My grandfather, Earl P. L. Apfelbaum, was born in 1905 and died in 1985. He was born in Philadelphia, and though he traveled extensively, at the time of his death his home was only a few miles from where he was born. He collected stamps from his earliest childhood, and this was an interest he shared with his father, Maurice. Earl started his stamp business in 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, by opening his little shop in downtown Philadelphia.
Earl’s interest in philately was different from what most people do today. He was a complete generalist, as happy sorting through a batch of mixed Nicaragua as researching a transatlantic cover. One country or era was pretty much the same to him, and he was this way intellectually as well, being proud of belonging to a select group of people who had read the old Encyclopedia Britannica from Aardvark to Zygote (try doing that today with Wikipedia). He was politically progressive