I recently had an extended conversation with a couple of other philatelists and the subject was how we could get young kids interested in collecting stamps. A lot of things were suggested and eventually, the discussion rolled around to how we got involved, back in the day.

I told my story, but I admitted that my path in wasn’t one that anyone could ever follow today. It’s a shame but the world has changed to such a degree that people back when I got started, our stories can almost certainly never be repeated.

But I’ll pass it along anyhow, just in case anyone has any ideas.

I’ve been doing this for a really, really long time. Part of what brought this up was a discussion on a stamp forum about what album everyone started in. I don’t have my original albums, they’re long gone, but they looked somewhat, if not entirely like this, at least for my American album. I had a worldwide album, also made by Treat, that my parents gave me one year for either my birthday or Christmas, I don’t remember. I spent the vast majority of my time in my American album and then, when I moved on, all of the stamps were removed from it, all of the hinges were replaced with mounts and I went on from there.

I haven’t been able to find a picture of the worldwide album that I used.

But my story goes back beyond that. I’ll be the first to admit that I have no idea what drew me to the idea of collecting stamps. They were colorful and I saw them all the time on mail and for some reason, I just started to soak them off of envelopes and pile them up. I had no means of organizing them so they went haphazardly into some of the spare envelopes that my mother had from stationary sets. When I started to show an interest, she showed me hundreds of other envelopes that she’d saved over the years, from letters and Christmas cards and she gave them all to me. That was stamps going back into the 30s and 40s and I was hooked.

It was right around that time that I got those first two albums and, of course, I gravitated to the U.S. versions. That was what I really had access to, although there were some foreign stamps that I put into my worldwide album, but there, I was dissatisfied from the start. You’d get a couple of pictures on the page and then just empty boxes that you could stick a couple of stamps into without rhyme or reason and when you ran out of space, you had to stop collecting that country. Some of them that I got tons of stamps for, counties like Spain and France, if I remember right, I filled those pages quickly and then I had a huge number that just sat in envelopes because I had nowhere else to put them. That’s why I focused on the U.S. album. It had a space for everything.

And I do mean everything. If I remember right, there was a spot for the 1918 inverted Jenny under air mail, something that no child in a beginner album would ever have access to, but I still faithfully put every new stamp that I could find into the album.

When I was a couple of years older, perhaps 9 or 10, I found out that a local store had a stamp counter. It was at the top of the escalators on the second floor and I spent hours just standing there, staring at the cases in awe. I want to say it was a Woolworths but I could be mistaken. It’s been a very, very long time since then. My father bought me the first set of mint stamps I ever had, the 1937 set that included the 5c Virginia Dare commemorative. I still have that set in my collection to this day.

From there, I learned about stamp shows and I went every chance I could. I rode my bike to the stamp counter and bought stamps every time I had any money and it’s become a lifelong love. Those are great memories, but there’s a problem.

Nobody  can really do that anymore.

First, you don’t see a lot of stamps in the mail, if there is much mail at all. Most of what I get at my house is junk and even on philatelic mail, the number of actual stamps are becoming fewer and fewer. If I hadn’t seen all of those colorful stamps coming into the house every day, I doubt that I’d ever have become interested.

Secondly, there aren’t many stamp shops out there anymore. I don’t have an actual shop within 100 miles of me. There’s only one really good one that I know of, it’s down near my wife’s parents’ house and we don’t get down there all that often. Had I not found ready access to new stamps when I was young, I likely would have gotten bored and walked away. Even with stamps showing up in the mail, it was all common, new issues, not the colorful engraved stamps from the past that I eventually fell in love with.

Third, there just aren’t that many shows out there anymore, even in the days before Covid. I used to have a wealth of local shows to go to and the shows were much, much larger that what you see today. I see bourses that advertise 50 dealers. I used to go to shows with hundreds of dealers. You had to keep going back because there was absolutely no way that you could even walk past all of the dealers in a day, much less spend time perusing their wares. The biggest current show in the U.S., the unfortunately named Great American Stamp Show (GASS), only has 75 or so dealers on the floor. That’s pathetic. Looking back at some shows from the 80s, when I was attending, this one article advertises more than 160 dealers and it’s not a huge show.

Granted, you do have the Internet today and collecting is somewhat easier today, but I know that one of the things that appealed to me then and still does today is being able to flip through the dealer cards, make discoveries on my own and pick up my purchases and examine them with my own eyes in person.

You really can’t do that easily these days.

The only reason I collect stamps today, I’m sure, is because I was in the right place at the right time in history, where stamps were plentiful and accessible to a kid like me. I knew nobody else who collected. I didn’t get a collection handed down to me. I picked it up on my own. It really feels like that would be difficult for a kid growing up today.

So what is your story, if you’ve been a collector for a while? What brought you to the hobby and what convinced you to stick around? Today, I don’t see any of the things that made it possible for me to become involved. In fact, becoming a stamp collector today seems positively impossible if you aren’t shepherded into it by someone else.

I think that’s a shame. I also think it doesn’t bode well for the maintenance of the hobby into the future.