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. |
Posted 06/15/2009 07:24 am
