Stamp Show

Here's Janine and Bobbie at the National Philatelic Society show this past Friday here in Pittsburgh. They are making their way through a pile of stamps looking for categories they like, mainly pictures of authors. John and Janine were looking for stamps from countries attending the G20 summit that will take place this September here in Pittsburgh in the same venue.

Dan, my business partner, is an avid stamp collector so we got a personal tour of his Vietnam collection. The collection is quite comprehensive following how Ho Chi Minh created a mail service to legitimize the nascent communist independence movement in the 1940s.

The collection contains US State Department correspondence from FDR's administration and continues though the fall of the French in the 1950s. It moves on with letters from both sides of the conflict, from early US military involvement through the Vietnam War. There are even letters home from Soviet and Chinese advisers whose existence was denied. It ends with a returned letter dated April 30, 1975, the fall of Saigon. It even contains a letter Dan wrote as a Marine lieutenant in 1967.

Dan worked with people both here in the US as well as Vietnam to create this collection.

While we all were impressed with Dan's collection, as an old time Pirates fan, Bobbie really liked the Roberto Clemente collection. There must have been 100 covers in that one!