Stamp Greetings Next Year
U.S. stamps are always supposed to provide a slice of Americana, but next year's commemorative issues will go a step further: Fifty stamps, each featuring a different state, in the style of 1930s "Greetings" postcards, with icons representing each state.
The stamps, scheduled for issuance in April, will be the centerpiece of a program that includes Harry Houdini, Irving Berlin, Teddy Bears, Langston Hughes and West Point.
Although the "Greetings" stamps have the style of the old linen-finish postcards, all the designs are from original art, said U.S. Postal Service stamp development chief Terry McCaffrey. The USPS also went to great lengths to avoid rights issues with any of the designs, even to the point of changing the markings on cows and the color of the horse on the Louisiana stamp.
That horse, and the carriage it draws, substitute for New Orleans' Bourbon Street, for which attorneys told the postal designers they would need to obtain permission from each building shown in the stamp.
Rights are also an issue for the four Winter Sports stamps that will come out in January in Salt Lake City, site of the 2002 Winter Olympics — but neither "Olympics" nor the Olympic Rings symbol appear on the tentative designs for the stamps. That's under negotiations with the U.S. Olympic Committee, McCaffrey told CBSNews.com: The USOC wants the rings to appear on the stamps, but not necessarily on other merchandise the Postal Service might produce. The USPS wants to market T-shirts, coffee mugs and other trinkets with the stamp designs.
Also scheduled for January is a Mentoring stamp that started as "anti-violence," but all the designs seemed "too negative" to the Postal People.
A special stamp that reads "Happy Birthday" will be kept on sale even as rates change. A previous Happy Birthday stamp was part of a booklet of greeting-card themes, but customers complained they had to buy the entire booklet just to celebrate one event.
The 2002 stamps also include 20 for American Photography, in connection with the centennial of the birth of photographer Ansel Adams. Rather than picturing the photographers, the stamps show a signature work of each — but none by Civil War photographer Matthew Brady. According to McCaffrey, there are no known pictures definitely attributable to Brady, who had a number of lensmen working for his studio.
The Andy Warhol stamp, to be issued on what would have been his 84th birthday, is based on a self-portrait from 1964, which in turn was based on a coin-operated photo booth picture.
Other stamp subjects include poet Ogden Nash, legendary surfer and competitive swimmer Duke Kahanamoku, women journalists Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, Margueritte Higgins and Ethel Payne, and, for National Stamp Collecting Month (October), the kids-oriented Bats.
An intense letter-writing and telephone campaign yielded two stamps that will exhort us to spay and neuter our pets. McCaffrey told the philatelic press aStampshow 2001 that when informed that her efforts to lobby for the stamps had been successful, Prevent A Litter Coalition head Hope Tarr burst into tears.
Missing from the program is the subject for next year's Legends of Hollywood stamp. McCaffrey said a published report that the John Wayne family is not interested in a stamp honoring the actor is "totally false," but he wouldn't confirm that Wayne is the subject, either. He said several people are under consideration for 2002 as well as subsequent years, and he is unsure which one will be commemorated next year.
Only the Happy Birthday design has been released to the press. The USPS plans to unveil the Greetings images in September and the others in October.
By Lloyd A. de Vries
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