Sergio Lugo is the winner of the 2023 Kehr Award “for enduring contributions that help guarantee the future of the hobby.”

Lugo has been a worldwide stamp collector since the age of 7 and is still going strong 70 years later. He added postal history to his collecting pursuits in his mid-30s and soon jumped in as an active member officer and author / editor of several collecting organizations, including clubs throughout the Denver, Colorado area, including the Rocky Mountain Philatelic Library (RMPL), plus national and international groups such as the APS, the Sociedad Filatelica de Puerto Rico, Military Postal History Society and British West Indian Study Group. He’s been involved as an editor and writer for several award-winning articles and publications.

He has been the author or executive producer for 40 of the 42 educational videos produced for the RMPL and other national organizations in the past decade. These often been geared toward educating the philatelists and non-collectors on the eclectic character of the hobby.

Working often with videographer Joe LaNotte, the goal of the video program, which began with no budget, has always been one of providing high quality, managed educational videos free of any restrictions to the viewing public. Lugo said there is no systemic selection process.

“We accept whatever is given to us and spend considerable numbers of hours writing, scripting and developing the narrative, selecting hosts for the presentation, vetting the final product for accuracy and entertainment value and brevity,” Lugo said. “In this later regard we always target 10 to 20 minutes as our time frame, but that is frequently exceeded by the nature of the story.”

Based on data through May 2023, the average yearly views of the RMPL have amounted to 5,300 visits, with an average of 1,500 visits per video. The range of those visits is between 100 and 14,000 visits. Two of the most popular videos have been “Fakes and Forgeries” by Harry Pedersen, of the Arapahoe Stamp Club (14,000 visits); and the endearing story of U.S. Naval postal clerk James Wilkinson (13,000 visits) and his story of Pearl Harbor, the emergence of a Christian missionary organization, his rise to a U.S. Navy commanding officer and his post-war friendship with his Japanese enemy and future Christian missionary Commander Fuchida, leader of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Kehr Award is presented annually by the APS and named for Life Member Ernest A. Kehr. Established in 1991, the Kehr Award recognizes one living philatelist each year who, for a period of at least five years, has demonstrated one or more of the following:

• • Making philately attractive as a hobby to newcomers.
  • Working directly with newcomers, especially young people.
  • Developing and administering programs aimed at recruiting newcomers.

Al Kugel (1930-2022) was associated with many philatelic organizations, but especially Chicagopex, the Military Postal History Society, and the American Philatelic Society. He served as a director of the Chicago Philatelic Society (CPS), and as exhibit chairman and general chairman of Chicagopex. The CPS honored Kugel with its Saul Newbury and Aubrey Berman awards.

A Life Member of the Military Postal History Society, Kugel served as its director, vice president and president. At the time of his death, Kugel had the lowest membership number (434) of any active member.

With his experience in the investment field, Kugel brought financial stability to Chicagopex, considered to be one of the best World Series of Philately venues. As a member of the American Philatelic Society’s finance committee, he advised the APS on its investment portfolio.

Kugel was an expert on military postal history and had more than 100 single and multiframe exhibits in this field. He contributed scores of articles in this area, many of them in the Military Postal History Society Bulletin. He also contributed to The American Philatelist; Collectors Club Philatelist; the Postal History Society Journal; Rossica, the journal of Russian philately; and German Postal Specialist, among others. Kugel and co-author Ed Dubin received the United States Stamp Society’s Barbara Mueller award for the best article in the 2017 issues of The American Philatelist.

Al was an APS accredited philatelic judge and served on CANEJ. In 2005, he was awarded the John N. Luff award for distinguished philatelic research and in 2011 he was elected to the APS Writers Hall of Fame. He was a council member of the American Philatelic Congress, an officer in the Collectors Club of Chicago, a Fellow of the Royal Philatelic Society London, and he served on the Smithsonian National Postal Museum’s Council of Philatelists.

He also won many single-frame exhibit competitions and did much to popularize that form.

VSC Note: Al was a frequent financial analyst on CNN in the late 1990s and first decade of this century. In a Tiffany Dinner talk, he told how that came about: His office was in the same building as CNN’s Chicago bureau. When CNN needed an expert on economics or finance, a producer would call him, he’d throw on his jacket and head for the stairwell.

Reginald Stafford “Captain Tim” Healy was born in Sydney, Australia in 1892. He fought through World War I with the Australian Army and was part of the Allied forces at Gallipoli.

Reginald Healy came to the United States to learn the oil business in Texas. There, he met his future wife, Margaret, a schoolteacher, and they moved from Gainesville, Texas to New York Coty, where he ran the financial side of a small oil company.

The business collapsed in 1929, and after that, he did whatever he could to survive, his son recalled, including sweeping streets. For a time, he had a radio show called “Captain Tim’s Stamp Club of the Air” on NBC. Healy used his son’s name as his on-air personality.

In the early 1930s, Henry Ellis Harris partnered with the consumer products firm Procter and Gamble to produce a radio show using “Captain Tim” to sell stamps. For a small price (and a couple of box tops from some Ivory Snow detergent), a person could be a stamp collector. Another Harris insight was that collectors not only needed stamps, but they needed a low-priced series of albums to put them in. The radio show that Harris produced and hosted by “Captain Tim” Healy, offered not only stamps but a small album to put them in. Captain Tim’s albums were produced in the millions.

Thanks to Captain Tim’s exciting tales of battle and stamps, thousands, young and old, joined the rank of collector.

Although he was a prominent physician, Dr. Stanley Bierman (1935-2022) worked diligently at assembling one of the world’s greatest private philatelic libraries, putting it to good use as a tool for research on philately’s greatest stamp collectors.

Perhaps even more importantly, Bierman also actively worked to preserve philatelic oral history by initiating a series of insightful video interviews with some of the most important living figures in philately. He is shown interviewing Raymond Weill at AMERIPEX ’86. Without Bierman’s strenuous efforts, much philatelic history and many fascinating anecdotes would have been lost forever.

Bierman’s masterful 2016 summary article on Philatelic Literature, Its Lore and Heritage is available in the Philatelic Literature Review. Furthermore, the surprisingly entertaining and fascinating story of how Bierman’s own philatelic library came to be formed is recounted in earlier PLR articles published in 1984-1985.

Henry B. Scheuer is the winner of the 2023 USSS/Barbara Mueller Award, for his article, “How the Earliest Collectors Sought Out First Days,” Part I and II of which appeared in November and December 2022 issues of The American Philatelist. It was written for the 100th anniversary of modern first day cover servicing.

The award goes to the author of the best article published in a single year of the AP, the monthly journal of the American Philatelic Society. The award is named for the United States Stamp Society (USSS) and for one of its most prominent members, authors, and editors, APS Life Member Barbara R. Mueller.

In 2007, the United States Stamp Society founded the award to promote the USSS, its goals and its mission to the 26,000 members of the APS, an estimated 75 percent of whom collect U.S. material.

Scheuer started collecting United States first day covers in 1959 and began acquiring older material in 1965. Over the last 45 years, he has written many articles, addressed numerous philatelic groups, and has been involved in various aspects of creating and collecting covers. Henry is a long-time member of the AFDCS, as well as the APS, the Collectors Club, and the United States Stamp Society. He is probably the top collector of Sc. 1246 John F. Kennedy FDCs, which went on sale nationwide on May 29, 1964. He has more than 5,000 different cities.

Below, Scheuer receives his award from U.S. Stamp Society president Nicholas Lombardi.

He previously won the Mueller Award for his 2016 article “Kansas-Nebraska Overprint Stamps: Why, Where, and When They Were Initially Sold,” which also won the AFDCS’ Philip H. Ward Jr. Award for Excellence in First Day Cover Literature. He has been awarded that honor two other times and written dozens of articles for First Days, dating back to 1976.

At the end of 1921, the Philatelic Sales Agency was formed, and in 1922 began the widespread coordination and promotion of new stamp issues – allowing for the similarly widespread preparation by collectors of first day covers.

Here is an excerpt from his 2022 article:

“… for our philatelic forebears, collecting first day of issue/usages was an entirely different beast than what today’s FDC collector experiences. The covers shown in Part 1 are almost entirely the work of prominent Washington, D.C. philatelists, because they had the foreknowledge, proximity and physical access to use these new issues as soon as they were available. Today, first day covers proliferate – a very good thing for the many collectors who create them and seek them out to collect. Despite the differences between the earliest first day collectors and modern, the motivations are much the same – to be a part of documenting philatelic history.”

Both The American Philatelist and First Days are benefits of membership in the societies that publish them.

The American Philatelic Society has announced the winners of its Luff Awards, the most prestigious honor the APS can bestow upon living philatelists. They are:

• For Distinguished Philatelic Research: Jerzy W. Kupiec-Weglinski
• For Exceptional Contributions to Philately: Lloyd A. de Vries, and
• For Outstanding Service to the APS: Patricia A. (Trish) Kaufmann

You can read the APS press release, which includes detailed biographies and accomplishments of the winners, here.

The Luff Award was established in 1940 in memory of John N. Luff, APS president from 1907 to 1909, who was considered the most prominent American philatelist of his era.