Why am I collecting IGY philatelic items (interview question #2)?

So, continuing from the last post, I want to answer another question for my interviewer. But as they suggested I might want to do, I will alter the question. I am going to modify what my last post indicated would be question #3, and move that up above what had been suggested for question #2.

So I will change the original question #3,

I understand that this stamp is one of your favorites. What is your fascination with this stamp? How did it become one of your favorites?,

to the following:

How did you become interested in the IGY and the collecting of related philatelic items?

This will lead me to basically answer the original question anyway!

In several indirect and more direct ways, my life intersected the IGY. I was born in 1950, the month after the idea for the IGY was hatched over dinner at James Van Allen's house in Silver Spring, MD, and just a few miles away from the location of that soiree. My education was shaped by the emphasis on science education that followed the launching of Sputnik during the IGY. For example, I remember watching Time for Science on WTTG-tv in the Washington, D.C. market during elementary school. It was first broadcast during the IGY in 1958. My summer jobs during college were all in Earth science fields, at the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, the U.S. Weather Bureau, and at the University of Maryland working on electronics packages for rockets investigating the near-space environment. After my B.S. in engineering physics at Cornell University, my first real job was with Fairchild Space & Electronics Co., working on the communications satellites ATS 6.

I eventually received my graduate degrees in geophysics from the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona. Two luminaries of the IGY were in my department, Hugh Odishaw and Larry Gould, and Maury Davidson worked for Newmont Mining in Tucson where I had a summer job. In those days, the number of older geoscientists who had links to the IGY was probably not insignificant, although I was mostly unaware of the IGY in those days. After I got my Ph.D., I became the first tenured professor specializing in geophysics at Franklin & Marshall College.

In the early 2000s, being in my early 50s and having a mid-life crisis of sorts, I felt an urge to start collecting something. After some ruminating, I decided to start collecting items related to the IGY. This was an acknowledgment of how the IGY had impacted my childhood, my education, and, and my career in geophysics, but also anticipated the upcoming semi-centennial of the IGY in 2007-08. My collection now consists of hundreds of philatelic items (stamps, covers, etc.), technical and popular books and magazines, and miscellaneous memorabilia. My stamp collection was a more focused revival of a childhood hobby of general stamp collecting, partly relying on family in England, Belgium, the Soviet Union, and Israel, and my mother's work at a publishing firm. I did have a used U.S. IGY stamp (Scott 1107), issued on May 31, 1958, the day after my 8th birthday, in my childhood 1961 Minkus stamp album.

My childhood IGY stamp and Minkus album

Some covers from my collection with the IGY stamp that are in the Mellone catalogs

More on the design of the U.S. IGY stamp in the next post.