Virtual Stamp Club behind-the-scenes webmaster Stephen Ross has passed away at the age of 73. He had begun hospice care due to the rapid spread of merkel cell carcinoma.
Steve was not a stamp collector; he put together and did the HTML work for The Virtual Stamp Club website, starting in December 1996 when Delphi told its moderators we had to create websites or be dismissed. I balked. I didn’t think the World Wide Web was necessary. His wife Leigh, then the moderator of Delphi’s Arts ‘n Crafts Forum, put us together.
He was still doing the bulk of the HTML work until May 2023 — the last remaining VSC “staffer” from our glory days on Delphi.
Strangely, although we both lived in New Jersey, I have never met Steve. He lived “down the Shore” as we say, and I invited him to StampShow 2002 in Atlantic City, but he declined. This photo, from the funeral home’s website, is the first time I’ve seen him.
However, we “talked” frequently by e-mail, and and not just about the VSC website. His outside-philately observations helped me greatly during some of the unpleasantness 10 years ago. (“What is it with you stamp collectors?” he asked, and then admitted his wife’s artists could be just as…vehement.) He also came up with the WordPress blog as a way I could post news stories quickly, after VSC had lost its message boards. He named the WP section, “The LloydBlog.”
Leigh, who passed away a few years ago, partly as a result of the pandemic, also designed the look of the website and the border. She liked the then-new 1998 Remember the Maine stamp (Sc. 3992). It was my decision, though, to make the website simple, never the latest HTML tech: I wanted it to be accessible by as many stamp collectors as possible, not all of whom were technically proficient. That’s still true.
In recent years, I’ve been doing all the updates to the U.S. stamp program myself and simple updates to the home page. He did the more complex updates, and earlier this year when the “RSS feed” (the list of the most recent pages in the LloydBlog) broke, Steve figured out a low-cost way to replace it. (The Virtual Stamp Club hasn’t broken even in years.)
I’ll miss him, and not just for the technical support. When he entered hospice, I asked his daughter to let him know how much I appreciated his help and friendship over the past 26+ years.
