Remembering my Mom on her birthday, and the start of my IGY collection

 Today I'm thinking of my mother, Johanne (de Haas) Sternberg, born in 1916. The picture below shows me and her, taken for my kindergarten graduation, May, 1956, a year before the start of the IGY. My pants were pink!

Mom's life was affected dramatically by World War II. First, her family was forced to leave the Netherlands to live in England during the war. There she met my father, an American GI, who convinced her to move to the U.S. to marry him after the war. Some time in the late 1950s, I started collecting stamps, relying in part on mail from relatives in Holland, England, Belgium, the USSR (where Dad was from, in what is now Moldova), and Israel.

This was my first (or at least an early) album, Minkus dated 1961, which I still have:

And included in that album is the 1957 U.S. commemorative stamp for the IGY:

Much, much more on this stamp to come in future entries!

But for now, happy birthday, and thanks, Mom!