Behind Every Stamp There is a Story

Reporter Joe Kovac Jr. of the Macon, Georgia Telegraph.
writes, "Berdia Felder collects stamps the way a lot of kids collect baseball cards. She stashes them by the thousands in boxes under her bed and in her attic. She has no organized albums or fancy display cases for them."

He goes on to pen, "On a recent afternoon in her Forsyth Road living room, Felder, a retired school counselor, sat on a couch with a plastic bin of stamps in her lap. Most of the stamps, full sheets of them, are related to black heritage. One, with the botanist George Washington Carver on it, dates back to 1948 when stamps were 3 cents.

"But some of the other figures in black history on the stamps aren’t necessarily as well known.

"As she picked through what was but a fraction of her collection, every few minutes she held up a stamp and asked, “You heard of Charles R. Drew? ... You heard of Dinah Washington? ... Benjamin Banneker? ... Paul Laurence Dunbar?”

Berdia, shown above, first took an interest in stamps four decades ago when a principal at a school where she worked in Florida talked her into heading up a student stamp club according to Kovac.

He quotes her as saying, “Stamps really tell an interesting story, not only about history, but about different personalities, different countries and regions."

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