I collected stamps intermittently over my lifetime and only recently got rid of my stamp collection when we went full-time in our RV. My father had a collection when he was a boy in a 2-ring binder and I took that over when I was his age and continued it. When we went full-time, I sold my collection to a local stamp shop - I found out today that I should have given it to the Postal History Museum here in Tucson. What a fascinating operation they have here.
In a quiet neighborhood, in an old church building is a marvelous gem of a postal museum, or is it an excellent educational resource, or is it a Civil War Library? Well, whatever it is, it’s called the Postal History Foundation.
Formed in 1960 when a lifelong stamp collector retired and came to Tucson, its goals are to encourage kids to collect stamps, to gather items of postal history for display, to develop lesson plans for teachers using stamps, oh, well, just to promote stamps as an interest.
We arrived at 9:30 and left at 1:15. We had a tour all to ourselves led by a volunteer there and was it ever good. The tour was really ‘free’ but we made a donation to the Foundation since we had had the time of a volunteer for about 2 hours. The purpose of the foundation is to display many items related to postal history in Arizona, sell stamps (it is a functioning post office) but their main purpose these days is to educate through stamps.
First the process. They receive tons of stamp albums, boxes of stamps, thousands of letters with stamps on them and they separate these all into categories they can use. Here’s the main room
and you can see the desks where the 50+ volunteers sit separating stamps using a cool gadget like this.
I should have taken a picture when we arrived when these desks were filled but took it after our tour - when many of them were at lunch. Oh, well.
Here are some of the stamps they sell, mostly in bulk. Stamps from various countries,
Stamps for crafts.
We were told that they have quite a presence on eBay selling some of the rarer stamps which helps support their activities.
But here is the educational part of the foundation. They have an Educational Director named Lisa Dembowski who has done a marvelous job designing lessons plans for elementary school students using stamps. She has lesson plans in History (Lewis and Clark, Martin Luther King, Native Americans, Lincoln) Geography (National symbols, Grand Canyon, National Parks) Transportation (trains, airplanes, bridges) and 8 other categories. She supplies questions, stamps to illustrate this and worksheets for each kid in the class.
They have field trips to the museum here, they have programs for Scout badges and they deal with about 40,000 school children a year. This woman has put together about 100 different lesson plans for teachers using the stamps they have.
OK, now for the museum part, in this building which is pretty interesting in itself. It is from a kit. Back in the late 1800’s when a postmaster needed a post office, he ordered a post office kit. This particular structure is one such kit and was in a Wells Fargo freight office building as a post office in the town of Naco, AZ for 30 years. It was one of the few offices that exchanged mail from Mexico and the US. When Naco, AZ got a new post office in 1960, the structure was disassembled, stored for a while and finally wound up here in the Postal History Foundation. Note the rounded front,
the beveled, frosted windows, the maker’s logo
and the cute postmaster.
I liked this old hand crank phone. I actually worked at a Girl Scout camp on Catalina Island many years ago and this was the kind of phone we had. I told my mother that our phone number was 6F14. Huh? Well, yeah. She tried it and got through. I had to crank it to talk. But then those were the days even before the dial phone. No smart phones then.
Hey, look, here’s the typewriter I used to type my papers for High School. Well, not quite but pretty close.
Here’s a stamp dispenser and note that it is sanitary - no one has touched those stamps it sells.
Here’s an analog scale - something that puzzles the elementary kids who visit here.
Lots of old postcards on which you had to write your message on the picture side since the other side was used only for an address and a stamp. Here are two of them with their message side out.
Next door is the Peggy Slusser Memorial Library which has a large reading room, lots of books about stamps in the back and a nice display of US air mail history in the early part of the 20th century in the display cabinets under the pictures.
We leaned about Katherine Stinson, the Flying Schoolgirl, who was the 4th woman to earn here Aviation license in 1912. She had quite a career, stunt flying in the US prior to the war, training Canadian pilots before they went off to Europe to fight in WWI, flying in China and India, setting several distance records and becoming the first woman to perform the loop-the-loop maneuver. She also set successive endurance and distance records and raised $2 million dollars for the American Red Cross. Her flying was stopped when she was one of the 18 - 20 million people in the US who caught Spanish Influenza in 1918 - 1920, survived but the contracted tuberculosis and became an architect. She died in 1977. There is an airport in San Antonio named after her and her two siblings who also flew.
To say she was ahead of her time is an understatement.
Fun visit and what an educational institution.
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