As a nine-year-old boy woke up to the news of a space ship circling our world in 1957 and hearing the tiny bleeps on a newscast, I was amazed at the world we lived in.  We waited in our back yard to see a faint blinking light overhead in a star-studded moment in time, but saw nothing except our breath.  To our amazement the space age came to us in 1957 as our nation wondered if the Russian’s were about to come over the North Pole to us.

As time progressed and the over whelming threat of uncertain times loomed over us, I found my second love of space stamps and other related topics of science and the world. Each stamp meant a bit of history, a slice of time, and most of all something I had that others didn’t have, stamps from Russia, and some of the communist block countries that also gave us bits of their history to us.

Czechoslovakia stamps commemorating space exploration

As I got older and found that there were others like myself in the world that recognized this bit of our lives flying over our heads were important to us back then. I researched each stamp, tried in my feeble way to understand the Russian language and how they all touched our lives. From space spectaculars of the first animals in space to the first flight of Yuri Gagarin and the race that pursued his monumental flight, to each space first to each feeble steps that the United States tried and failed at.  Time and time again I am reminded with how each flight made the head lines and made us all think that the heavens were a busy place and we humans had a place there.  As I got older and my interests in space stamps grew to other countries and added expense of pages for my stamp books, I left them in protective mounts and stock books so that I could touch history and know I was part of that slice of time. Knowing one day I would have a book to put them in, I kept each stamp as I found it, maybe a small wrinkle, or blemish, but each one was my way of knowing my history.

Various Russian space stamps

Each space achievement meant more stamps to mark their trip into the heavens and most of all each was etched in our minds as we raced to the moon and beyond with attempts to understand the heavens.  I collected as history unfolded before me, I couldn’t have enough of what people call the space race and how democracy had to out distance communism and the fear in our minds we were in second place.  I collected with an open mind of what history was all about; I collected with a mind open to the heavens and beyond.  Each time I take out my small collection of history, my mind looks back to simpler times, where the heavens were open to us and it was God’s scrapbook just waiting for us to make our mark and make new friends.

Various Hungarian space stamps