Two newly acquired U.S. first day covers on earthquakes

I recently purchased two covers with themes of U.S. earthquakes, so I thought I'd highlight them today.

Yesterday there was a significant (magnitude 6.9) earthquake in Croatia, near the capital of Zagreb. I used to teach about earthquakes and seismology in my geophysics courses at Franklin &  Marshall College. I set up and was in charge of an earthquake seismograph, which in recent years has evolved into a station managed by the Lamont-Doherty Seismographic Network. In the early years of cooperation with Lamont, I started and maintained a blog about earthquakes and seismology, The Shaking Earth (still up, but inactive). 

Cover commemorating the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake

One cover I bought was prepared by the Anchorage Philatelic Society  after the Easter Sunday Alaska earthquake of March 27, 1964, which occurred less than two months before the Anchorage Stamp Show (APEX). The magnitude 9.2 Anchorage earthquake remains the most powerful earthquake recorded in North American history, and the second most powerful earthquake recorded in world history (after the 1960 Chilean temblor). The cover features the Red Cross Centenary issue stamp (Scott #1239), an Anchorage cancel, and the Apex cachet.

The second souvenir cover has a cachet of the Loma Prieta earthquake and a pictorial cancellation of the flag stamp (Scott #2280). The quake of Oct. 17, 1989, with an epicenter near Santa Cruz, California, ironically occurred immediately before a scheduled World Series game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's. The magnitude of 6.9 was about 1000 times less energetic than the Alaskan earthquake, but caused significant damage ($5 billion worth) in the major metropolitan Bay Area. It was the second costliest earthquake in U.S. history, behind only the 1994 San Fernando earthquake ($30 billion of damage) in the Los Angeles area.

Cover commemorating the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake

It turns out that no U.S. postage stamps have commemorated earthquakes. Other countries have done so, including the issuance of so-called semipostals, where a surcharge was added to the sales price of the stamp to raise money for relief efforts. There was a short article on Seismological stamp collecting, by Carl A. Von Hake, Earthquakes and Volcanoes, 4(5), 1972, p. 14-19. It lists postage stamps issued by various countries for the following earthquakes: Jamaica (1907), Nicaragua (1931), Argentina (1944), Greece (1953), Yugoslavia (1963). Additional earthquakes commemorated by stamps listed in Seismic Philately (2007) by David J. Leeds are Mexico (400th anniversary of 1542 event), Jamaica (300th anniversary of 1692 event), New Zealand (75th anniversary of 1931 quake), Nepal (1934), Iceland (1947), Algeria (1954), Lebanon (1956), Chile (1960, 1985), Morocco (1960), Iran (1962), Indonesia (1963), South Africa (1969), and Guatemala (1976).

For more information on these and other earthquakes, the U.S. Geological Survey hosts a number of informative web pages.

Recall that number 12 on the list of the 14 special areas of IGY inquiry was seismology, which includes the study of earthquakes. More on seismology and the IGY in posts to come.

Happy Holidays

My collection includes a Season's Greetings card from Antarctica, from the days of the IGY. At least when "wintering over" in Antarctica (according to the Northern hemisphere winter season, that is, which just began two days ago), it is summertime in Antarctica. The typical average daily temperature in Antarctica during the December season is just about freezing (32°F), although this past February, Antarctica recorded its highest ever temperature of 65°F. Coughs, global warming.

Front and back of the greeting card

In case you can not decode the seal, there is a map of Antarctica, a Seabee exhaling and carrying some tools, a penguin, a naval insignia, and the texts "U.S. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (Special),"  "Deep Freeze II," "IGY 1957-58," and "Detachment Bravo."  Deep Freeze II was actually in 1956-57 (see my earlier blog post). United States Naval Construction Battalions are better known as the Navy Seabees; the term Seabee is a riff on the first letters "C B" from the words Construction Battalion.  According to the Seabee Combat Handbook, volume 1, chapter 1, "one large group of Seabees, called Naval Construction Battalions, Special, functioned as stevedores, loading and off-loading cargo ships." Such battalions were critical in setting up the Antarctic IGY stations.

Inside left and right of the greeting card

Stationary letterhead

And finally, a  personal message for my readers (reader?):

My holiday greeting to you (scribbling is digitally added to the original)

IGY-themed Hanukkah gifts

Hanukkah has already ended. It's is always nice to have my holiday season mostly over before the Xmas brouhaha.

I was quite pleased that my wife picked up on my blog hint and bought a print of the 1956 IGY cartoon from Punch (Nov. 17 post). It looks the same as the copy I finally bought in the magazine, but at 12" x 18" it is suitable for framing (it's really rectangular, my photo just has a perspective crookedness), so it will go up on the walls of my study:

1956 cartoon from Punch, imagining British, American, and Russian Antarctic IGY bases

Then, I could not resist buying for myself a CCCP Sputnik watch. A nice eBay purchase. Although the Soviet Union has an interesting history of watchmaking, this is a recent watch from a Hong-Kong based company, CCCP.

Front of watch. CCCP is a transliteration of Cyrillic USSR, equivalent to Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in English, and 1957 was the launch year for Sputnik

I like the red translucent back of the watch, showing the movement. "Спутник 1" is just Russian for Sputnik 1, the first of three Sputniks launched during the IGY. 

The launching of Sputnik, Earth's first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, was a hallmark event of the IGY. Both the Soviet Union and the U.S. had planned satellite launches for the IGY. The Soviet Union just "beat us to it," and shocked Americans by this manifestation of its technical prowess during the Cold War and the intercontinental ballistic missile arms race.

I also got two bottle of whiskey from countries that participated in the IGY (ha ha, that's a pretty tenuous connection):

German peated malt Eifel Whiskey and Indian Amrut fusion single malt whisky

They go well with latkes!

Finally (coughs), although I may have said I was done with the NY Times crossword references ... 

The Dec. 16 puzzle had the clue, "Part of a philatelist's collection." The answer, of course: "Stamp."

And for the geophysicists, the Dec. 17 minipuzzle contained the clue, "Crust, mantle, or core," answered with [Earth] "layer."

The crossword connections to my blog are downright eerie!

The Creation of Kabaddi, postal rates, and geophysics

A few odds (oddball you say?) and ends today. Yesterday I was browsing the Hotstar app that I used to watch the Indian Premier League cricket season. I learned there was a new professional sport in the Indian subcontinent called kabaddi. It is kind of a combination of tag, dodgeball, and rugby. The YouTube channel People Make Games has an informative and entertaining introduction to this game. Since touching opposing players gets you points, the "divine" significance of the touch is portrayed in the video thusly:

A frame capture from It's Time You Knew About Kabaddi: The Ancient Game That's Gone Pro

Ha ha, it's a riff on The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel (see my last post if you missed that), with Quintin Smith replacing Adam. It's almost the image on the U.S. IGY stamp!

If you want to learn more about the game, you can watch the entire YouTube video:

Anyway, I received my first comment for my blog after the previous post. Thanks, Anonymous! One part of the comment was: "Would be interesting to see a graph of how postage rates have changed over time; does it scale with inflation?" Wikipedia provides a great graph, in which the dark purple is the actual issued price of the stamp and the light purple is the price adjusted for inflation and shown in 2019 U.S. cents:

Actual and inflation-adjusted first-class postage rates in the U.S. (Wikipedia)

You can see that increases in stamp prices themselves have an effect. When the first class postal rate went up from 3¢ to 4¢ in 1958 during the IGY, that was a 25% increase in the inflation-adjusted value. But you can also see the effective decrease in postage costs during periods of inflation in the 1920s and post-WWII.

Speaking of postal rates, some are proposed to increase in the U.S. in 2021:

Product                                   Current Prices    Planned Prices

Letters additional ounce(s)            15¢                     20¢

Letters (metered 1 oz.)                   50¢                     51¢

Domestic Postcards                        35¢                    36¢

Letters (1 oz.)                                55¢             55¢ (no change)

Flats (1 oz.)                                     $1                $1 (no change)

That announcement goes on to say: "The Postal Service has some of the lowest letter-mail postage rates in the industrialized world." That's true, as this graphic from an article by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones magazine shows:

Postal rates in some western countries (Mother Jones)

And Drum explains what we saw in the Wikipedia graph above: "federal law allows the price of first class stamps to rise only at the rate of inflation." He argues that, in these times of competition, that's not sustainable.

I was going to retire the NY Times crossword puzzle thing, but sorry ... today clue for 42A  of "Prefix to political or physics" was answered by "geo", i.e. GEOPHYSICS! 

NY Times crossword for Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2020

Design of the U.S. IGY stamp - Michelangelo and the sun

I've already posted about the release of the U.S. IGY stamp. Today I want to talk a little more about its design, in particular the imagery.

Again, here is the stamp:

U.S. IGY stamp, Scott #1107, 1958, 1.5" x 1"

There are two main elements in the graphical subject, the outreached hands, and the solar surface.

The nearly touching hands are excerpted from The Creation of Adam, a fresco painted ca. 1510 by Michelangelo as part of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in The Vatican. It illustrates the Biblical creation narrative from the Book of Genesis in which God gives life to Adam.

The postcard from my collection shown below contains an image of The Creation of Adam. The IGY stamp on the card has the cancellation date and place for the FDOI of the stamp, but does not bear the First Day of Issue slogan. The back of the card is stamped with "First Day Cancellation."

Postcard FDOI front, with Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, 5 3/4" x 4 1/8"

Postcard FDOI back, 5 3/4" x 4 1/8"

Just a tad has been written about The Creation of Adam fresco. Paul Barolsky comments that

God gave form to Adam out of the earth; next we read that he breathed into Adam the breath of life. The temporal implication of this textual sequence is clearly that first God shaped Adam's body and then filled it with spirit. [The genius of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam and the blindness of art history; Notes in the History of Art, 33(1), Fall 2013, pp. 21-24.]

As for the image of the solar surface in the stamp, recall that in my Nov. 21 post, of the fourteen scientific goals for the IGY, #6 was the study of solar activity. The Postal Bulletin dated April 24, 1958, volume 79, issue 20080, states that

The design of the stamp is based on a photograph of the sun and depicts an area of intense solar activity such as occurs periodically and is among the phenomena being studied during the 18-month long period of the International Geophysical Year.

Ervine Metzl [more on him another time], the designer of the stamp, explained that 'In the small confines of a postage stamp we have endeavored to picture a man's wonder at the unknown together with his determination to understand it and his need for spiritual inspiration to further his knowledge [gender usage as in the original].'

The small poster below comes from an album produced by the Postal Commemorative Society, The Complete Collection of U.S. Stamps Honoring America's Space Achievements, by Drew Windler. The image reminds us of the significance of solar surface activity to the IGY by using the IGY stamp to commemorate the launching of the first solar probe, Pioneer V, on March 11, 1960. This was just two years after the IGY, during which the first artificial satellites were launched. Pioneer V was the first space probe to study the sun from solar orbit. The album containing this and other space philately posters came out years later, with the 29¢ flag stamp canceled on March 11, 1992, thirty-two years after the launch of Pioneer V. First class postage had gone up almost ten-fold since 1958.

Solar probe poster, 13" x 10"

In my last blog, I showed a couple of stamps displaying the Auroras Borealis and Australis. Today's NY Times minipuzzle included "aurora" as an answer. Maybe editor Joel Fagliano read my blog?

NY Times minipuzzle for Dec. 12, 2020, with "aurora" as an answer

Polar opposites - double FDOI IGY covers

I was going to post next on the design of the U.S. IGY stamp, but I decided to delay that to again take my prompt from today's New York Times crossword. The revealer at the center of the puzzle was "polar opposite", as clued by "One totally unlike another ... or what each answer on the edge of this puzzle has".

This reminded me of three first day covers I have that involve polar opposites, if you'll give me some liberty with that term. 

The first cover comprises two first day cancellations of the IGY stamps from two countries, the U.S. and Canada. The stamps and their cancellations are in "polar opposite" catty-corner positions of the cover. Both countries do have geographic areas north of the Arctic Circle. So, polar opposites? I'll return to the Canada stamp at some point. Its issue date of March 5, 1958, predates the U.S. stamp by almost three months. I like the bilingual FDOI slogan.  If you look at the back of the envelope, Canada is right-side up.

Two FDOI cancellations on the same cover, for U.S. and Canada IGY Stamps

The second cover has two U.S. stamps, the IGY stamp from 1958 (with a cachet) and the Antarctic Treaty stamp from 1961. The Antarctic Treaty partly grew out of cooperation that occurred on that continent during the IGY, another topic for the future. Two main areas of scientific interest during the IGY were solar physics and polar science. Hot and cold, up above and down under - polar opposites?

Two FDOI cancellations of the U.S. IGY and Antarctic treaty stamps

The third cover again contains the 1958 U.S. IGY stamp, but also two stamps issued during  the 2007-08  Fourth International Polar Year, 50 years after the IGY. The IGY itself was also the Third International Polar Year. Not only do the stamps from the two eras show the solar and ionospheric environments, respectively, but the two IPY auroral stamps are for both the Northern (boreal) and Southern (austral) lights, polar opposites you might (?) say. The cancellations are much clearer than for some of my covers. The logos for the IGY and IPY are the de facto cachets on this cover.

A cover showing FDOI cancellations for the U.S. 1958 IGY stamp and two 2007 84¢ IPY stamps

Back of cover, showing remainder of souvenir sheet for the IPY stamps

The excellent book, Topical Adventures: A Guide to Topical and Thematic Stamp Collecting (Jack R. Congrove, Dawn R. Hammer, and Martin Kent Miller, eds.; American Topical Association, Handbook #168, 2020, 190 p.), says on p. 72:

Covers, mostly philatelically contrived but sometimes not, used on a stamp's first day of issue are highly collectible, especially when accompanied by a colorful cachet.

From a philatelic standpoint, you could say these covers with double FDOI cancellations are indeed contrived, or at least my interpretations of them are, but I like them!

First Day of Issue of the U.S. IGY stamp, May 31, 1958

According to the American First Day Cover Society,

Although most U.S. stamps are released nationwide on the first day, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) will designate a single city as the "official" first day city. (Sometimes multiple cities are designated as “official.”) The location is usually appropriate to the subject of the stamp, and will be the only place where the “First Day of Issue” postmark is used. A specific day is selected for release of the new stamp, one which may be significant to the subject. Generally a First Day Of Issue (FDOI) ceremony is sponsored by the Postal Service or an organization associated with the new stamp.

The U.S. IGY stamp was issued on May 31, 1958, during Compex 1958. The Combined Philatelic Exhibition of Chicagoland (Compex), is organized by six  stamp clubs in the Chicago area. I haven't figured out any particular reason for the location or timing of this. The date was one year into the 18-month IGY. The Compex web site is currently down. Linn's Stamp News posted an announcement for this year's 63rd show. That would have made the 1958 show COMPEX's first one, so nabbing the ceremony was a bit of a coup. 

Below are scans of my copy of the FDOI Ceremony program for the U.S. IGY stamp. The front page of the program includes the basic information about Compex, an image of the stamp, and a copy of the stamp itself with the first day cancellation, including the pictorial cancellation showing the IGY logo.

Front cover, with first day of issue cancellation

The inside shows the program. Dignitaries present include Arthur Summerfield, Postmaster General from 1953-1961, tied for second in longevity of Postmasters General. Another participant was Franklin Bruns, a noted stamp collector who at that time was the first director of philately for the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee. I would like to know who the scientists representing the U.S. IGY program were, but no luck on that yet.

Inside pages - program

Back cover

I also have first day covers with cachets representing the Compex expo, and also for the venue, the historic LaSalle Hotel.

FDC with cachet for Compex, 1958

FDC with cachet for the LaSalle Hotel venue for Compex, 1958

Deltiology, picture postcard collecting, is a field unto itself. I have two picture postcards with Chicago imagery, that include first day cancellations of the IGY stamp. I guess the government made money on these, since the postcard rate was only 2¢. Well, neither were the cards sent, so more savings there.

FDOI cancellation of postcard illustrating an aerial view of Chicago

Back of card

Front of postcard with views of Chicago and Midway Airport

FDOI cancellation on back of card