By Dennis Sadowski
As a kid, José Mora would travel around Puerto Rico with his father, a broker conducting business with countless customers across the U.S. territory.
Mora’s father introduced him to stamp collecting at age 12 and during the travels he got to meet interesting people and see various versions of everyday life while picking up a few stamps along the way.
Then an idea struck: Why not stop at the post offices in the towns and villages they visited and collect postmarks?
“I realized it was a good way to learn about geography and history,” Mora said of his interest in local postal markings Oct. 17 during the 63rd convention of the Post Mark Collectors Club at the National Postmark Museum on the grounds of Historic Lyme Village in Bellevue, an easy 32-mile drive from Elyria.
For Mora, 55, now of Berea, Kentucky, it was his first convention and first visit to the museum. A club member for 24 years, Mora came away impressed. With nearly 2 million postmarks, research resources, postal paraphernalia and photos of post offices, there’s a lot to see.
Mora’s collection includes hundreds of items from the U.S., Puerto Rico and Southeast Asia including Cambodia, where for 13 years he was a professor and chair of global affairs at the American University of Phnom Penh and a church missionary. He returned to the U.S. in May.
In Cambodia, he visited each of the country’s estimated 40 post offices to obtain a postmark. Almost every stop, he said, led to discoveries about events and people who create the story of humanity.
post offices to obtain postmarks. He estimates he has visited 12,000 post offices in the
U.S.
Convention attendee Evan Kalish, 38, of Queens, New York, holds the same fascination with postmarks. He was introduced to stamp collecting by his father, who began the hobby in the 1960s. On family vacations, Kalish and his father would stop at post offices to get a postmark. At first the young Kalish was hardly impressed.
“I found it completely uninteresting because I wanted to play mini-golf,” he said.
By 2008, when Kalish was in college, things changed. He began taking photos of post offices, and other buildings, to document architectural styles. It led him to obtain postmarks when he visited.
During the three months after college graduation Kalish traveled 13,000 miles and visited 250 post offices. “It grew on me,” he said of his collecting interest.
Now he plans road trips around post office locations. He uses large foldout roadmaps to plot trips, looking for backroads that pass through small towns where a post office is located. At home he has a map marked with pushpins to indicate where he has been.
Kalish estimated that he has visited more than 12,000 post offices in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. On the trip to Bellevue Kalish made the rounds in central Pennsylvania to catch additional postal markings for his collection.
“The experiences I had at the post offices made it worthwhile,” said Kalish, the club’s webmaster. “I talked with longtime postmasters. They tell the history of the town. Also it’s the fact that I get to see different places and document a snapshot in time.”
The convention drew about 30 people from across the country. Most are longtime club members who attend the convention almost every year. Members traveled from Delaware, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and elsewhere.
The gathering coincided with the semiannual museum work week during which members file postmarks alphabetically and chronologically by town and by state and even many counties.
Robert Slater, 75, of Millsboro, Delaware, is among those who try to attend the convention every year. Studying postmarks gives him a window into “a history of Americana.”
“Mail shows communications between Americans have been in the past and how they are now. These postmarks and pieces of mail are the history of that,” said Slater, who worked as a postal clerk on the aircraft carrier USS Independence while serving in Navy. He went on to work for the U.S. Postal Service for 37 years in Fairfax County, Virginia.
The postmark museum is open for tours during the afternoons of the first and third Wednesdays of each month. The Fire Lands Stamp Club meets at the museum the same evenings. Information about the club and the museum is online at www.postmarks.org.
Dennis Sadowski can be reached at sadowski.dennis@gmail.com.