The question was posed in the American Topical Association’s Facebook group about a favorites sports/philatelic memory. This is mine:

In 1979, I was a freelance radio sports reporter, covering the Baltimore Orioles, who won the American League Pennant and went to the baseball World Series. I discovered the Baltimore post office had a station in Memorial Stadium with a pictorial postmark, and purchased a stamp and had it serviced. (Appropriately, the stamp is the Fort McHenry Flag, and Fort McHenry is in Baltimore Harbor.)

Now, freelance reporters don’t travel with teams, except on rare occasions or at their own expense. I did not go to Pittsburgh for Games 3, 4 and 5, but when the Series came back to Baltimore, I was ready: I obtained a few more credentials envelopes from my friends in the public relations office and had topically-related stamps ready, to produce another cover.

I also obtained a few Baltimore Orioles No. 10 business envelopes.

Sidebar: UPI Audio sent its White House reporter Tom Foty, who is still working in 2023 for CBS News, Radio, on weekends, to do the reports during the American League Championship Series. UPI’s competitor, AP Radio, asked me to do its voicework during the ALCS — but UPI wouldn’t let me use my own name! “‘Lloyd de Vries’ belongs to us!”

I was doing two reports an hour for APR as “Dave Archer” (“Archer” is my middle name, “Dave” was a corruption of one of the many mispronunciations of “de Vries”), one an hour for Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Radio as “Lloyd de Vries,” and various stations and regional networks at different points, also under my own name. We secondary press were displaced from the press box and put in the stands, where I had had my own telephone installed, and I had cards in front of me to make sure I got the names, times, and everything else right.

I used to hang out at the office in Washington with the APR guys, though, so every time “Dave Archer” called in, we all started laughing. “OK, Dave or Lloyd or whatever your name is….”

Sadly, the O’s lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 7 games. And to this day, I cannot stand to hear the Bucs’ anthem, “We Are Family,” which was played ad nauseam by Pittsburgh. Still, this is my favorite memory combining sports and philately, and maybe even combining my career and philately.