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My memorabilia from magic moments
(by Ed Flynn - July 30, 2008)
Sometimes it seems that much of my life has been spent preserving things for posterity that posterity finds of little or no interest… memorabilia of magic moments long past; the flotsam and jetsam left behind in the murky backwaters of memory.
Now I’m not talking about sentimental, mushy things like a flower crushed between the pages of a book. I’m talking about practical things, like my stamp collection for example.
I started collecting stamps back when I was a teenager, back when Franklin Roosevelt was in his first of many terms as president. FDR was an avid stamp collector himself and when he appointed his good friend Jim Farley Postmaster General, Farley returned the favor by issuing a bunch of stamps for
Roosevelt ’s collection. One of the most colorful was the original National Parks series, which consisted of 10 stamps ranging in value from 1 cent to 10. I bought the entire set at the
Bergenfield post office for 55 cents. I still have it in case anybody wants to see it. It isn’t really worth all that much today, probably about $30, but I guess that’s a pretty good return on my investment.
An interesting sidelight to those stamps is that Farley got carried away with himself and printed some stamps without perforations and without glue intended to be rare and only for the president’s own collection. However, when Congress got wind of it they were outraged and demanded that the post office print a lot more of them. They’re known today as “The Farley’s” and I’ve got most of them, too. They’re not worth all that much either.
OK, so you’re not interested in my stamp collection. Nobody in my family seems to be either, not even my grandchildren. So how about some souvenirs from World War II? I’ve got my campaign ribbons and the medals that go with them and some odds and ends like my “dog tags” and my “Ruptured duck.” Unless you’re a World War II veteran yourself you probably never heard of the “Ruptured duck.” I have no idea why it was called that. It is a tiny pin in the shape of an American eagle which veterans could wear in the lapel of their new civilian suit coat to show that they had done their duty.
Nobody seems very interested in looking at any of that stuff either and on the few occasions one of my grandchildren has asked about the war I’m aghast at how little they know about it even though they’ve all got college degrees. I’d be willing to bet they don’t even know which side was on and they probably think
Guadalcanal was really a canal on some island called Guadal.
I even have a copy of the 1941 yearbook from
Dumont
High School . There’s a photo of me in it with a full head of hair and smiling with my own teeth. Underneath it says, “Ed is a right good scout, one we couldn’t do without.” I’m not sure what that meant but when I read some of the others I think they must have all come out of Chinese fortune cookies.
Let’s see now, what else have I got around here in my home office? There are a lot of things hanging on the walls; some plaques for awards I received down through the years, none very prestigious, no Pulitzers or anything like that. And there’s the medal I won in an essay contest sponsored by the New York Times when I was in Junior High School. I’m still kind of proud of that one. There’s also a map of the world on the wall with about 60 red tipped pins stuck in every country I’ve been to. Whenever I try to count them I lose count and come up with a different number. Besides, some of the countries don’t even exist anymore. There’s also a whole bunch of photo albums on one of my library shelves with pictures from all those countries. And, oh, yes, there’s a jug on a shelf filled with foreign coins. Some of them even have holes in the middle. I think they’re from . I’ve no idea what they’re worth or if anybody would even want to take the time to go through them.
And there’s a lot more. Like my collection of Kennedy half dollars and the Indian arrow heads from my wife’s grandparents farm in Wisconsin, and I’m sure I have a baseball signed by Bobby Feller in one of my desk draws and there are the scrapbooks with a program from the 1938 New York World’s Fair and a ticket stub from a Giant-Dodger game at Ebbets field and… but I don’t know why I’m going on like this. If you’re like the other people I offer to show my stuff to you’ve probably stopped reading this column long before now.
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