The most popular and famous child star ever, Shirley Temple, died recently of natural causes at the age of 85.

Her upbeat, cheerful movies raised spirits during the Depression, and for four years — 1935-1938 — she was the top star in Hollywood, more popular than Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, or anyone else.

Later, after her acting career had petered out, she became active in Republican politics and served twice as a U.S. Ambassador and in other roles for the State Department.

I wouldn’t call myself a Shirley Temple fan, as in fanatic; her stardom was before my time, her film career over by the time I was born. But if there was ever a candidate for a Legends of Hollywood stamp, she is it. Heck, they even named the faux cocktail served to kids after her, the Shirley Temple.

And then I thought, “but will the marketeers who now run the U.S. stamp program see her as commercial enough?” I mean, according to the Washington Post last November, USPS marketing director Nagisa Manabe vetoed a stamp for the great jazz singer Sarah Vaughan because today’s kids don’t know who she was.

Memo to Manabe: I’ll bet most Americans couldn’t tell you who half the people in the Black Heritage series were, or any of the people in the recent sets of stamps honoring design, such as the upcoming Pioneers of Graphic Design. Bradbury Thompson? Isn’t that the furniture store chain? Norman Rockwell makes rocket engines, right? One of the purposes of a nation’s stamps, or at least this nation’s stamps, is to bring to our attention historic figures and subjects about which we ought to know something.

There’s a story that a well-known philatelic editor turned down a chance to edit the book Stamp Collecting for Dummies, because “stamp collecting isn’t for dummies.” He was wrong to turn down the book, but right about who collects stamps: We’re mostly thoughtful people with a sense of history. The kids who will become stamp collectors, and continue philately into adulthood, are mostly thoughtful kids with a sense of history.

Deliver only commercial subjects on our stamps, and you will drive off many of the adults — some are already heading for the exits — and you won’t snare those thoughtful kids with a thirst to learn. Collecting stamps will become another short-lived childhood fad, like Davy Crockett or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

If there’s any justice, we will see a Shirley Temple stamp in a few years, not because it will sell lots of copies, but because it’s right.

by Lloyd A. de Vries

I hate to use this phrase, because it was used to describe my situation seven months ago, but Ken Martin’s position as executive director of the American Philatelic Society “wasn’t a good fit.” It was never a good fit.

His tenure as the APS CEO was uneasy from the start. Ken wasn’t what many on the Board of Directors and other organizational leaders wanted. Efforts to make him into that type of an executive director weren’t successful, and probably weren’t ever going to be successful.

Ken is one of the most popular people in U.S. stamp collecting. Practically everyone likes him. Many older collectors watched him grow up in philately, from president of the now-defunct Junior Philatelists of America into employment with the APS. If you have attended an APS-sponsored or -sanctioned stamp show in the last two decades, chances are you ran into him — perhaps literally! As APS Shows & Exhibitions Director, we called him the Blue Blur, walking rapidly (and sometimes running) from one part of the show to another.

Ken was the only APS executive director I ever saw on his back under exhibit frames, pulling out reluctant screws. (No one does it better.) But as an APS leader told me last summer, “I’m not sure we want to see our executive director on his back under exhibit frames.”

Operations are Ken’s strength, though, and it’s part of why he is so popular with stamp collectors: Although he is a gold-level exhibitor and judge (Chief Judge, in fact), Ken looked and acted like most of us.

Unfortunately, it’s not what the current leaders of the APS feel the organization needs in its executive director. To keep trying to make him conform to that model is like trying to make one of those stripped screws fit into a frame. No one was happy with the result.

“Pam, that ship has sailed.”

There is a postscript to the new movie “Saving Mr. Banks,” and it really happened. After watching the premiere of “Mary Poppins,” author P.L. Travers buttonholed Walt Disney — right there at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre — and started to give him a list of changes to be made in the movie.

His reply is above.

The same can be said of the old Virtual Stamp Club message board: That ship has sailed.

Last spring, for reasons that were justifiable, DelphiForums took control of the message board away from me, and eventually awarded it to someone else, Chris “StampPuzzles” Steenerson. The name of the forum was changed from “The Virtual Stamp Club” to “The Stamp Collecting Forum.”

Several months later, my professional situation had changed, and I entered into discussions with Chris and his staff about what my role on Delphi would be, if any. No decision was reached.

The former VSC staffers and I then had extensive discussions on what the future course was for The Virtual Stamp Club and us: Start a new Delphi message board, start a new message board somewhere else, or something else.

Eventually, we decided that that ship had sailed. We couldn’t put the GEnie* back in the bottle.

Instead, I am now concentrating on this website, which had been neglected in favor of the message board, and make it a major source of philatelic news and information (admittedly, with a strong bias toward U.S.). I always saw the Internet as a great boon to distribution of philatelic news and information. I never saw it as an avenue for verbal muggings and character assassinations.

However, setting up a webpage can take time, and we have been looking for some months for a way to quickly disseminate “breaking news” or new information. After several months, we have decided to give this WordPress blogging system a try.

We now have a minimum of discussion, and it is more tightly controlled. The discussions stay on topic: If you start reading about stamps for science fiction authors, you won’t suddenly find messages about postal stationery from Mongolia or the low intelligence of Certain Stamp Collectors.

Instead of refereeing petty arguments and personality conflicts, I’m spending more time working on stories for www.virtualstampclub.com — or doing something else entirely, even activities that are non-philatelic!

Most of the staff has moved on, too. Many told me they were burned out by years of moderating the forum, and wanted a break. As time goes on, I, too, am finding I don’t miss being a moderator.

I think in its heyday, The Virtual Stamp Club Message Board was the best one anywhere on the English-speaking Internet.

The Stamp Collecting Forum, formerly known as Delphi’s Stamps, Coins & Postal Forum, and then The Virtual Stamp Club, is still there: forums.delphiforums.com/stamps/messages There’s no reason a hobbyist can’t participate there and here. I still do.

Will I ever manage a philatelic online discussion forum again? Maybe, maybe not. But for now, that ship has sailed.

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

* Pun intended: I got my start as a stamp collecting online discussion leader on General Electric’s GEnie message board system.

eBay announced this morning it is not going to honor eBay Bucks Rewards amounting to less than $5 per quarter. Earnings less than that amount will be forfeited, not rolled over.

I had been using my PayPal debit card for stamp purchases from the USPS, and getting a smaller percentage (1.5%) as a rebate, so I switched to the eBay program. I hit $6.83 this quarter (with a late start), thanks to the Harry Potter stamps. But I’ll have to spend at least $250 per quarter to get that Bucks rebate. I rarely buy FDCs or other stamps on eBay, so will I spend $250 in new issues each quarter? First Quarter, with the rate change issues, maybe. Second and subsequent quarters, doubtful.

P&H is 50 cents more per order off USPS.com for orders over $50, but I don’t think that’s significant.

If I guess wrong, and my stamp purchases in the first quarter are less than $250, I’ve lost my rebate.

To paraphrase Dirty Harry, “You’ve gotta ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

Nope, not me. I think I’m going back to USPS.com and my PayPal debit card.

Writing the Harry Potter stamps story for Muggle… uh, sorry, for non-philatelist news people the other day made me think about how I felt about this issue and other recent actions by the U.S. Postal Service.

I realized I’m not upset that the U.S. is issuing Harry Potter stamps with only a minimal connection to American culture or history. Other countries’ postal services are going or have already gone that route. Get used to it. As a collector, I have the option of deciding what I buy, what I keep, and what I skip. I’m already fairly selective.

No, what is annoying me is <i>how</i> the USPS people in charge of stamps are doing things.

Twenty stamps on sale for Harry Potter all at once — $9.20 – is overkill. Why not release four a year for five, as the Postal Service did with its Disney stamps a few years ago.

Need to put the Hanukkah stamps on sale sooner, because your customers are wondering why there are Christmas stamps on sale but nothing for the Festival of Lights? Fine, do it – but change the first-day cancels to the actual first-day date. Already canceled the ceremony programs and other merchandise with the old release date? Then at least make a postmark with the correct date available to collectors.

Oh, and don’t put stamps with a Jewish theme on sale for the first time on Shabbat! That’s insensitive.

Don’t care what a bunch of (in your view) out-of-touch stodgy cultural elitists think should be on stamps and what shouldn’t? That’s your prerogative. Tell the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee it’s disbanded or only responsible for a few issues a year. Don’t just ignore CSAC; that’s rude. It’s as if someone took my writing and replaced it with Wikipedia text.

What ought to worry the general public is that most of the members of CSAC are not stamp collectors. They’re experts in American culture, including pop culture.

First day cover collectors (like myself) have their own particular gripes: The postmarks are too big and often don’t print well on actual envelopes and stamps. The information about the postmarks and even the issues themselves is withheld, often until the day of issue. Yes, other countries produce their own cacheted first day covers. None sells as many FDCs as the USPS, not even when you factor in the differences in population.

You don’t want to kill FDC collecting: When stamps are put on first day covers, they are “retained;” they’re not going to be reused ten or 20 years later. Contrast that to the stamp you love to tell us is the most popular ever, Elvis Presley. I’m seeing it now in face-value bins at shows and discount postage lots. Stamp collectors and others are using them to pay for mailings. The Postal Service got a loan, not a gift on all those sheets that were thrown into dresser drawers.

Millions of the Elvis stamp, though, were used on first day covers, and not one of those will now be used for postage.

The same thing is going to happen with the $2 Jenny Invert Reprint. Thousands will be purchased by people hoping to hit the jackpot with one of the “unverts” (with the airplane rightside-up). Thousands of the stamp will end up on packages and letters.

My Latin teacher, Anthony Fiorella, used to say, “Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it.” (I know it wasn’t original with him.) The Postal People now in charge of the U.S. stamp program aren’t learning from history.

What worries me, though, is that the “Mickey Marketeers” now running the stamp program don’t care about the history. If so, they’re not alone. The attitude in Corporate America these days is join a company, puff up the bottom line, collect the bonuses, parlay the short-term success into a better job, and move on to another company, never looking behind at the wreckage.

I hope that’s not what is happening with the U.S. stamp program. If it is, I hope the people responsible move on before the damage is permanent.

Every so often, something blows up in a stamp collecting organization of which I’m an official, and my wife asks, “You do this for fun?”

It’s gotten to the point where she doesn’t even have to be in the room, doesn’t even have to know about the latest flak; I hear her voice in my head. “You do this for fun?”

Oh, it happens in some of the music organizations in which I’m involved, too, but not as often. You’d think with all the pressure involved with performing, there would be more blowups there, but, no, I guess putting stamps away in albums or on envelopes is more stressful than hitting that high A, in tune, with everyone in the band listening to your solo.

It would be easy to blame it on the Internet: After all, any jerk with a computer and an Internet account can go on Facebook and say nasty, untrue things about you. Heck, you don’t even need your own computer and Internet: You can go to the public library and use their computers. But it’s been going on since long before the Internet.

More than 40 years ago, as a high school student, I sat stunned in a band parents meeting as the group’s president and vice president, a lawyer and a doctor, “pillars of the community,” screamed at each other until they were red in the face — and then kept going.

I don’t remember what the issue was, but it wasn’t very important. (In my story for the next day’s local paper, I brushed it off with “After a spirited discussion….”)

We live for our avocations.

About a decade ago, the American Philatelic Society engaged a public relations/advertising agency to promote both the hobby and the organization. It came up with the slogan “We feel your passion.” The agency workers were amazed at how strongly stamp collectors feel about things others consider relatively unimportant.

It’s not even just leadership issues: I’ve seen the passion stoked by plans to change an organization’s logo or whether the group should take PayPal.

I have a theory: For so many of us, our day-to-day lives are mundane, maybe even boring. Ah, but in our hobbies and avocations! There we are important, there we have an opportunity to make a difference, there we are somebody!

Plus, collecting stamps or playing music or raising funds for a high school trip is what we’d really rather be doing, not moving paper from one side of the desk to the other or sweeping out the bus aisle. Our hobbies are also part of our identity: “My son’s soccer coach” or “the lady’s auxiliary president,” rather than “this insurance agent I know.”

Most of us will work for 40 years, often in the same field. While there may be a progression within that profession, after awhile, the job becomes routine. The excitement of going to work wears off.

Most of us accept that. We get our vocational joy in our avocations.

“My day job? That’s just what I do for money. What I really care about, though, is…”

And when something goes wrong or, worse, not as right as it could, that passion turns to anger.

Maybe it’s worse in stamp collecting because so much of what we do has to be precise: The measurements of a perforation, the alignment of a stamp on a cover, the date on which a service was performed. Sometimes the so-called “flyspecks” really do matter.

We philatelists have to learn to lighten up. There are times I want to grab stamp collectors by their throats, shake them, and scream, “IT’S A HOBBY AND IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE FUN, DAMMIT! SO HAVE FUN OR ELSE”!

Then I stop and take a deep breath.

Seven score and 10 years ago, the President of the United States gave a speech that lasted about two minutes. The featured speaker at the cemetery dedication went on for two hours.

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” Abraham Lincoln said, but he was wrong: Today, the “Gettysburg Address” is considered one of the greatest in American history. It’s also quoted, and parodied, throughout our history and literature.

On the other hand, maybe Lincoln was thinking of the U.S. Postal Service. We have at least two stamp issues coming out this year on November 19th, the 150th anniversary of the speech, but none is for that event. Instead, we’re getting two crassly commercial issues: Harry Potter and Hanukkah.

Lincoln wasn’t Jewish, and couldn’t play Quidditch worth a darn, so I can’t see servicing Gettysburg Address Sesquicentennial covers with any of those stamps.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m looking forward to both of those issues, even though I know they’re pandering to specific non-philatelic audiences. Jews will buy the Hanukkah stamps because, well, they’re not Christmas stamps and some send out cards for this minor holiday because Christians send out cards for their holiday. (Has the U.S. Postal Service ever considered stamps for the Jewish High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the major holidays when Jews also send out cards? No, I didn’t think so.)

When I first head of the Harry Potter issue, in a blind listing in a stamp program chart in the Postal Bulletin, I thought, okay, the books spurred adolescents in this country to read voraciously. Since then, I’ve been told the stamps feature the movies, not the books, and I’m finding it harder to justify. At author J.K. Rowling’s insistence, nearly all the actors in the movies are British. The locations are British, too.

Then we were told the location for the first-day ceremony, and the light dawned: It’s in Orlando. No location within that city was mentioned, but “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter” at Universal Orlando Resort is there. What a coincidence!

Universal has already announced a major expansion of the Harry Potter attraction for some time in 2014. Although the USPS is rushing out the stamps on November 19th — a date apparently set by the Potter people — they won’t be universally available (sorry) until January, when there will be another big media push for the stamps. Another coincidence!

So what’s on November 19th? Just a wild guess, but a press release on the Universal Orlando Resort media website says the Hogwarts Express locomotive is now in place, and will carry patrons between different parts of the Harry Potter attraction. Perhaps November 19th is the day that train service begins.

However, that the Postal Service seems almost desperate to sell stamps isn’t the point of this essay. The stamp that it’s not issuing is: The Sesquicentennial of the “Gettysburg Address.”

Amid the 16 varieties of flag stamps, more than a dozen flower stamps, 12 construction stamps and the rest of this year’s bloated issue program, wasn’t there room for one more historical issue? I count six this year (Battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Rosa Parks, Battle of Lake Erie, West Virginia Statehood, March on Washington), six if you throw in the Grand Central Terminal Express Mail stamp (it opened in 1913).

Unfortunately, there is precedent for a lack of respect for the “Gettysburg Address:” The only other stamp the U.S. has ever issued for the speech was in 1948, the 85thanniversary. That was a year in which even chickens got a stamp, so it was no big honor. There was no stamp for the centennial in 1963.

That year, and this year, we had stamps for the Battle of Gettysburg, a turning point of the Civil War. But those stamps commemorate death and destruction. Why no stamps for great public speaking? Great statesmanship? Great leadership?

I hate to sound like one of those fuddy-duddies 16 years ago who began every complaint about stamps that weren’t issued with, “We have a stamp for Bugs Bunny, but not :” And I’m looking forward to the Hanukkah and Harry Potter stamps. I plan to service my Dragon Cards first day cover cards for both issues.

But I’m also going to service Dragon Cards for the Gettysburg Address. They just won’t be first day covers of a stamp commemorating the speech.

That may sound like a strange declaration from a guy who’s made his name using computers, but it’s true. It’s a love-hate relationship.

Nothing does a better job of making me feel stupid than a computer — not my sons, my bosses, not even my cars.

“Computers,” of course, covers a wide range of subjects. No one does everything related to computers well. I think I do some really well, others about average, but then there are the ones that drive me crazy.

Software upgrades fall in the latter category, and that includes changing servers for this website. I don’t think I’ve ever upgrade an operating system on a computer or smartphone without complications. I know the recent move of this site from one hosting company to another didn’t go as smoothly as I’d hoped. My e-mail system is still a mess, and I just don’t have the time right now to clean it up.

It’s not just me: Hardware intended for consumer Windows machines 10-15 years ago used to be called “Plug ‘n Play,” meaning all you had to do was plug in the new board or device, and mirabile dictu, it would work. The computer techs, however, called it “Plug ‘n Pray,” because it rarely was that easy.

My wife once asked me how I became so good at using the computer. (She said it, not me.) I told her I wasn’t afraid to try something, then reboot the machine after it crashed, and try something else.

On a recent trip to Washington, D.C., by way of Appomattox, the navigation app on my iPhone stopped talking to me, so I had to keep picking it up and looking at the screen to see what my next turn would be. Since the app overrides the screensaver function, it quickly drains the device’s battery, and I had the phone plugged into a USB port. The cord became wrapped around the emergency brake lever, and at one point, I dropped the phone into my cup of Diet Dr. Pepper.

(I imagine several of you are wiping off your own computer monitors right now.)

I quickly fished the phone out of the drink (pun intended), but for the next day or so, I could only talk on it using the Bluetooth earpiece or the speakerphone.

I think I’m a pretty good computer-aided cachet designer, but twice recently, I’ve used the wrong version of a design for the master I submit to the printer: The .psd (PhotoShop) layered version versus the flattened .tif. The result was no text on the printed card, and the need to reprint the cards.

Luckily, or perhaps prudently, as I’m designing my Dragon Cards, I save all the intermediate steps. When I screw something up (and I do, I do), I go back to an earlier version.

No one understands everything about computers, or the Internet. We all have strengths and weaknesses, even the IT professionals.

“Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.” Or, in my case, the computer.