friendships:From Thursday’s tour:

Participants in the Americover 2014 pre-show tour enter Washington Press headquarters in Florham Park, N.J.

Otto Thamasatt, John Hayner and John Friedrich show off their ArtCraft tour envelope souvenirs.

The postmaster of Florham Park himself applied cancels to the tour souvenir envelopes, with stamps provided by The Washington Press.

The jam-packed tour included a quick visit to The Collectors Club on East 35th Street in New York.

Americover 2014 tourists join others at the fountain on the World Trade Center site. In the light blue shirt near the center is Mark Thompson (Tennessee); to the left is Alan Warren (Pennsylvania). To the right is Carol Peluso (New York). Further to the right in the black polo shirt is Frank Kohut of Maryland and next to him in medium blue is Bob Lewin (California).

Americover 2014 tour guide Henry Scheuer (green hat) discusses the events of September 11th with participants in the tour. Through the trees at the top center of the photo is the building where Henry was working that day.

Americover 2014 chair Pete Martin goes through a box of covers at Champion Stamp Company, the only remaining street-level stamp store in New York.

Here’s a view of the Stamp Fulfillment Services seminar at Americover 2014. That’s right, no one from the U.S. Postal Service showed up. No one from the USPS called to say no one would be there.

by Lloyd A. de Vries

I was amused recently by some of the letters to the editor in the August American Philatelist (the journal of the American Philatelic Society) and the subsequent discussion in another online stamp collecting discussion venue.

There were two subjects in the letters that caught my attention, equally silly, in my opinion.

One was a rehash of the location of the APS headquarters. “Why is it in the middle of nowhere?”

Give it a rest already. We’ve been over this ground several times.

First, my credentials: I was on the APS Board of Directors when we decided that the previous building in State College, Pa., was no longer adequate and chose the former Match Factory in neighboring Bellefonte. I believe I was the deciding vote to purchase the present building, and it wasn’t an easy decision. I daresay I spent more time looking at the issue then than all three letter-writers combined.

There were many contributing factors to my decision, but I’ll cut right to the most important one: The APS staff. I think as a whole they’re wonderful, and I doubt if most of them would have made the move to another metro area.

Many had working spouses, or were firmly established in the State College area. (APS employees tend to stay for a long period of time.)

Besides the excellence of the staff, there would have been the time required to train new staffers: The jargon (“bourse,” “expertise,” and so on), how to handle stamps, and so on.

Because the cost of living is much higher in any major metropolitan area, we would have had to pay the staffers, or their replacements, more money.

Speaking of money, real estate would have cost more in a major metropolitan area.

Oh, and about those “metropolitan areas:” Everyone had a different idea of what those are.

Someone threatened to sue if we didn’t choose Chicago.

I remember talking to another member who lived in New York City back then, who was insisting the APS should move to a “major metropolitan area.”

“You’re right,” I said. “We’re looking into Los Angeles.”

“No, I mean a MAJOR metropolitan area.”

Okay.

The other idea espoused in a letter, and then taken ad absurdum online, was to open branch offices of the APS around the country, each in a (wait for it) major metropolitan area.

The cost of renting office space in one big city plus paying someone’s salary there would be astronomical, but several?

And the question was raised online, what would the APS Branch Office staffer do?

Be outreach for the society, helping local stamp organizations, answering questions and glad-handing potential donors were some of the answers.

Is that really a full-time job? Well, the offices could be staffed by volunteers. I’m not sure the APS could find 10-20 volunteers to sit in an office 40 hours a week, and there’s still the issues of rent, phone, Internet, furniture, and so on.

One supporter then said that the offices didn’t have to be downtown, but could be in “outlying strip malls.” Well, as a resident of a municipality with the New York (major) metropolitan area, I can see where that would lead: “Why didn’t you choose MY outlying strip mall?”

Stamp society officials hear these “pie in the sky” suggestions all the time. Another perennial is that the APS or another stamp society should advertise in AARP, the magazine for over-50s, either to promote itself or to promote stamp collecting.

The cheapest rate I found for the magazine was $45,260 for a sixth of a page. Black-and-white. One ad. One issue.

The APS only charges $45 a year for membership.

People tell me all the time (and did when I was on the APS board) that my stamp organization should do this, or should do that. Some of these suggestions are as silly as branch offices in outlying strip malls. Some actually have potential

But when I’ve asked the person making the suggestion if he or she would chair the program or spearhead the project, I’ve been turned down.

“I’m too busy.”

“I’m not the right person for this.”

“I’m not in good health.”

Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Just over 17 years ago, I began my CBS Radio News Stamp Collecting Report. The first one distributed to stations on April 4 for use April 5-6 (or whenever they wanted). It also marked my return to doing on-air work, which I hadn’t done since I left National Public Radio in 1982 to go to CBS.

At the time, I was packaging a weekend feature package for CBS stations, and also tasked with combining two different packages into one. I kept pestering one of my supervisors about doing a stamp collecting feature, until one day he said, resignedly, “Yeah, go ahead.”

The features I was supervising were all over the place in terms of time, but I decided that stamp collecting was going to be a hard enough sell, so I decided all of mine would be 60 seconds (short enough to fit into a commercial window.

In 17 years, there have only been five repeats, so that’s almost 900 different pieces. All have run 59 to 61 seconds. If not, I re-record them until they fit.

A few years after I began the weekly feature, I began to do much shorter “news spots,” often previewing new issues coming out later in the week. These usually run on Sunday mornings when there isn’t much news.

I also got permission to put the feature on this website (every one since 1999 is there, I think), and eventually began to produce variations of the features for APS StampTalk and KNLS, a shortwave evangelical radio station that broadcasts to China and Russia. The VSC and KNLS versions are usually longer, and I read them more slowly, because I’m not trying to cram everything into 60 seconds.

The CBS Stamp Collecting Report and the other features in the weekend package are what is called syndicated: Stations can run them whenever they want, regularly or erratically, or even play them backward if they want. Since there are no commercials packaged with them, stations are not required to inform the network when or if they run any or all the features.

Early on, I discovered that one central California station was saving them up, and running them all once a month during the monthly stamp collecting talk show the manager hosted. After that, I stopped using specific date references like “this week” or “last Tuesday.”

I sometimes put in so much time producing a feature, with music and interviews and so on, that I’m really earning less than minimum wage – no exaggeration! I get the union minimum for each feature, and that won’t buy dinner at a nice restaurant! (The news spots, when they run on newscasts, pay better.)

However, I enjoy the production: I flatter myself that I used to be a pretty good radio producer, and sometimes I miss it. So I sometimes raise the bar just because I can.

The features are intended for a mass audience, not stamp collectors, and I used to run each script past a non-collector radio person to make sure they weren’t in Jargon. Stamp collectors have often told me I should be running three, four minutes and on National Public Radio. I don’t know that NPR wants them and even so, I prefer preaching the joys of stamp collecting to a wider audience.

At the same time, some radio news people have tried to convince me to dedicate the feature to postal service issues and news, and sometimes even UPS, FedEx and – oh, the pain! – coins. To them, I reply that it’s “The Stamp Collecting Report,” not “The Delivery Service Report.” While I’m never going to talk about plate varieties and Two-Cent Reds, there are going to be some editions that are mostly of interest to philatelists.

I think I’ve managed to walk the fine line between the mass market audience and the philatelic one, entertaining, amusing and informing both most of the time.

By the way, I now lay claim to the longest-running major network radio stamp collecting feature ever.

I’ll be happy to answer questions posted here.