How Did You Begin Stamp Collecting?

I started by joining this group,at first I had no intention of collecting stamps,I just wanted to find my grandpas collection a good home,but then as time went on and I kept asking questions,and the guys are so helpful,that I soon became very interested in them,Im learning so much and I find when im doing my stamps im relaxed and no stress at all how about you?

I started in 1966 at the ripe old age of 7. My next door neighbour worked at the post office and gave me an English stamp of when England won the World cup soccer (I think that was the last time they won it too). He said to look after it as it may me worth a lot in the future. I still have that stamp in a glassine all these years later, but he was wrong about the value.
My parents then used to buy FDC's for me, up till 1969, when we left England and migrated to Australia. I then stopped collecting for a long time. I no longer collect FDC's, but the seed was sown. Many years later I started collecting again and here I am.

Steve

The Time: December 1967/January 1968 (Age 6)

The Place: A store called Reid's House of Ideas, Kennedy Heights, Delta, B.C.

The Action: My father and I enter the store in search of a Christmas present for my mom. One one shelf, there is a revolving postcard rack filled with colorful packets of stamps, selling for a dime each, all the way up to fifty cents each. They look interesting, and I spend a few minutes looking at them, but before long, I am called back to the duty at hand. We wind up getting my mother two wall plaques suitable for over the living room couch, with a pair of tropical musicians on each in ceramic on teak wood, both measuring about ten inches wide by twenty-eight long. Total price: about $8, tax included.

Fast forward to January 5, 1968: I am back in school after Christmas holidays. My school is located behind the strip mall/shopping plaza where Reid's is located. I have been thinking about those packages of stamps since I first saw them, and in my pocket is approximately $6, recently plundered from my piggy bank. At that age, I understand the concept of money, and realize that I can buy approximately 60 packages at a dime each, although I am not totally clear yet on the concept of sales tax, which is 5%, whatever that means.

After school, I enter Reid's, and walk right to the stamp rack. I spend a few minutes comparing packs, and then start picking out the ones I want, trying to ensure the minimum of duplication. Each pack contains somewhere between 8 and 10 stamps each, and no two packs are the same, so this is a little harder than it appears at first, but over the next half hour or so, I accomplish the feat satisfactorally enough. I count the packets; there are 42, and I realize I have enough money. I go up to the counter and tender my purchase. The clerk counts them up, enters them into the cash register, and asks me for $4.42. I count out five U.S. dollars, all sent to me over the last year from my dad's Aunt Mary in Lewiston, NY. and take back the 58 cents change and my purchases, bagged, which I slip into my school bag. I leave the store and begin the walk home.

That night, after supper, I show my purchases to my dad, whose only hobbies are woodwork and hunting and fishing. Despite this, though, he looks at them with a high degree of interest, then tells me to keep them as they are for now and set them aside, because there are albums one can get to put them in. I look at them a few more times before going to bed at 8:00.

The next night, my dad is a little late getting home from work, arriving at 6PM instead of his usual 5:30. My mother, who has arrived home from her job at 5:45, is in the kitchen making supper, and I am in the dining room, setting the table, which is my customary job every night at this time.

After supper, my dad calls me to the living room, and I take a seat next to him on the couch. He explains that everyday, on the way to and from work, he passes a store called Surrey Stamp & Coin. Tonight, he stopped in there, as it was still open, and talked to the man running the store about stamp collecting, specifically about my interest in it. He gets all the information he can from the man, who cheerfully answers all of his questions, and shows him a typical beginner's album, noting that it has a Stamp Identifier inside, mentioning that a loose-leaf album is the best kind to get because it allows for expansion room, and showing him how the stamps are hinge-mounted in the album.

At that point, dad hands me a bag, and goes on to explain that after the information session was over, the man pitched him a package deal that he couldn't pass up. I look in the bag to find a Harris Traveler album and a pack of hinges, which the man gave him for $5, on account that it was important that new collectors ought to be encouraged.

We set up on the dining room table, and dad tells me everything he learned, that we should go through the album first to familiarize ourselves with it as well as the illustrations in it, and then look over our stamps to see if we remembered any being illustrated inside. Amazingly, we do, so we turn to the pages in question, and match stamp to illustration, and dad shows me how to use the hinges. When we run out of those that are easily matched, dad shows me how to use the Identifier, and before long, I have all the mechanics down pat.

And that's how it all began. Eventually, I would take my album to Show and Tell at school, and spark a mini-stamp collecting boom there. Where before, no one collected, suddenly there were collectors coming out of the woodwork. On library days, I would start to check out books on countries where my stamps were from, and learn new things to the point that by the end of the school year, I was able to name the capital cities of most countries. When I wasn't working on my collection, I was reading non-fiction, and the hobby really did open up the world to me.

Thanks, Dad.

Here is a link to a poll along this line of thought:
How Long Have You Been Collecting?

It may be an overlapping area.

BTW: I started collecting by watching my grandmother work on her album. I'm a little fuzzy about the details, I was 8. Check out my profile for more info...

WpgLwr,

Lovely write up, thoroughly enjoyable read.
Thanks.

I collected whilst at school aged 8, it was the 'in' thing to do at the time. But I wasn't serious.

Many years later I was walking with friends through Alexandra Park in North London. Towards the entrance of the old Alexandra Palace [Ally Pally] there was quite a commotion and hundreds of people. We ventured forth. It was StampWorld London,1990 the big International Exhibition. One friend came in with me and re-ignited a long dormant feeling for the Hobby. Later that month I was travelling in Egypt.
On a dusty,hot day in Cairo, I came upon a scruffy back street Stamp emporium, it was a real mess but also with tons of atmosphere.
I spent hours in that little 'Den', but came out hooked and with loads of goodies from the Middle East.

And that was it.
After that, it was stamps, stamps, stamps.

Londonbus1......Three cheers for Cairo...Hip, hip...

I started back when I was a kid and I had my first batch of stamps from my Mom..I stopped but then my interest got rejuvenated and I never stopped ever since

I started as a kid but then the interests vanished. Now my son got interested and that made me want to help him out and here I am :) It has now become my hobby too.

I started it when I was 14 or 15 years old.I did it for two years and wasn't exposed this kind of resources for collecting stamps(Internet,mails).My dad and relatives and friends had been in many countries at that time and I got stamps by them.
Unfortunately I had to stop it for a while because of my studies and I restarted it in January 2009.
Now I spend hours for collecting,organizing and soaking stamps.lol
This is the greatest hobby in the world I guess.

Thanks for the great stories

WpgLwr I love your story

I began when I was 10 or 11 (it was so long ago I cant remember). I saw an add in a magazine $1.00 for a bag of stamps. I loved history and geography then. I bought an album with babysitting money and kept buying stamps from magazine adds. I had (what I thought was a pretty great collection. I kept it up for a few years and after high school and University joined the Military.

I hadn't worked on my collection in a few years and met a young boy who was very ill and couldn't partake in many of the normal activities a child could enjoy. I showed him my collection and he was immediately taken with it. I left that day withought my collection knowing he would enjoy it greatly.

Fast forward to many years later. I am much older and somewhat older. I had recently moved to a new town In Nova Scotia and one of my neighbours has a sister who is an avid stamp collector. I'm hooked again and she provides me whith a good supply of stamps. I buy a WW album and start all over again. But stamps are hard to come by in this small town.

In my spare time I look after a freind kids (because I am the only francophone in the area). One of the girls loves my collection and decides to start her own. I set her up with a starter set from Canada Post and our collections grow together.

Fast forward again. I move to Fredericton NB and discover ebay and then this forum. Now there is no stopping me. I have about 280 countries. Some only have a few stamps, some many. Most are not organized or sorted yet. But I'm deffinatetly hooked big time.

Just goes to prove that there it's never too late to pick up something you love to do

Dianne

I started when I was 5 years old. My grandpa and I used to go the the department stores and get 1940s and 1950s stamps from vending machines. You used to put in a quarter and out would pop four stamps in a cardboard cover. You never knew what you were going to get, so it was pretty much a surprise.

My grandpa died in 1984, and I have been collecting ever since. You could offer me a million dollars for my collection, and I wouldn't sell. Those old commemoratives from the 40s and 50s are absolutely priceless to me.

I hope no one minds my dusting off this old topic, but I didn't want to start another one when I was going to ask the same question. I got into the hobby in grade school. I went to a parochial school and at some point they were collecting huge quantities of used envelopes in a hallway next to the undercroft classes. I was in a split 6/7 grade class and when the seventh grade was out for gym or something, they would bring big tubs of the envelopes in and have us cut away the paper and save the stamps, then discard the rest of the envelope. I'm not sure what the point was, but I figured it had to be for a fund raiser of some kind. A couple of us who were sixth graders started pocketing anything that looked unusual, my first being one of the 1972 Colonial Craftsmen set, the glass blower. (Yes, I still have it.) I would take them home and put them in an old margarine dish in my room, and eventually I discovered the stamp section at the local Woolworth and bought an album, then a US album, then a Scott Minuteman the following year for my birthday. One time I got sent to see our parish priest for an imagined transgression and instead of going to talk to him I hopped up onto one of the bales of stamps and went through a stack. I went back to class with a downcast look to make the teacher think I'd been read the riot act, but in actuality I was thrilled because my pockets were bulging with new stamps for my collection. No one was ever the wiser.

I bought my first stamps at a Ben Franklin craft/hobby store when I was probably around 6 or 7 years old. I don't remember exactly. I just remember being fascinated by these stamps with foreign words on them and perhaps showing exotic topics, or maybe a stamp that was really,really old (by my 6-or-7 year old understanding of the term). Eventually I joined an approval service or two (probably from ads in Boys Life or The Grit) and bought the typical kinds of stamps you'd expect a young kid to buy. My first album was one of those paperback jobs that had maybe 40 or 50 pages in it. I outgrew that before long and eventually got myself a Harris Traveler. Man, I really thought I was a big shot then! I transferred the stamps from the old paperback album and threw it in the trash. I still have the Traveler album and I occasionally even add to it with duplicates from my main collection. I'd kind of like to fill every space in it before I die although I'm not actively working towards that goal.

I dropped the hobby as I got into my high school and college years and had a couple short stints collecting in my later 20's and later 30's, but those didn't last long. I picked the hobby back up again a little over 4 years ago (I'm 47 now) and have been going like gangbusters since, with no intention of ever stopping again. In fact, sometimes I wish I could stop, as space is getting to be a premium. And that's only after 4 years, I can't imagine what it'll look like in another 20. I say that with both anticipation and trepidation, if that makes any sense.

I forgot about Grit. I think they had a stamp column/page that I discovered when one of our neighbors started selling it. After I found that I was one of his best customers.

WALLYUM -Interesting story ,sounds like something I would do .

ARTFUL HINGER -----Your story has a lot of what I did.

The beginning for me was around 1956 in Providence ,Rhode Island . The older boys in the neighborhood would get together and trade stamps on the front porch of the house across the street. The younger kids ,me included would watch. One of these older boys gave me four or five stamps from his duplicates.
This was the very first thing that was mine and not shared with my brothers and sisters. It was a treasure .
There are many more stories about growing my collection some are hard to believe . In 1969 I got a job at the Chicago Board of Trade and shortly after started to trade the markets. In a short time all the guys I hung around with started to make serious money. I never forgot about the joy I had with my stamp collection to take your mind off the daily grind .

I think I mentioned this once before. I became interested when I saw my friend's father's All American album. The stamps were beautifully all mint and Crystal Mounted. I was hooked (1957). I even have my own All American album (cloth with mint paper jacket) on my shelf with my MYSTICS. No stamps in it, though.

Jack Kelley

Resurrected thread here....anyway I started when I was about 7 also in 1967, the neighbor lady (Mrs. Bianco) gave me her old childhood stamp album from 1937. Probably about 100 worldwide stamps in it, all glued in! Oh well, that's for another thread. I became an HE Harris packet junky for the next few years. Later I would buy a few of interest one year, then a few five years later as the US Navy moved me around the continent/globe. I can only say that I got semi serious about the analytical side of things about three years ago. John