Apfelbaum’s Corner – Volume 81

The other night my wife and I attended the wedding of my secretary. She married a fine, brilliant young physicist whose future seems destined to be highly successful. The wedding party was in the main made up of young, attractive, well educated people striving for important places in America’s expanding future.

In contrast, there were a few of the “older generation”— those whose ultimate future has arrived and who are living now at the pinnacle of their achievement. For the most part, they grew up during a time when education wasn’t the all and everything of youth. School ended for those born early in this century when economic pressure on the family overbalanced the scale of wonderment and curiosity that leads to higher education. College degrees were for the one in twenty-five who were touched by providential guidance. America today is the land of the young. The young number among them a greater percentage of well-educated, thinking sophisticates than any generation in history. Stamp collecting in its most advanced forms is a pursuit extremely enjoyable to this great class of learned people. Considering the number of them in our new society, can you doubt that we are at the threshold of philately’s greatest expansion; that fine and scarce stamps have today only a fraction of the worth they will have before the end of this century and that the cultural qualities of stamp collecting will be a part of many more in the future than it has been in the past?