John Mars was already an older man when I began working on stamps. He, as his father before him, had been a lifelong collector and loved his stamps. He collected France, just France, and collected the way the French do, by the Yvert and Tellier catalog. He collected classics in multiples and Twentieth century with all the trimmings, which means imperfs, millisiemes, precancels and much, much more. John was a professor of French at a major university and as he got older, stamps became a more and more important part of his life.
John’s wife suffered from bi polar disorder, which in those days was called manic-depression and she was of the depressive type. She suffered terribly and would go days without being able to get out of bed. Religion became her one consolation and, once for Lent, she gave up speaking. John was a good husband, but getting little besides his care taking needs satisfied in his marriage, he increasingly turned to philately. He would buy quantities of Nineteenth Century used France, sold for only a few dollars a thousand, and create town cancel collections. He would scour stamp show dealer cover boxes for covers with France as their destination, which he then collected by area. Hardly any area of the stamps of France went unattended by him. And when he wasn’t collecting he was caring for his wife. He never complained even though I spoke to him several times a week for nearly twenty years. One day he called to tell me his wife had just passed away. At the funeral he looked worse than I had ever seen him look before and within a few weeks John too was gone.