What Got You Interested In Stamps?

My dad had an envelope fall of old stamps in his dresser drawer. Every once in a while my sisters and I would has permission (you NEVER just went in there!) to look at them, so we'd sit on my parents bed and sort through. Soiled and dirty from our little fingers, they are now hold a special place in my collection and are probably some of the most valuable items in there, to me anyway! He also had an old tin cigarette box of coins in his beside table. Same story with those, I have them too.
When I was about 10 or 11 some cereal, I think it was Muffets, started offering little envelopes of world stamps as a premium in their boxes. Those really got me going! I ate a lot of Muffets.
I had an uncle who was an avid collector, and once he heard I was interested, he took me under his wing and showed me the ropes. His collection was amazing, to me anyway. His wife, my aunt, is in her mid 90s now and still has the collection. She's convinced it's going to make her rich one day!

My parents gave me a worldwide stamp album and stamps for Christmas around age 8. I collected for a few years then drifted away. A few years ago I started reading books by Laurence Block featuring Keller the professional assassin, who also happens to be a stamp collector. That got me thinking about stamps again, which led me to start collecting again.

Was in 4th grade; which was 1983-1984 for me and the school I attended was for the "gifted" kids as was the term back then but they did a lot of non-traditional things, one of which was making you pick special classes to foster/introduce new hobbies or other interests, which had special times designated for those interests once every two weeks. Stuff like model-building, learning guitar, and one was stamp collecting which I picked along with my friend Paul. They gave us these pretty basic US albums, and a lot of common used US Stamps donated by the Sarasota, FL philatelic society and off we went. My parents fostered my hobby, and soon I had a Harris Liberty album and Paul's and my parents would shuttle us to shows maybe once a month for the couple years or so where we'd spend our allowances and hard-earned yard-mowing or yard raking money on what we could afford. At about 14 or so, sports and impressing the opposite sex became much more important, as happens and I sold the collection at some point; not for much as I recall although it was not much of a collection.


The years passed, and for some reason recalled the old Harris Liberty album and bought on more or less on a whim; really more for nostalgic reasons. When I got it and opened it, I re-realized the dream I think a lot of philatelists have... "I've got to fill this thing up!"


Am really thankful the I re-discovered the hobby, as probably are some sellers on ebay and Hipstamp over the past few years.