Stamp collectors share pastime with students

Stamp collectors are as varied as the small, colorful pieces of paper they collect.

“Collecting stamps is the hobby of kings and kids,” said Jesse Malone as he stood before a group of students at Whitefish Middle School last week.

Members of the Glacier Stamp Club brought their passion of philately, or the studying of stamps, to fifth-graders at the school. They showed triangle-shaped stamps, stamps featuring royalty and stamps bearing all the U.S. state birds.

Club members range in age from teens to octogenarians.

“As collectors we find fun in every stamp,” Gail Long said. “ As you look at the stamps that come across your desk, you see a favorite flower or a favorite color.”

A display on stamps and collecting was set up in the middle school library for several weeks prior to the club’s presentation. The talk last week fit in well with classroom lessons as fifth-graders were learning to write letters and address envelopes.

Mailing letters is exactly how Dick Reedquist gets the stamps he collects canceled by the U.S. Postal Service. He writes letters to family and friends and places one of his stamps on the envelope. Then he asks the recipient to return the stamp to him when they write back. He still has the first stamps he received as a young boy, featuring a kangaroo and a kola bear.

“As a 7-year-old, it opened my eyes to the world,” he said of stamp collecting.

The club hopes to entice children into considering the hobby. Fifth-graders got a good start by selecting stamps from piles that the club brought for them to keep.

Stamp collecting isn’t suffering from the invention of email, Malone said, it’s self-adhesive stamps that are more detrimental to the hobby.

“The self-adhesive stamps, you can’t get off the envelope,” he said. “They’re a lot more difficult to collect because you have to cut the envelope. That’s actually caused some people to stop collecting.”

The Glacier Stamp Club meets the first Monday of the month, February through November, at 6:30 p.m. at the Flathead County ImagineIF library in Kalispell.