How Did You Get Started?

I can remember as a 9 or 10 year old there was a 'mission mixture' packet at home. I sorted through it and put all the stamps into their various country types. In there was a block of 6 of the 10c Washington Memorial (Sc #1510) and for a while I regarded that as the most valuable item in my collection!

A year or so of collecting coincided with the stamp boom of the late 1970s. I managed to put together a pretty reasonable collection of Australia quickly as a result of finding an old guy with mountains of stamps who wasn't aware of the boom.

I shamelessly took advantage of his ignorance to put together a collection at no net cost to me.

Around this time, I was at a local trash and treasure market and bought a cigar tin (I still have it) full of postage dues. Within 5 years these were my sole collecting interest.

ebay has permitted the acquisition of a large range of material that I couldn't access otherwise. I now regard dealers as fair game when they don't know the true value of stuff, but I'm a little easier on fellow collectors

Well when I was a young lad my grandfather gave me a bunch of stamps and a booklet to put them in. There were a lot of German stamps and some unused Hitler stamps. Quite a few were unused never hinged. I didn't know any better back then and I licked them and pasted them in the booklet.
Recently I soaked them off the paper and put them in vario pages.

Before I was born, my father was hunting on property owned by his boss. There was an abandoned house on the property and my father found an old Scott's International Album inside. My father's boss let him keep the album. He gave it to my sister who collected a little while, but when I was about six I started messing with her collection and album. When I was seven she gave me my own album for Christmas and I really started from there. My $1 a week allowance was spent on packets of stamps from the local hobby store. Over time my sister gave me the Scott's International and the stamps I hadn't pilfered already. I also acquired two collections from her boyfriend's (one now her husband in Italy), two more collections from cousins and another from an aunt. Of course all the other relatives would save me stamps (Grandma would always trim the perfs off). Now I go after postcards and covers.

The Littleton Stamp Company and the Kenmore Stamp company were my friends while in grades 4-8. I also " inherited" my brother's collections (they were much older than me). I still have a box of glassine envelopes (with stamps) from approval companies dating from 1954 to 1978 or so.

I had the Harris Citation album for WW and the Harris Liberty album for US. I still have both of them and the stamps are firmly fixed in with Crystal Mounts.

I've recently learned that Crystal Mounts are bad news. But they look so nice in the album and almost all the stamps are listed at the minimum Scott catalog value. So why bother them?