April 27, 2004
Have You Philately?
I live within blocks of where I grew up. I have, in fact, lived in the same small California town for most of my life. In 1967, when I was six years old, my parents moved our family into the house where they still live today. Since then the only time I lived elsewhere was for a short while in the early 1990's when I moved to San Diego. But I moved back to Ventura in 1994, got married in 2000, and now own a condominium that was built when I was fifteen on the site of an avocado orchard I played in when I was ten.
There is a riverbed near where we live that, unlike most everything else in town, has changed very little over the past thirty-four years. Running from the foothills to the ocean, the river “bottom”, as it has become locally known, is little more than a trickle of water for most of the year transforming via the winter storms into a full-fledged raging torrent.
In the early 1970’s, the river bottom was the perfect place for my brother and I to look for high adventure, and when school let out for the summer we would easily spend an entire day there catching lizards, small fish, and frogs. But the real allure of the river bottom, at least for me, was its banks.
Before even more condominiums were built along reclaimed land along the river’s banks, there were a number of old trash dumps that the city never bothered to clean up. In these dumps was everything imaginable from old bicycles, car parts, broken toilets, and magazines, to just plain old trash. It was a young boy's treasure trove. There were at least three separate dumps that spanned some three decades of our town’s history. Even as kids we were able to discern this fact from our many archeological expeditions to these sites. There were plenty of discarded magazines, letters, and newspapers among the layers of refuse that made it rather obvious even to the least experienced adventurer when in history these artifacts were deposited.
I credit my brother for actually turning these otherwise forgotten city dump sites into a real treasure hunt because he was the one who saw the value of the many discarded envelopes and letters we found there. My brother collected many of the used envelopes, and carefully cut around the stamps, and then floated the stamp still attached to a portion of the envelope in hot water. The hot water would separate the stamp from the paper, and this was how my brother built quite an impressive stamp collection.
Because I wanted to do most of the same things as my older brother, I started my own little stamp collection. My brother gave me all of his duplicate stamps, and from what he gave me plus what I gleaned from the dumps on my own; I built a nice little collection myself. Once we exhausted the supply at the dumps we started buying stamps from local hobby stores. We extended our individual collections to include foreign stamps, and we would send off for a “grab bag” of 1000 guaranteed no-two-alike stamps from ads we found in comic books. We became quite serious about the whole stamp collecting pastime; looking for stamps with little or no postmark, placing each stamp in a special made sleeve with and adhesive backing made for stamp collecting books, and competing with each other over the greatest number, and best quality stamps. His was always the best.
I still have my collection, and I recently found my brother’s. He lives in another state now, so I called him and told him I had it, and would be sending it off to him soon. While we never found an “Inverted Jenny”, or any other extremely rare specimen, those stamps still have great value for me, and I am glad we rediscovered them. When I called my brother and told him I would be sending his collection to him, it sparked a wonderful conversation for a couple of hours about not only the old town dumps, but also about our many adventures down in the old river bottom as well.