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.