Verona

MONDAY JANUARY 27, 2014, 2:37 PM
BY DAN ROSENBLUM
STAFF WRITER
VERONA-CEDAR TIMES
“This is modern postal history, folks,” Robert Parkin said as he displayed a table decorated with vintage stamps.

Robert Parkin of Glen Ridge, standing, president of the West Essex Philatelic Society, auctions off stamps and albums during a meeting at the Verona Public Library Monday, Jan. 13.
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Robert Parkin of Glen Ridge, standing, president of the West Essex Philatelic Society, auctions off stamps and albums during a meeting at the Verona Public Library Monday, Jan. 13.
Parkin spoke to about 15 interested stamp collectors in the basement of the Verona Public Library. There, the West Essex Philatelic Society was holding its monthly stamp auction. Over coffee and donuts, Parkin called out 30 lots of albums and auctioned off members’ collection of postage seals from all over the world, American tax stamps – “one person’s lifetime collection of U.S. Revenues” – and old, thick albums.

If you go
The West Essex Philatelic Society meets at the Verona Public Library the second and fourth Monday of every month from 7 to 9 p.m. Visit www.wepsonline.org or call 973-890-1888 for more information.

For more than 80 years, the club has cultivated a love of postal stamps and accessories and still carries a passion for the glory days of the world’s postal services.

Members pay a $15 annual fee to join and use the library of reference books, price guides and publications – some dating back to 1930, when the club formed.

The group also hosts lectures with ones planned about using eBay, early stamp production and an upcoming one about the hobby’s roots in Lower Manhattan. That event will be hosted by Steven Rod, an award-winning columnist and philatelic expert.

The group’s 30 members – a mostly local base, but some as far away as the United Arab Emirates – receive a newsletter, such as a recent one that was mailed with a Forever stamp from “A Bug’s Life.”

The auctions are open to anyone, but only members can sell, said Ron Gollhardt, a former club president.

The Cedar Grove contingent isn’t alone. There are 23 stamp clubs in New Jersey, according to a website for Linn’s Stamp News, which bills itself as the world’s largest stamp collecting newspaper.

Because of the sheer volume of stamps and combinations, decades after they were issued and often mailed, the postage seals are still passports to colorful tropics or dead nations.

“Stamps were our Internet,” said Lou Caprario, a former treasurer.

He said that’s how he learned of far off places like Tannu Tuva, a short-lived state between Mongolia and the Soviet Union that is now folded into the Russian Federation.

“I looked it up on a map, found out where it was exactly,” he said. “And there were intriguing pictures on those stamps about their society, what it was.”

Today, his specialty is Christmas seals, which were originally put out by Tuberculosis Society to raise money to treat the disease.

George Zeevalk, a 93-year-old from West Orange said he had some stamps when he was 10-years-old, but didn’t get back into the hobby until a cousin passed along a collection 40 years later. A member of the club for two decades, he also has a specialty.

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