Grampa Don
Yep, that's me
- Location
- Orange county, Calif.
I was looking through a magazine yesterday and noticed a small ad, “100 stamps for one dollar”. It brought back the memory of when I was a kid in the 50’s and answered one just like it. I started collecting them. My Mom bought me an inexpensive stamp album and each month I would receive an envelope of stamps on approval. I’d return the ones I didn’t want and money for the ones I kept.
Stamps were my window on the world. I learned that other countries didn’t always call themselves the same names we used. Norway was Norge, Ireland was Eire, and Denmark was Danmark. Some had strange alphabets I couldn’t even read and I had to do some research to figure out where they were from.
I got a cheap Atlas and began pasting stamps in it over their countries. My old album is long gone, but I still have that Atlas.
The world was bigger and more exotic in those days. Viet Nam? Afghanistan? Where the heck were they? To me, China was a place where people wore cone shaped hats and lived on rice. The Swiss wore lederhosen and yodeled in the mountains. Africa was one big jungle in the south and desert sand in the north.
Most news was fairly local and limited. If there was a riot in India, who knew? It might be a tiny item on a back page. All I saw of these places were articles in National Geographic magazines at the library. All I knew about Russia was that they were the bad guys.
There was a popular song about far away places with strange sounding names. Now a days, they aren’t so strange. Some are only too familiar.
Stamps were my window on the world. I learned that other countries didn’t always call themselves the same names we used. Norway was Norge, Ireland was Eire, and Denmark was Danmark. Some had strange alphabets I couldn’t even read and I had to do some research to figure out where they were from.
I got a cheap Atlas and began pasting stamps in it over their countries. My old album is long gone, but I still have that Atlas.
The world was bigger and more exotic in those days. Viet Nam? Afghanistan? Where the heck were they? To me, China was a place where people wore cone shaped hats and lived on rice. The Swiss wore lederhosen and yodeled in the mountains. Africa was one big jungle in the south and desert sand in the north.
Most news was fairly local and limited. If there was a riot in India, who knew? It might be a tiny item on a back page. All I saw of these places were articles in National Geographic magazines at the library. All I knew about Russia was that they were the bad guys.
There was a popular song about far away places with strange sounding names. Now a days, they aren’t so strange. Some are only too familiar.
