Home
In late 1959, as a 16 year old junior in high school, I had already been collecting Vatican City stamps for five years. I was introduced to these beautiful stamps by a missionary brother who was a stamp dealer for St Michael’s Seminary in Conesus, New York. Collecting Vatican stamps during the 1950's was not a huge undertaking. There were less than 300 stamps issued, and the prices were ‘cheap’, especially the new issues. In fact, anyone with a commitment to Vatican Philately actually had the Scott catalog numbers of all the issues tattooed in memory. The Vatican issued a set of stamps commemorating the Second Anniversary of Vatican City’s New Broadcasting Center (Scott 262-263). Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, was an avid stamp collector. In 1959, I had a brilliant idea of mailing the Cardinal a set of the broadcasting stamps and asked him to sign them for me. To my amazement, about two weeks later, I received a letter from the chancery in New York. And behold.... the Cardinal signed both stamps. Today, I consider this one of my most prized Vatican City possessions. With the advent of the internet, I was eventually able to verify the signature on the stamps to be Francis Cardinal Spellman's. Cardinal Spellman was born May 4, 1889 in Whitman, Massachusetts. Cardinal Spellman founded the Spellman Museum of Stamp and Postal History located on the Regis College Campus in Weston, Massachusetts among his philatelic accomplishments. The museum contains over two million items, ranging from postage stamps, to postal history, to artifacts of communication through the mails. The collections in the museum are the personal collection of Cardinal Spellman, collections from the Philadelphia National Philatelic Museum, and collections and portions of collections donated or loaned by other collectors such as President Dwight Eisenhower, Musician Jascha Heifetz, and General Matthew Ridgway. References: • Religion.Wikia, A Short Biography of Cardinal Spellman Article Link: . James C. Hamilton, "A Visit to the Spellman Philatelic Museum” : Vatican Notes, Vol. 65, No. 371, p. 30-34 (2017) |
