California Postmark Collectors Please Read

Hi

Have hundreds of these envelopes. All addressed to this electric company. Believe the original collector was collecting postmarks. This is not an area of interest of mine. Rather than discard them I would like to offer the entire group to one person interested in expanding their collection of postmarks. Willing to mail to US addresses only to minimize expense of shipping this box. I will select from responses received within the next 7 days from members with a minimum of 50 posts. Person selected can have them gratis.

If no one else is interested I'd love them.

MaryC

Thank you for your response. There are a few forum rules that prevent me from sending them to you. Members can not post personal information to the board. Something like a mailing address or email address is prohibited. This information is ordinarily exchanged via private message. This is for the protection of forum members. This board is viewed worldwide and we never know who is reading. I apologize for not including anything in my OP to save you from replying to something the forum rules prevent you from replying to. When you have 50 posts under your belt you'll be able to take advantage of the offers members make to other members.

This may sound crazy, but I would like to be considered as well. These would be local to me, as I've lived in the Los Angeles area since 1979. (Gasp -- just realized it'll be 50 years coming up on next month!)

In fact, when I first moved here, I lived in Huntington Beach, and, quite by coincidence, it was just a few blocks from the address shown on the cover you depicted. (And I paid Edison monthly the whole 50 years, too!)

Thanks for your consideration, and for your very generous offer to the Board!

I think MaryC could message you through the system with her mailing address, right?

There are also a dozen or so envelopes addressed to a TV show in South Dakota in the group. Tried to post a link to it and got a certificate error warning. Deleted the link. Can be found if Keloland TV is Googled.

More than half of the envelopes have never been opened. Just opened one and found this inside:

I have some similar "contest" mail from the 1950s. Here is an example. Most of these were "legitimate" contests, and the covers made it out into the world because some collector knew the folks running the contest.


I ended up with several 100s of these, mostly different, for my Texas postmark collection.

An interest situation occurred in Israel during the 1956 - 1973 wars. An enterprising collector wanted to get examples of the many Israeli military unit markings scattered around the country. So he took out an advertisement in the military newspaper (comparable to our US Army "Stars and Stripes" in WW2) inviting the soldiers to send in the attached coupon for a drawing for a small monetary prizes. He must have received thousands of entries. Of course, all it cost him was the ad cost and the prize.
He opened one of the envelopes, declared the named individual the winner, the rest were sorted and packaged for sale.

Here is one sample envelope. The triangular mark identifies unit 1066. Many were also censored a benefit for the israel postal history collector.





Here is the Linn's ad I saved from a 1975 issue. Mine came from a different source, and I surely didn't pay that prices. Although today it might be worth that.

mml1942

Very interesting. The contest for KELO TV was for meat from a local butcher. The butcher shop got free advertising for the cost of the prize they awarded.

I completely understand, thank you

gettinold, sent you a message. I would be interested for either myself or for someone I know starting out.