Page 20 - Demo

First Day CoversWhen I was between 10 and 12 years old, I went to several monthly meetings of Lafayette%u2019s Junior Stamp Club. The meetings were held in the City Hall building on 6th Street, where I'd climb the stairs to the second-floor courtroom where they took place. On those Sunday afternoons, I usually walked by myself the nine blocks from home to there, and back.In truth, the club wasn%u2019t a real club. Nobody paid dues, there was no list of members, and there were never any presentations about stamps or philately. Instead, a typical meeting consisted of an adult collector from the Lafayette Stamp Club sitting at a table and selling stamps to the boys who showed up. Since he could only deal with one person at a time, the rest of us stood around waiting and talking. We were a fairly well defined group, but not all of us came every week. One mid-summer day, a new boy showed up. He wasn%u2019t interested in buying anything%u2014only selling. He had a stack of 29 First Day Covers for the 1938 Presidential series of stamps. These were standard postage stamps (definitives to philatelists), not commemoratives, and he had covers that ranged from a %u00bd%u00a2 stamp up to a 50%u00a2 stamp. He was only missing the three highest denominations from the series: the $1, the $2, and the $5. There was also one First Day Cover unrelated to the Presidentials that featured a 10%u00a2 National Park Souvenir Sheet. All were addressed to R.A. Derrick on the faraway island nation of Fiji in the Pacific Ocean. The boy explained that he had inherited them from his uncle, but since he wasn%u2019t a collector, he wanted to sell them. He was asking ten dollars for the batch.I knew about the Presidential series, which philatelists refer to as Prexies, and I already had several of the low-value stamps in my collection. All the other boys at the meeting that day collected stamps, but not First Day Covers, so no one lined up to buy his. I was mildly interested, but being just a grade-school kid, ten dollars was a great deal of money. In any case, I%u2019m sure I didn%u2019t have that much cash in my billfold. I can%u2019t recall how the negotiations progressed, but I somehow bought all his covers for two dollars.The Prexies featured all 32 U.S. presidents who were in office between 1789 and 1928%u2014from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge. Their designs were similar, with busts in profile, and they were printed in solidcolors up to the 50%u00a2 stamp. The $1, $2, and $5 values were more elaborate, with black-and-white busts surrounded by colored lettering and ornamentation. It was President Franklin Roosevelt who first suggested this series of stamps in 1933, but it took until June 22, 1937 before the Treasury Department announced a national competition to design them. A panel of philatelic specialists and art experts judged the over eleven hundred designs, and prizes of $500, $300 and $200 for the three top entrants were awarded. First Elaine Rawlinson, the first woman to design a U.S. postage stamp