Hobby Déjà Vu

There was an advertisement in today’s USA Weekend newspaper supplement that took me on a rocket trip back to my youth – a Kenmore Stamp Company offer of 44 mint U.S. stamps for only two bucks.

When I first got into stamp collecting, back in the summer of 1956, I had answered a similar ad on the back of a comic book, an ad that propelled me on my way to a lifetime of collecting. The ad offered a packet of stamps, a packet of stamp hinges, a cardboard watermark detector, a plastic magnifying glass, and a stamp album.

In the months that followed, I discovered that Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines had oodles of free stamp offers in their classified ad sections, so I used to cut them out, Scotch-tape them to a piece of paper with my name and address on it (and if required, a dime or nickel).

Kenmore Stamps was one of those companies that I patronized over and over and over again, getting approvals in the mail, keeping some, then returning the rest with payment for what I kept. The approval business was the way to go in those days, especially since postage was just three cents, no matter the size or weight of the envelope.

I still collect today, but approval companies are hard to find. Not only have today’s youth found better things to do, thanks to electronics, the cost of postage has risen considerably, wiping out any little profit a company might make.

That’s too bad. I guess I grew up at the tail end of the Golden Age of Stamp Collecting.

It's amazing to me that Kenmore Stamps is still doing this. As for me, déjà vu is a wonderful thing.