Gene Autry Censored World Fan Mail.

Shown is a portion of a recently purchased group of 25 WWII era censored covers addressed to Hollywood film icon: Gene Autry. I am not a serious collector nor do I specifically collect covers but I am a fan of the old Republic Pictures produced singing cowboy westerns and thought these, although in rough condition would be a unique addition to my small US 1930-1990 collection. I would be interested and very thankful to know if any of the stamps or postal markings are of any particular interest.

The covers by themselves are standard WWII censored mail, but you've pinpointed what sets them apart: the addressee. It's great fun to collect fan mail covers and not too difficult to find them for almost any star of the silver screen.

Wow that's really neat! I have a few of these to Davey Jones. Fan mail like yours. Great looking stuff~!

Thanks for the replies.

stampfan9: Nice score!

/s/ ikeyPikey

One more:

Nice war-time slogan cancel on that cover!

Don

Not censored but two Gene Autry fan mail covers from Britain:

Love the penmanship on that first one! Also, I'm a big fan of Gene Autry and his Cowboy Philosophy...

The value is in the addressee which you already know the value. The stamps and cancels and censoring has little value since none of these are airmails which depending on the routes and years can give a bit of extra value.

I love the covers. They will make a nice display and collection. Reading the Cowboy Code, I just don't see that being used today. What a great era. The idea exudes a positive outlook. You can tell it touched a lot of people around the world. I'm sure that was less than a days worth of mail. You just don't know how many survived. The ladies working the mail desk would have boxes were they tossed this stuff. Most tore the stamps from the cover. Great to see them!

One more from Dublin Ireland with the "Grow More Wheat" slogan cancel:

And they're often very inexpensive. I've seen a fair number in the $1 cover boxes at WESTPEX.

I've picked up a few myself: one to Mary Pickford, one to Marlene Dietrich, and a couple to Doris Day. The Doris Day ones are particularly fun, because they're aerogrammes and thus still contain the charming letters written by Norwegian schoolgirls in less than perfect English.

As has been mentioned, these have little commercial value as stamps and covers, but they are fun to have, especially as a group of them. Too bad the syrupy letters inside are gone. All of the movie stars of that era received vast quantities of this kind of fan mail every week and there were secretaries whose job was to go through it all. Sometimes the stars would take the time to look at some of it. Sometimes the secretaries sent publicity photos to the writers. The letters that have the extra value are ones that have rare stamps or rare markings, or even better letters or envelopes that were actually mailed by the stars themselves and where they hand wrote the address. Those are hard to find since the big stars had secretaries and publicity agents who did most of the handling of the mail from the stars.

Mr. Orvon Grover.

2010


Nice Post Kirk.

I agree with rod222, Kirks is a gentleman philatelist of the first order. As an aside, does anyone know what title on the last cover the writer has given to Gene Autry. My wild guess is an abbreviation for Tech Sergeant.