News
January 7, 2023
At the the 78th Annual Stamp Exhibition of Southern California (SESCAL 2022) held in October 2022 in Glendale, CA. I submitted the following peer reviewed publication in the Literature Exhibit competition.
https://sescal.org/literature-exhibit/
The SESCAL Judging Committee gave me the Novice award as a first-time competitor, and I earned a 90 out of 100 score which qualified my publication for a Large Gold award, one of only 6 out of 42 literature exhibits submitted for scoring to earn that second highest award mark (2 of those 6 also won the highest Grand Awards). I am honored to be in the same Large Gold category with accomplished, renowned philatelic authors such as Roger Brody and Patricia Kaufmann.
A downloadable copy of the Final Exhibit Award Results by scoring rank sits in the publication section of this website.
A downloadable copy of the winning publication sits in the publication section of this website.
In the July 2020 issue of the American Philatelist, my name and commentary appeared several times on a lengthy article about a highly debated Parcel Post cover from 1913 ; is it genuine or fake?
Here are my quotes from that article, which concerned whether a parcel cover from 1913 with a 5 Parcel Post stamp and a one cent Parcel Post Due stamp were affixed. if genuine, the cover would established new "earliest documented use" for both the Q5 and the JQ1.
page 638:
"It was a unique opportunity to chime in on an important topic and I felt that non-technical considerations such as human nature and common sense needed to be included. None of us were standing at the Boston Post Office as a witness on 1-1-1913, so everyone's opinion should be worth something if they take the time to review all the facts. "
About me:
"I own stamps from many countries but I have focused my attention on United States and Canadian stamps in the last several years. I will likely move next to Italian stamps and stamps of Spanish speaking countries, as I am capable in both of those languages and have family heritage ties to Italy and Peru. I started collecting stamps around the age of 8 up until my high school years, dabbled very infrequently as College, Graduate school and career took over, and then rejoined in the hobby about 10 years ago. I consider myself as much a stamp detective as a stamp collector. "
page 638:
"If someone wanted to fake this cover, I guess that they would have used a well centered JQ1 with no straight edge and tied it on with full mark that extends onto the envelope to make it more believable. That is human nature. "
page 639:
Regarding postal services and their bearing on the cover:
"The mail packages are prepared, accepted for mailing, delivered and received by people, not robots. People make mistakes and or are not 100% aware of all the rules. I therefore think it unreasonable that anyone should expect that ALL 13 of Expert #3's points must be met to perfection in order for the cover to be genuine. Especially around or on a holiday (Jan 1st), ..."
In my opinion, the cover is genuine.