Like many of you, I’m a collector by nature… I’ve collected a variety of things over the years, including comics, coins, LP’s and even radio station bumper stickers.
I also collected postage stamps for a couple of years in high school, but once I went away to college and no longer had my “support group” , the stamp collecting fell by the wayside.
Stamp collectors have long specialized in collecting particular themes, countries, types of stamps, etc., mainly because there are far too many stamps for one person to collect… Just like card collectors might collect only parallel sets or Faux tobacco cards or whatever.
One of the themes I had when I was collecting stamps was sports-related stamps, and I’ve got two of those to share today; both are from 1969 and both commemorate the 100th anniversary of a major sports milestone.
The first stamp commemorates the 100th anniversary of professional baseball; specifically, the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first team to pay its players.
The second stamp commemorates the first inter-collegiate football game played on November 8th, 1869. The game was played on the campus of Rutgers University and they beat rival Princeton 6-4.
Obviously the image on this stamp is meant to portray football in 1969, not 1869.
Like my card collection, my stamp collection is an unholy mess, but I’ll share any more sports-related stamps that I run across during the great clean-up process. I know that there’s a Canadian hockey stamp in there somewhere…
I love hearing about people’s other collections. Look forward to seeing more.
I also used to collect stamps, got an awful lot of them. I’m pretty sure I have those two stamps you featured still. When I was in high school (or middle school?) I was a member of one of those “stamps by mail” companies/clubs that used to advertise in comics and on the back of matchbooks. You order the batch of stamps from the ad and then every few weeks they would send you more stamps to “preview” and then either send the stamps back or purchase them. That was fun but could be expensive, especially if you loved every sample they would send.