In all fields there are mantras that people repeat over and over as what would propel them and their organization to the top. In business, the holy grail is exporting to China (you know 1.5 billion people all of whom will soon need your widget), in higher education it is the prospect of eas(ier) college loans, and in philately the idea is that we need to get more kids to collect. These HG’s (for holy grails) are not bad ideas in themselves. Certainly, any company that could find the magic way to export a product that 1.5 billion people need (and couldn’t be knocked off by them at a cheaper price) would do very well in our competitive world. And easy money does encourage people to take on debt for education, even if is often for education that will be useless for their job prospects or their ability to repay. And no one starts collecting stamps in a serious way for the first time at the age of sixty. Nearly all of us collected as kids and then either retained our hobby throughout our lives or came back to it in middle age.The issue then is not whether we should encourage kids to collect stamps (of course we should) but how should we go about encouraging them. First, we need to be aware of why we want to make our hobby stronger. Proselytizing for philately seems to have two main reasons, not mutually exclusive and existing in various degrees in most stamp missionaries. The first group is the more altruistic. They have seen the benefits that the hobby has given them. They enjoy the knowledge, the order, the peace and quiet, and the sense of achievement that stamp collecting can confer. And they are eager to encourage young people to enter into this discipline so that they can get many of those benefits too. The second group is more mercenary, and their calculation for encouraging others to collect is based on the question that if we don’t encourage new collectors, no one will buy our stamps when we want to sell them. Most collectors who seek converts have a mixture of these two motives.
Historically, encouraging the young to enter into our hobby has broken down into three main types of efforts. First is what could be called the Captain Tim school. Captain Tim has been the paradigm of public philatelic promotional aspirations since he was on the radio in the 1930s. Captain Tim was a radio show produced by H.E. Harris and Ivory Soap in the 1930s that was responsible for adding millions of collectors to our hobby. The times (the depression), the circumstances (a wonderful far seeing dealer, H.E. Harris), and the economic climate (mass unemployment meant dads and kids had unprecedented amounts of time together) have made this a one time circumstance. The mass media will never promote our hobby this way again, and it is waste of time and energy to think that it will.The second way large numbers of children have been encouraged into our hobby has been through the Postal Service’s forays into the schools. Many joint philately/education programs were tried in the 1970s and 1980s. I have never seen the internal Postal Service documents over the success of these efforts from the Postal Service’s point of view, but from the vantage point of mainstream philately, they were a failure. Traditional philately needs serious adult collectors who go back and acquire older stamps, and most of the graduates of these Postal Service programs seem to have no adult interest in collecting.
This brings us to the last and best way that young collectors are encouraged to enter our hobby— and that is through personal contact with a collector who spends time with them and who incorporates philately within a relationship. Over and over, older collectors tell me about how they collected with their dad or with an uncle. When they speak of those times you can see them reconnect through their stamps with the relationship that was once so important to them. Looks like we have got a win/win here— we can best promote our hobby by spending time doing what we enjoy with young people that we love.