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sored. This brought me into contact with other collectors who were my age, but the club also introduced me to several adult collectors. There was a Mr. Conn, a retired postal worker, who lived on the far north side of Lafayette; Mr. Cobb, a Purdue professor, who lived in West Lafayette; and a man, whose name I can%u2019t recall, who lived in a subdivision behind Central Catholic High School. While he was a Protestant, he collected stamps from the Vatican. When I asked why, he said he wanted to collect from a single country, one that he%u2019d have a chance to someday have a complete collection. For him, collecting Vatican stamps was challenging, but not too challenging. When I knew him, he didn%u2019t have many blank spaces in his Vatican album.I met with each of these adult collectors on several occasions. They shared their passion, and sold me stamps and covers. Each had a going rate for morerecent unused stamps of 1%u00a2 more than the face value. It seemed a very good deal, so I gradually replaced the used stamps in my collection with unused ones. While my dad and I had little in common, he was always willing to drive me to the homes of the various adults I was to be meeting with, drop me off, then pick me up later.In 1961, I read in the Indianapolis Star%u2019s stampcollecting column, that there was going to be an American Philatelic Society conference in Chicago. It sounded interesting, and it was only a two-hour drive, so I asked Dad if I could go. I knew he wouldn%u2019t be interested himself, but he agreed to drive me there, along with two of my friends, to spend the day. I don%u2019t recall any displays, or meetings dealing with stamps or postal history, but there were dozens of stamp dealers set up in a large room, hawking their wares. I%u2019m not sure what Dad did while we were there, but my friends and I wandered among the dealers looking at expensive stamps, asking questions, and making a few modest purchases.By the time I was a high-school Freshman, my mechanical interests started overtaking my interest in stamp collecting. After building my first minibike in 1964, then starting a hot rod in 1965, I put my albums on a shelf and left them there. I had accumulated two albums of stamps (mostly unused, dating from the 1930s to the present), three albums of First Day Covers, and an album filled with miscellaneous covers. During my early adult years, I didn%u2019t think much about my stamp collection, but I wasn%u2019t yet ready to separate myself completely from my albums. Then, by my early 50s, I had sold all but the miscellaneous covers, which still retained some interest for me. In my 69th year, I decided to create this new album for those covers, and include in it some of my stamp-collecting memories. Because stamp collecting was less popular than when I was a young person, I wanted to create a record of what I%u2019d enjoyed as a child.This album contains many of the covers and postcards that I acquired as a boy, and have held onto for more than fifty years%u2014along with stories about how I acquired them. Plus, there are also covers that were acquired over the decades since.