Do You Still Have Your Childhood Stamp Collection?

My collection from the late 1950's and 1960's was long gone when I started collecting again in my thirties. In my youth I usually got stamps from the incoming mail, mixtures from department stores that had stamp departments, or mail order approvals.( H. E . Harris).If you still have your childhood collection, have you found anything of value or just the usual common stamps kids usually collected from the period? I wish I still had mine because I have fond memories of collecting then. I think that was a "golden age" for stamp collecting even though they probably did not have much monetary value.

Nope, nor my rock collection. The stamp collection was just some kiloware (I didn't know the term then) picked up from an ad in the back of a magazine, or newspaper, something like that. The rock collection was a bit more elaborate, accumulated over the years during the 50's and early '60s from vacations through the west, southwest, and Rocky mtn area. I even chose geology, and then geophysics, as a college major until there got to be too much chemistry for my liking. I wonder...what college major might stamp collecting in one's youth lead to?

I started my current affectation with stamps and covers about a dozen years ago. Who knows what happened with my childhood stamp collection. Being a Navy brat, and moving regularly, it probably was left behind on one of my moves before I even became a teenager.

Basil

A boyhood friend of mine had very nice and professionally done collections of Stamps, butterflys, and arrowheads. He wound up with a history degree (two or three of them if I remember correctly) and worked for years for the Smithsonian as a curator. I don't know where he is now or what he is doing.




My sources were much the same in those days. My return to stamp collecting was just a bit later. I still have my first stamp collection, but any nice stamps that are applicable to my more current collections have subsequently been appropriated.

Technically, I still have my childhood stamp collection, although I have weeded out the "junk" (i.e. damaged common stamps, etc.) and have put the "better" material into an adult album (rather than the spiral bound or soft cover "kids" album.)

In fact, I still have the original set of all of the denominations of the 1932 Washington Bicentennial Stamps I acquired as a kid collector. As an adult, it is no big deal as the catalog value is little more than $1 or so, I know ... and I could probably put together a dozen or more sets today just from my own stockbook ... but as a kid on an allowance, I recall it was quite an accomplishment (and a great deal of satisfaction to me) to acquire all denominations of a complete "set" of stamps. Today, I look at them and discover finer points I never noticed before such as postmark types and centering, etc., that I didn't really understand all that well as a kid collector.

I found my old stockbook that had some US issues in it from the early 90's. Nothing great, but a lot of meaning to me.

I bought a set of international albums when I was 16 in 1975. I still have them and they are my 'fun' albums, I get just as much enjoyment filling an empty spot in them today as I did back then. I also had a fairly nice National album but I sold it, and my silver coin collections. Since silver was so high at the time I've not had any real regrets but I did miss the National. So about 5 years ago I started 'reliving my childhood' by replacing it and have had blast.
Don

I still had my original Minuteman album for US until I discovered ebay for stamps and upgraded to Scott National pages in the year 2000. I think I received the Minuteman album for my 14th birthday in 1978. By then I was borrowing Linn's Stamp News from my local library and trading thru the Trading Posthorn. I'd also buy lots with my paper route money. I transferred quite a few nice stamps into the new album but left the common used in it. It's still on my bookshelf. I tried to get my 3 kids interested in stamps and offered it to each, but no luck. Maybe I'll have better luck when I get grandchildren!

And by the way, yes, the cover of the Minuteman album is separating like everyone else's!

I had my childhood collection intact until 1977. At that time I inherited my Grandmothers collection. Both collections stopped around 1965 and were hinged. I bought a new album and combined the two collections replacing most of the mint hinged stamps with M.N.H. from our stock books. I put all the mint hinged stamps in a separate stock book. I sold my Grandmothers worldwide and U.S. block (not plate block) collection to finance the purchase of all the U.S. stamps issued from 65 to 77. Luckily , I found a dealer who sold me those stamps at 1 cent over face , except for the high value stamps , which he sold for a modest markup. Have been collecting continuously ever since.

I still have the albums and probably all the stamps. When I quit collecting as a teen, I gave everything to my father. He absorbed some of my stuff into his collection (usually the other way around right?). Then after he died I brought it all home with me and started collecting again. I broke everything down though and its all here or there.

My father and I were world-wide collectors (beginning level for my part). After I restarted collecting I decided to focus on US and central Europe (more or less). But I stored most of the other world-wide stamps in glassine envelopes by country. One of the first things I had to do was rescue the stamps from their deteriorating pages, envelopes and containers as this stuff had sat for decades. I still have my Harris Senior Statesman album with supplements to about 1975 and it has some stamps still mounted though its not a pretty sight.

I still have mine, pretty much intact in an old, bulging and battered Stanley Gibbons "Ideal" album. My rock collection went the way of the spider collection, and the dried leaf collection.

Not only do I have mine, but I still add to it occasionally. My childhood album was a Harris Traveler. I still have it and I occasionally will look through my duplicates today and add to that album if there's a space for them. It's something I do a few times a year. In the back of my mind, I'd like to someday fill every single space in that album. I don't order stamps specifically for that album, but if they happen to turn up, I'll still put them there on occasion, but only after they've been checked against my main collection on Steiner pages. And I never remove stamps from that album.

Still have the stamps from collecting the stamps in the 50's. The old album is long gone but the stamps are still in the new album and should be replaced because they are a darn good indication of what happens when your 10 years old and don't know what your doing.
Scotch tape as a hinge!
Worthless they are, but good as a reminder to take care of the others properly. Lucky I could not afford many at that time.

I still have my Scouts on Stamps, which I started collecting in my teens. There were some stamp purchases earlier than that, but I suspect they are long gone.

It was re-discovering my mid-1960s childhood collection that got me interested again, almost 40 years later. Eventually I moved all the stamps out of the home-made binder and re-located into 2 stockbooks, to space them out. At least they were all reasonably hinged.
I now have 6 binders of Prinz pages for the main collections, and 18 stockbooks for the rest. Still not enough space, too many still to sort!

Like StampOCD, I have recombined the set of stamp books that my grandmother separated into two equal parts to give to her sons. My Dad immediately gave it to me, while Uncle never took possession of his. Still adding to it, though the Minuteman cover is, indeed, falling apart.