Stamps... a quiet hobby? Think again

Well Done Don!

Because Don Jones does not and never has done anything halfway, he planned a trip to Alaska that included riding up the Dalton Highway of "Ice Road Truckers" fame with a geologist behind the wheel, and a visit to Point Barrow, the northernmost spot in the United States, and along the way, he licked some Alaska-themed stamps he had brought with him and mailed some postcards home, which drew some attention and led to his meeting an American Airlines pilot and a salesman from Texas, who soon became stamp collectors.

"Things like that happen," Jones said. "It's just where philately can lead you."

Because Don Jones does not and never has done anything halfway, a trip to Australia turned into a two-month journey to 16 countries on five continents, where he and his wife saw many famous places such as the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat and the Great Pyramids that are featured as philatelic subjects, which means on postage stamps.

"It's a fascinating hobby," Jones said. "You take almost any country, that country's history is in its stamps."
Because Don Jones does not and never has done anything halfway, an interest in early air mail pilots led him to map the country's first transcontinental air mail route beacon by beacon, which meant a mark every 25 to 50 miles, and then to drive that route to places like Rawlins, Wyo., where the guys at the airport didn't know anything about the subject but sent him to a local restaurant where a couple of old-timers usually came in for coffee but since on this day they didn't show up a couple of other fellows offered to drive Jones and his wife up into the hills to find them, which offer Jones declined, but while he was at the local historical society doing research, the two fellows showed up with their wives and a picnic lunch and said come on, come on, so this time Jones and his wife went with them and they found the old-timers powering their cabin with one of the original generators that powered a transcontinental air mail beacon in the 1920s.

"The hobby has led us to a lot of different places," Jones said.

Because Don Jones does not and never has done anything halfway, his love of investigation led him to start putting together what stamp collectors call "exhibits" for competition, which are in-depth research papers, nicely illustrated with the proper stamps, envelopes, cancellations, postmarks or other philatelic matter, that tell stories about subjects that somehow involve or are pictured on stamps, for which he earned five Grand Prizes at national stamp shows, which led to his writing a book in 1993 about the earliest air mail service, which led to his becoming an international philatelic judge, which led him to Norway, which led to his meeting the grand-niece of the first civilian air mail pilot in America, which led to his second book, about that pilot, Max Miller, in 2004.

And because Don Jones does not and never has done anything halfway, this fall the Portsmouth man was honored with the Luff Award for Distinguished Philatelic Research from the American Philatelic Society, which Jones has heard described as "the Nobel Prize of philately."

"It's the best you can get," he said. "It was for research, which is something I really hadn't expected."
Don Jones essentially stopped collecting stamps in the 1980s to focus on his research, but because he does not and never has done anything halfway, he still dallies with small themed collections on scuba diving and the Lithuanian province of Memel, and after a meeting of the local stamp club, when a bunch of the guys were talking about how it is possible to illustrate virtually any topic philatelically, and one of them said it couldn't be done on outhouses, well, Jones took that as a challenge.

I think you know what happened next.

Source: http://hamptonroads.com/2010/10/stamps-quiet-hobby-think-again