WWII 1st Day Cover No Cancels

Hello to all, newby here. I recently picked up a box of Stamps and related items at a swap meet. There were some 1st day covers with this one among them. I noticed that it had a stamp attached, but not cancelled like the others. The cover features a Submarine, The USS AMBERJACK. I have spent several hours on the internet. I found lots of information about the Sub. (It was lost in 1943 with all on board), but I could find nothing about this cover. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Phil

Well, a picture is worth a 1000 words, somebody once said . . .

Wow, look at the recipient in the second FDC!

Thanks for the response folks. I have been trying diligently to post a picture, but my Irfan program seems out of whack. The cover I have is unlike any that has been posted. I have not been able to find another copy and I have been all over the internet. I will keep on until I can get the picture posted. Here is a little more info while I am trying to post the picture. The design and lettering is all in "raised" or embossed silver ink or whatever. A name and address is also stamped in the lower right, but it obviously never went thru the mail.

Wow, look at the recipient in the second FDC!

Roosevelt was well known as a stamp collector and so he was deluged with such mail from well meaning collectors. I have no doubt that he never saw much less handled 99 percent of what was sent to him. Every President gets warehouses full of "stuff" sent to them from well meaning people and that they never see. Most of it gets sold off or just trashed at some point. Much of Roosevelt's "collection" of stamps and covers including this sort of thing was sold by his family at a series of four big auctions by Harmer, Inc. where there were many huge box lots sold. Another part of it ended up at the Smithsonian. There are also covers that were addressed to him but never mailed as they were cancelled and handed back to the person who prepared the covers. You can do this even today and address a cover to whomever you like but not actually send it to them.

First day cover makers, as well as just plain Naval cover makers who made covers every time a Naval vessel stopped in a port or participated in an exercise, or sometimes just when the captain sneezed, sometimes had left over covers they did not fully process for various reasons. Such covers today have little to no value as most all collectors really do want the cancellation to go with the rest of the cover.

Thanks to redwoodrandy for the links. I have learned a lot about covers in a short time. Thanks also to KIMO for your explanation. I can see how true believers would want the cancellation data on the covers. My real interest has always been coins. I should have passed on this box of stamp material as I am finding that one can burn up a lot of hours doing research on something he knows nothing about with very little reward.

Too bad it was not cancelled as the cancellation is really important to these, though even if it were cancelled the value would still be somewhere between $1 and $5 depending on how badly a collector needed this particular one for their collection.

This one has a nicely made cachet in silver colored ink. I do not know the name of the maker of the cachet though. Such cachets were all privately made and are not official - there were a great many makers of them and all tried to make theirs unique and fancy since most the makers of the cachets were either stamp dealers who would get a bunch of their cacheted covers canceled by the guy on the boat or ship whose duty was to handle the incoming and outgoing mail for the men, or the maker of the cachet would sell blank covers with his cachet to collectors for them to send off to get the on board cancellation.

Here is an example of another first day of postal service cachet that seems to have been made by the same cachet making company as yours, only this one is for a different submarine, has slightly different wording and was printed in gold colored ink. This one was properly cancelled making it of interest to collectors. It would be valued in the range of $3 to $4.

Kimo, thanks for the detailed explanation as to how some of these covers came about. In the box,I found another by the same person. This one is for the Keel laid for the USS Currituck-AV7. It too has a stamp in place, but no cancel. There is a name in very small print on the rear bottom right. It reads: S.E. Hutnick M.D. 5933 Lansdowne Ave. West Phila., Pa.
By the way, the he one you picture is most certainly made by the same person or company. The style is a give away as is the R.C.D. 70 at the bottom. I do not know the significance, but it is on both of the examples that I have.

Dr. S.E. Hutnick M.D. cachet maker

http://www.navalcovermuseum.org/res...Hutnick.html

http://www.navalcovermuseum.org/res..._Page_2.html

Naval Cover Museum

http://www.navalcovermuseum.org/res..._Museum.html

There is a group of collectors of U.S. Naval covers called the Universal Ship Cancellation Society and their website is at http://www.uscs.org/ Cancellations and commemorative covers from US Naval ships go back to the first world war, though you can find mail from US ships from before then even. I do not know how many different ones there are considering that every US Navy ship or boat had special cancels and starting the in the 1930s there was a real craze for making special cachets and inserting interesting information in the killer bars for all kinds of events and there were many different companies and individuals making cachets for such covers. The result is that there must be many tens of thousands of different ones to collect. As such, most collectors of these tend to specialize either in a kind of ship or boat such as just submarines or just air craft carriers or just battleships, etc., or just covers that were produced in a single country or port whenever a US naval vessel paid a call there, or just a given decade, or just one or two cachet makers' work, or whatever a person fancies as being fun to collect. The possibilities are endless, the covers are mostly very affordable, and they are very plentiful and easy to find. It is a great collectable for anyone with any budget and it is fun to learn about the ships, what they were doing and where in the world were they going.