By Patrick Timothy Mullikin

To the phalanx of philatelists whose idea of a good time is soaking cancelled stamps from envelopes or counting the days until some prized first-day cover is to be released, I understand your avocation/addiction. To their families, my sympathy.

When I was growing up my friends' fathers hunted, or they tinkered in their garages and workshops. My father fettered away a good portion of his day with his stamp collection.

His was no mere hobby but a passion, an obsession. Looking back, it was probably an excuse to hole himself away from his family and a world that was evolving into something increasingly unfamiliar and contrary to his way of thinking. It was his attempt to restore order to a chaotic world.

Collecting and trading stamps is to grownups what swapping sports cards is to kids. The idea is to amass the most, stumble upon the rarest, to have a complete set. My father, having retired at 50, had the time and money to dedicate his care-free years to his obsession. His study was filled with industrial-grade steel file cabinets, each one a part of an overall filing system that was the envy of his confederates in the philatelic world.

If Carl Linnaeus is the father of biological classification, Willard Everett Mullikin reached the same heights with his stamp collection.

For a person who loves organization, or is slave to it, stamp collecting offers infinite opportunities. Take, for example German, stamps, which, at their simplest, can be broken into people, places and things. My father had binders filled with stamps bearing the likeness of famous Germans: Beethoven, Kaiser Wilhelm, even those with Der Fuhrer's face, which were further broken down to cancelled and uncirculated.

Because stamps are so small and thin, they are easy to collect and store. My father must have had in the neighborhood of a half million individual stamps, easily, and he knew where each one was: Queen Elizabeth, the Graf Zeppelin, King George Tupou I, the King of Tonga, each had their place in his perfect world. His file cabinets were a combination League of Nations, encyclopedia and morgue.

As a kid I found his world interesting — partly because his stamp room was air-conditioned and Southern California was always hot and the air smoggy — but, to his disappointment, I didn't share in his passion.

But others did, and several afternoons and evenings a week other stamp collectors would drop by — always one on one, that's stamp collecting etiquette — to talk and trade stamps. He welcomed a theologian from the nearby Claremont School of Theology, a reverend from one of the churches, a mycologist, the head of the botanical gardens, a mailman, and a man named Les Larson, whose liltingly alliterative name has stuck in my head for more than 40 years.

Each of these men shared a common interest, the same obsessions, and dealt with the same demon – with apologies to the theologian and reverend.

This was a man's world. While fettering away the hours looking at stamps, they also talked about world events – the Cold War, Vietnam, trouble-making college kids – from their own perspective and area of expertise. My father, well-read and knowledgeable in many areas, delighted in conversation and debate. In these closed-door sessions he was more open and forthright with his fellow philatelists than he was with his wife and children.

I liked these guys and was happy when they'd visit. Theirs was a secret society of sorts, men from all walks and stations in life who revered a tiny piece of paper. These were men who traveled with big Sherlock Holmes magnifying glasses and stainless-steel tweezers. Stamps were always picked up with tweezers, never by oily hands God forbid, and held up to fluorescent lights to check for watermarks, flaws, tears and any number things only philatelists could see or imagine.

One benefit, actually the only one I can think of, in having a stamp collector for a father was that we never suffered for want of a stamp to mail an envelope.

My father bought his stamps by the full sheet, usually in multiples: One for the files, one to swap, one for postage. He had stamps of all denominations and vintage; a letter that originated from the Mullikin house bore an eclectic assortment of stamps – a 1945 FDR 3-Center, a 1954 Lewis & Clark 3-Center, a 1929 Indiana Statehood 2-Center – and looked as if had fallen behind the counter at the Post Office, resurfacing 30 years later. All stamps were aligned carefully, with just enough of a margin so that the cancellation mark would be good and clear. This was done for the benefit of the recipient, a fellow stamp collector, it was hoped or imagined.

Today when I go to the post office to buy my sheets (never booklets, perish the thought, or worse yet one at a time from the vending machine) I am drawn to the older-fashioned types with an engraved portrait. The more dour looking the man or woman, the better. Recent favorites of mine have been Alfred Hitchcock, Ronald Reagan and Sugar Ray Robinson. Cutesy-pie stamps with Star Wars or Disney characters don't get a second look.

My father died in 1976 during the nation's bicentennial hoopla. He must have known that his time was near; a few years earlier he started to sell off large blocks of his collection, not trusting some charlatan or carpetbagger with this important task this after his death.

If he were alive, I'm sure he couldn't tolerate a society where e-mail, cell phones and text-messaging has turned us into creatures needing and demanding immediate communication gratification.

For him, the mail brought the news, good and bad, in due time, and most importantly with a stamp.



Patrick Timothy Mullikin, an editor at The Times Argus, writes regularly for Vermont Sunday Magazine.