Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Two or three months ago I decided to start working a new web page based on the best airmail cover in my collection. It was carried over the treacherous Andes Mountains on the first official airmail flight between Buenos Aires and Santiago, Chile, in 1929. The pilot, flying an open-cockpit Potez 25 biplane, was Jean Mermoz, the intrepid airmail pilot who pioneered airmail routes between France and South America, and within South America, and was a colleague of the famous French aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. During his lifetime, he earned the "title" of the "French Lindbergh". This French stamp commemorates that flight:
The cover carried by Mermoz is a philatelic cover, which in this case made it valuable. The Argentinian dealer who sold it to me gave me a 10% discount, but he still asked for, and got, US $900 out of me, totally eclipsing any other philatelic purchase of my entire life and one not likely to be repeated. Where's that value come from? From Mermoz's signature:
My web page would also include not only a cover carried by Mermoz on the return flight to Buenos Aires, but earlier covers from "experimental" flights flown over the same route flown by a pilot who became famous for the world's first start-to-finish instrument flight and the first American attack on Japan in the Second World War. His name, if you haven't yet figured it out? Jimmy Doolittle.
The Mermoz cover would have anchored my new web page, if I had been able to find it! I looked high and low. I searched every binder in my collection where it might have been placed in a moment of distraction. (I have many. of those moments;old age and PTSD do that to you. I cleaned my desk, not something I often do, thinking it might be in this or that pile of envelopes, stock pages, glassines, clippings (paper, not toenail), and magazines, but it wasn't. It wasn't anywhere. I had dark thoughts, not easily dismissed, that I had accidentally included the cover in an envelope of stamps and covers that I had given to another collector, who sold it at our club's auction (I no longer attend those meetings). Or — Horrors! — I had tossed the cover into the recycling bin during one of my distractions and it was now pulped and being turned into toilet paper. In any event, that cover was nowhere to be found.
How embarrassing! I just couldn't admit my apparent carelessness to you guys, and even had trouble telling my wife and son. After several weeks of repeatedly searching in the same places that the cover hadn't previously been found, I began to accept the inevitable: I had had a rare, wonderful cover. I still had scanned images of the cover. The cover itself was gone. I would have to live with the memories if not the artifact. It was lost! And then…
Then found! Whew!
Two or three days ago I was searching for an image on my computer and came across a scanned image of a page in an exhibit I had shown at VANPEX two or three years ago. That page included the cover, and featured a quote from St. Exupery's book, Wind, Sand and Stars, about an emergency landing that Mermoz once made on an Andean peak and his successful take-off from that peak. Aha! I thought. The cover is in the binder with those exhibit sheets! I hope! I hadn't thought to look there before, because I didn't recall that it had been in that exhibit. But I wasted no time pulling that binder off the bookshelf where I keep my exhibits, and lo, there it was. Bless...whatever deity looks after the interests of forgetful stamp collectors!
Now I have no excuse not to start on that web page…
Bob
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For items missing for a far shorter period do look under the scanner cover.
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Oh I did! Nine times! And behind the scanner, under it, beside it. I didn't check the lady's chamber, though. Hmmm…
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that's wonderful
next time I can't find something, i'm looking in Bob's exhibit binders. Might not find it, but i'll be wonderfully entertained and made much smarter.
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I thought you might be interested in the other covers which will be featured in the Mermoz web page I plan to do.
The first one is an example of a cover transported by Mermoz on the first official airmail flight between Santiago and Buenos Aires, on July 18, 1929, a month and six days after the completion of the first official airmail flight between Buenos Aires and Santiago.
I don't recall how much I paid for this cover, but I'm pretty sure it was no more than $30 or $40; the dealer was surprised when I told him what he had. I can find no similar copies on eBay. Also, I have no idea what caused the delay in the return flight, but aircraft in those days were notoriously difficult to keep in prime operating condition, and I would want my plane to be in prime operating condition if I were going to fly it over the Andes! This interesting photo shows Santiago, with the backdrop of the Andes, in the 1930s: I can't imagine what it would like to challenge those mountains in a tiny, single-engine biplane:
The Mermoz flights weren't the first to cross the Andes. In 1928, Jimmy Doolittle, employed by the Curtiss airplane company flew the "First Experimental Flight" from Santiago to Buenos Aires. This is a cover flown on that flight, sold to me by the same dealer who sold me the cover shown above:
Several Doolittle-flown covers are currently available on eBay, at prices ranging from around U.S. $200 to $450. I think I paid about the same amount for this cover as I did for the Santiago to Buenos Aires cover flown by Mermoz.
Bob
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Great cover Bob, hats off to you ! I know people who exhibit and when a dealer knows they have a piece that the person needs to finish his exhibit the price goes through the roof. I could not do that but i am not a business person.
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Bob, i dabble in Argentina, stamps, postcards, covers especially penquins and Antarctica..nothing like your airmails..this is my best best Argentine airmail...to Sweden possibly 1934..i hate the faint postmarks.
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Wow Bob!
You had me sitting on the edge of my seat and sweating (even though your title said it was found)!
So happy you found the cover!
And a story (since you also build models)... I keep model car parts boxes in old shoe boxes. I had a box marked "Ford Falcons" that had a few old broken Falcon and Ranchero models, as well as a slew of parts to use on future projects. And it disappeared! I looked everywhere. I went though the same thoughts you did. Did I accidently throw it out? Did I bring it to a show or club meeting and leave it behind?
"The Elusive Falcon Box" became a running joke in my club. References were made in articles I did for the club newsletter. One guy took a cartoon of the lunar lander and drew the box on the moon next to it! I was sure I pulled apart the model room and every place I stored models in my house. I finally just stopped looking for it.
Then we made our big move from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. As I packed the model room I packed all the parts boxes in the bottom of the closet. The bottom box was marked "Matchbox Cars". I picked it up and it was way too light! Curiously I opened it... and Shazam! There were the Falcons. I turned the box around and the other end was marked "Ford Falcons". Finding them was almost a let down! And now I mark my boxes on BOTH ends!
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reminds me of a Joni Mitchell sound from my youth, when I would occasionally ride in a friend's black 62 Falcon
and, no, not the parking lot song
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BenFranklin1902 said, "And a story (since you also build models)... I keep model car parts boxes in old shoe boxes. I had a box marked "Ford Falcons" that had a few old broken Falcon and Ranchero models, as well as a slew of parts to use on future projects. And it disappeared!"
In my brief modelling career as an adult*, I have experienced a couple of "painful" losses of model parts.
Loss #1 — Dutifully following the advice of more-experienced modellers, I washed all of the parts of my first model, a British Hampden bomber, in a bowl of warm soap and water to remove any contaminants; most of the parts were still on the sprue, but a few the had fallen off. After washing them, I carefully emptied the bowl into the kitchen sink. But not carefully enough. A small, clear plastic wing light slipped past my fingers, into the sink, and down the drain! Gone! That particular model is no longer produced, so I couldn't write the manufacturer to request a replacement. My only choice was to buy another model, which I did. Here's the model, "kit bashed" to represent the Hampden in which a Canadian airman died in 1942. See my web page, Joe Hicks and the Battle for Europe. Here's the model:
This Fiji stamp pictures a Hampden bomber, and is the only stamp issued picturing a Hampden, according to my 2009 Stanley Gibbons catalogue, Collect Aircraft on Stamps:
Loss #2 — I had "seen the light" when that Hampden wing light swirled down the drain, so I didn't repeat that mistake. But when I was building my second model, a Beech T-34B Mentor, I was ready to install — wait for it — a wing light, holding it firmly in a pair of tweezers. Very firmly. Too firmly! In a microsecond, the wing light poppeded out of the tweezers' grip — PING! — and flew away like the projectile it had become, and landed...where? Somewhere. Somewhere in our apartment, never to be seen again despite the moving of furniture, sweeping off the floor, peering in every dark corner with a flashlight. It simply vanished las if it had been transported from the Enterprise to some alien planet. Beam it back, Scottie!
That model was a Beech T-34B Mentor, like the one I crashed in in 1966. See my web page, I survived a plane crash in the Black Range. The Mentor kit was still in production so I asked the company that built it to send me a replacement, which they did, for free. Here's the completed model, with decals and other details replicating those of my "crash plane":
A stamp issued by the Dominion Republic in 1995 pictures the Mentor. According to Collect Aircraft on Stamps, it's the only such stamp ever issued, The Mentor still makes popular aerobatic appearances at airshows.
Bob
*My model building as an adult began with a field trip with my stamp club to the The Canadian Museum of Flight in Langley, British Columbia, a bedroom community east of Vancouver. The key exhibit there is a complete but non-flying Hampden bomber, at that time the only complete Hampden in the world. I was already familiar with Joe Hicks' story (see link above), so I was pleased to see the bomber. And then, in the museum gift shop, a club member spotted an Airfix model kit of the Hampden, bought it, and gave it to me as gift!
At that time, I hadn't built a model since I was about 17 and the Airfix kit intimidated me. I wanted to build it to replicate Joe's Hampden, but didn't think I had sufficient skill. Several years passed. Then a friend, neighbour, and fellow stamp club member, Mike Strachan, enthusiastically re-started his teenage model-building hobby, and I couldn't help but become interested in building my model Hampden.
With Mike's advice, I bought some tools and supplies from Magic Hobbies here in Vancouver, and set out on my task. I climbed a steep learning curve and spent a lot of money; model building today is not the rip-open-the-box, rip the model parts off the sprue, slap the parts together with plenty of glue, and quickly paint process that it was when I was a kid. Scores of new types of paint, glue, and purpose-built tools are now available and necessary if you want to build a realistic model. But I'm pleased to report that I'm now now working on my sixth model, of the fictional submarine Nautilus that sails (and submerges, a lot) in Jules Verne's novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The base for the model is the giant squid that attacks the submarine in the novel. But I'm still taking time out for stamps.
My "adult modelling" story has one dark ending. Shortly after the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Mike had his prostate removed because of a rare cancer. He never recovered, required both a colostomy and a urostomy, was in constant pain, soon could not stand for more than a few minutes, and died before the year was out. I miss him. I ran into his wife on Saturday, and she urged me to visit her and take home any of Mike's modelling tools, supplies, and kits.
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i am so sorry about the unnumbered loss #3, Mike.
but I do love reading about your history of compiling and modelling history
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Fun stories Bob! We've all sent a part or two into hyper-space! They never get found until after you buy a replacement kit, or scratch build the missing part. Then they show up. I once found a part in my pants cuff!
Sorry to hear about your friend. I lost a good model car friend of over 30 years this week. It's never good!
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Bob you tell a good story
"But I wasted no time pulling that binder off the bookshelf where I keep my exhibits, and lo, there it was. Bless...whatever deity looks after the interests of forgetful stamp collectors!"
I literally said whew! when I was reading it and my husband asked what happened!
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Lost! Aye Chihuahua!
Two or three months ago I decided to start working a new web page based on the best airmail cover in my collection. It was carried over the treacherous Andes Mountains on the first official airmail flight between Buenos Aires and Santiago, Chile, in 1929. The pilot, flying an open-cockpit Potez 25 biplane, was Jean Mermoz, the intrepid airmail pilot who pioneered airmail routes between France and South America, and within South America, and was a colleague of the famous French aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. During his lifetime, he earned the "title" of the "French Lindbergh". This French stamp commemorates that flight:
The cover carried by Mermoz is a philatelic cover, which in this case made it valuable. The Argentinian dealer who sold it to me gave me a 10% discount, but he still asked for, and got, US $900 out of me, totally eclipsing any other philatelic purchase of my entire life and one not likely to be repeated. Where's that value come from? From Mermoz's signature:
My web page would also include not only a cover carried by Mermoz on the return flight to Buenos Aires, but earlier covers from "experimental" flights flown over the same route flown by a pilot who became famous for the world's first start-to-finish instrument flight and the first American attack on Japan in the Second World War. His name, if you haven't yet figured it out? Jimmy Doolittle.
The Mermoz cover would have anchored my new web page, if I had been able to find it! I looked high and low. I searched every binder in my collection where it might have been placed in a moment of distraction. (I have many. of those moments;old age and PTSD do that to you. I cleaned my desk, not something I often do, thinking it might be in this or that pile of envelopes, stock pages, glassines, clippings (paper, not toenail), and magazines, but it wasn't. It wasn't anywhere. I had dark thoughts, not easily dismissed, that I had accidentally included the cover in an envelope of stamps and covers that I had given to another collector, who sold it at our club's auction (I no longer attend those meetings). Or — Horrors! — I had tossed the cover into the recycling bin during one of my distractions and it was now pulped and being turned into toilet paper. In any event, that cover was nowhere to be found.
How embarrassing! I just couldn't admit my apparent carelessness to you guys, and even had trouble telling my wife and son. After several weeks of repeatedly searching in the same places that the cover hadn't previously been found, I began to accept the inevitable: I had had a rare, wonderful cover. I still had scanned images of the cover. The cover itself was gone. I would have to live with the memories if not the artifact. It was lost! And then…
Then found! Whew!
Two or three days ago I was searching for an image on my computer and came across a scanned image of a page in an exhibit I had shown at VANPEX two or three years ago. That page included the cover, and featured a quote from St. Exupery's book, Wind, Sand and Stars, about an emergency landing that Mermoz once made on an Andean peak and his successful take-off from that peak. Aha! I thought. The cover is in the binder with those exhibit sheets! I hope! I hadn't thought to look there before, because I didn't recall that it had been in that exhibit. But I wasted no time pulling that binder off the bookshelf where I keep my exhibits, and lo, there it was. Bless...whatever deity looks after the interests of forgetful stamp collectors!
Now I have no excuse not to start on that web page…
Bob
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re: Lost, then found…
For items missing for a far shorter period do look under the scanner cover.
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re: Lost, then found…
Oh I did! Nine times! And behind the scanner, under it, beside it. I didn't check the lady's chamber, though. Hmmm…
boB
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re: Lost, then found…
that's wonderful
next time I can't find something, i'm looking in Bob's exhibit binders. Might not find it, but i'll be wonderfully entertained and made much smarter.
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re: Lost, then found…
I thought you might be interested in the other covers which will be featured in the Mermoz web page I plan to do.
The first one is an example of a cover transported by Mermoz on the first official airmail flight between Santiago and Buenos Aires, on July 18, 1929, a month and six days after the completion of the first official airmail flight between Buenos Aires and Santiago.
I don't recall how much I paid for this cover, but I'm pretty sure it was no more than $30 or $40; the dealer was surprised when I told him what he had. I can find no similar copies on eBay. Also, I have no idea what caused the delay in the return flight, but aircraft in those days were notoriously difficult to keep in prime operating condition, and I would want my plane to be in prime operating condition if I were going to fly it over the Andes! This interesting photo shows Santiago, with the backdrop of the Andes, in the 1930s: I can't imagine what it would like to challenge those mountains in a tiny, single-engine biplane:
The Mermoz flights weren't the first to cross the Andes. In 1928, Jimmy Doolittle, employed by the Curtiss airplane company flew the "First Experimental Flight" from Santiago to Buenos Aires. This is a cover flown on that flight, sold to me by the same dealer who sold me the cover shown above:
Several Doolittle-flown covers are currently available on eBay, at prices ranging from around U.S. $200 to $450. I think I paid about the same amount for this cover as I did for the Santiago to Buenos Aires cover flown by Mermoz.
Bob
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Great cover Bob, hats off to you ! I know people who exhibit and when a dealer knows they have a piece that the person needs to finish his exhibit the price goes through the roof. I could not do that but i am not a business person.
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Bob, i dabble in Argentina, stamps, postcards, covers especially penquins and Antarctica..nothing like your airmails..this is my best best Argentine airmail...to Sweden possibly 1934..i hate the faint postmarks.
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re: Lost, then found…
Wow Bob!
You had me sitting on the edge of my seat and sweating (even though your title said it was found)!
So happy you found the cover!
And a story (since you also build models)... I keep model car parts boxes in old shoe boxes. I had a box marked "Ford Falcons" that had a few old broken Falcon and Ranchero models, as well as a slew of parts to use on future projects. And it disappeared! I looked everywhere. I went though the same thoughts you did. Did I accidently throw it out? Did I bring it to a show or club meeting and leave it behind?
"The Elusive Falcon Box" became a running joke in my club. References were made in articles I did for the club newsletter. One guy took a cartoon of the lunar lander and drew the box on the moon next to it! I was sure I pulled apart the model room and every place I stored models in my house. I finally just stopped looking for it.
Then we made our big move from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. As I packed the model room I packed all the parts boxes in the bottom of the closet. The bottom box was marked "Matchbox Cars". I picked it up and it was way too light! Curiously I opened it... and Shazam! There were the Falcons. I turned the box around and the other end was marked "Ford Falcons". Finding them was almost a let down! And now I mark my boxes on BOTH ends!
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reminds me of a Joni Mitchell sound from my youth, when I would occasionally ride in a friend's black 62 Falcon
and, no, not the parking lot song
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BenFranklin1902 said, "And a story (since you also build models)... I keep model car parts boxes in old shoe boxes. I had a box marked "Ford Falcons" that had a few old broken Falcon and Ranchero models, as well as a slew of parts to use on future projects. And it disappeared!"
In my brief modelling career as an adult*, I have experienced a couple of "painful" losses of model parts.
Loss #1 — Dutifully following the advice of more-experienced modellers, I washed all of the parts of my first model, a British Hampden bomber, in a bowl of warm soap and water to remove any contaminants; most of the parts were still on the sprue, but a few the had fallen off. After washing them, I carefully emptied the bowl into the kitchen sink. But not carefully enough. A small, clear plastic wing light slipped past my fingers, into the sink, and down the drain! Gone! That particular model is no longer produced, so I couldn't write the manufacturer to request a replacement. My only choice was to buy another model, which I did. Here's the model, "kit bashed" to represent the Hampden in which a Canadian airman died in 1942. See my web page, Joe Hicks and the Battle for Europe. Here's the model:
This Fiji stamp pictures a Hampden bomber, and is the only stamp issued picturing a Hampden, according to my 2009 Stanley Gibbons catalogue, Collect Aircraft on Stamps:
Loss #2 — I had "seen the light" when that Hampden wing light swirled down the drain, so I didn't repeat that mistake. But when I was building my second model, a Beech T-34B Mentor, I was ready to install — wait for it — a wing light, holding it firmly in a pair of tweezers. Very firmly. Too firmly! In a microsecond, the wing light poppeded out of the tweezers' grip — PING! — and flew away like the projectile it had become, and landed...where? Somewhere. Somewhere in our apartment, never to be seen again despite the moving of furniture, sweeping off the floor, peering in every dark corner with a flashlight. It simply vanished las if it had been transported from the Enterprise to some alien planet. Beam it back, Scottie!
That model was a Beech T-34B Mentor, like the one I crashed in in 1966. See my web page, I survived a plane crash in the Black Range. The Mentor kit was still in production so I asked the company that built it to send me a replacement, which they did, for free. Here's the completed model, with decals and other details replicating those of my "crash plane":
A stamp issued by the Dominion Republic in 1995 pictures the Mentor. According to Collect Aircraft on Stamps, it's the only such stamp ever issued, The Mentor still makes popular aerobatic appearances at airshows.
Bob
*My model building as an adult began with a field trip with my stamp club to the The Canadian Museum of Flight in Langley, British Columbia, a bedroom community east of Vancouver. The key exhibit there is a complete but non-flying Hampden bomber, at that time the only complete Hampden in the world. I was already familiar with Joe Hicks' story (see link above), so I was pleased to see the bomber. And then, in the museum gift shop, a club member spotted an Airfix model kit of the Hampden, bought it, and gave it to me as gift!
At that time, I hadn't built a model since I was about 17 and the Airfix kit intimidated me. I wanted to build it to replicate Joe's Hampden, but didn't think I had sufficient skill. Several years passed. Then a friend, neighbour, and fellow stamp club member, Mike Strachan, enthusiastically re-started his teenage model-building hobby, and I couldn't help but become interested in building my model Hampden.
With Mike's advice, I bought some tools and supplies from Magic Hobbies here in Vancouver, and set out on my task. I climbed a steep learning curve and spent a lot of money; model building today is not the rip-open-the-box, rip the model parts off the sprue, slap the parts together with plenty of glue, and quickly paint process that it was when I was a kid. Scores of new types of paint, glue, and purpose-built tools are now available and necessary if you want to build a realistic model. But I'm pleased to report that I'm now now working on my sixth model, of the fictional submarine Nautilus that sails (and submerges, a lot) in Jules Verne's novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The base for the model is the giant squid that attacks the submarine in the novel. But I'm still taking time out for stamps.
My "adult modelling" story has one dark ending. Shortly after the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Mike had his prostate removed because of a rare cancer. He never recovered, required both a colostomy and a urostomy, was in constant pain, soon could not stand for more than a few minutes, and died before the year was out. I miss him. I ran into his wife on Saturday, and she urged me to visit her and take home any of Mike's modelling tools, supplies, and kits.
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i am so sorry about the unnumbered loss #3, Mike.
but I do love reading about your history of compiling and modelling history
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Fun stories Bob! We've all sent a part or two into hyper-space! They never get found until after you buy a replacement kit, or scratch build the missing part. Then they show up. I once found a part in my pants cuff!
Sorry to hear about your friend. I lost a good model car friend of over 30 years this week. It's never good!
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re: Lost, then found…
Bob you tell a good story
"But I wasted no time pulling that binder off the bookshelf where I keep my exhibits, and lo, there it was. Bless...whatever deity looks after the interests of forgetful stamp collectors!"
I literally said whew! when I was reading it and my husband asked what happened!
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