Stamps

I harvested three stamps today one dollar stamp, 90 center and another for 26 cents, off two different envelopes which happened to cross my desk this week. That’s over $2 in postage and that could be helpful in this day of 41 cent stamps. It’s not that I am cheap, but I am cheap, it’s the whole idea that a government so charged with raising the price on stamps every time one turns round lets this treasure slip by unmarked. I wonder how many other folk watch the mails and are ready to pounce when they see a piece of mail come in with out being stamped, then cut the stamps and soak the stamps long enough to remove the stamp from the envelope.

I think I first started postage salvaging behavior in my adolescence when I noticed the rates in postage climb from five cents a stamp to six cents in 1968. I remember that and I remember thinking that was criminal the Fed could charge so much for postage. This was the time when I first got my first subscription to a magazine, a real magazine not some Scholastic publication. I think magazine was Time. The point was this was also the first time my name was added to mailing lists and I started getting junk mail which I hated until I started realizing that many of the come on they included self addressed envelopes with postage printed right on the envelope with a message telling the postmaster that postage would be covered if this piece was mailed anywhere in the continental Unites States or there was a self addressed envelope with a real stamp on it. I was disabled by this point in my life and had met some folks who did not live close by so I was beginning to write letters mote and more and 6 cents was 6 cents to a teenager with out a job postage added up and I wondered what would happen if a person just scratched out the address on these return addressed enveloped and wrote the address I wanted the letter to delivered to? Guess what? The postman delivered the letter and I was never summoned by the Post Master General. I used this method of getting postage a couple of time but was way too time consuming and to someone with limited hand function this activity too way too much energy for six cents. I mean really, you could still purchase a lot of postage power for a buck at those rates. Fast forward 40 years and times have changed 41 cents for a letter? This is exhortation! What used to be a bunch of stamps for a dollar is down to just three and some change. A stamp which has not been cancelled should be fair game.