Robey returned to his office to tell a co-worker about his find. He hurried off to another post office on Eleventh Street, six blocks away. Once outside, Robey was struck with the thought that other branches might have more of the strange stamps. “Needless to say,” Robey recalled twenty years later in Weekly Philatelic Gossip magazine, “I left that office in a hurry with my sheet of inverts tucked safely under my arm.” The clerk left the window and ran to a telephone. Robey called this to the clerk’s attention. Upon looking at the sheet, Robey later recalled, “my heart stood still.” On every stamp, the entire 100, the image of the Jenny had been engraved upside down! The clerk passed the stamps through the window. He bought a full sheet of the new stamps, 100 in all, paying for them with money just withdrawn from savings. On May 14, Robey went to the window of a downtown post office. Robey, an ardent collector who lived in the Capital. Word of the forthcoming stamp soon reached W. The experiment would test whether it was feasible to fly mail between Washington, Philadelphia, and New York on a scheduled basis, “one round trip daily except Sundays.” The Army Air Service provided pilots. The “new aeroplane mail service” was a ninety-day experiment scheduled to open on May 15. The center would feature a blue “mail aeroplane in flight”–a Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, to be exact. Though “intended primarily for the new aeroplane mail service,” the stamp would be valid for all postal uses. It stated that on May 13, 1918, the US would issue a new, twenty-four-cent postage stamp in Washington, D.C. The story begins on May 9, 1918, when the Post Office Department published a routine press release. Each costs thousands of dollars to acquire. Modern stamp collectors call it “The Twenty-Four-Cent Airmail Inverted Center of 1918.” It bears a most curious airplane image, which has helped make it one of the world’s best-known stamps.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |