An Interview with Cheryl Ganz

An insightful interview with Smithsonian National Postal Museum Curator and zeppelin stamp expert Cheryl Ganz appears on The Collectors Weekly website.

Last November, Maribeth Keane and Ben Marks spoke with Cheryl (shown here) about zeppelin stamps and the burnt mail that survived the Hindenburg disaster.

A lifelong collector, Cheryl says, "There are just certain people for whom collecting seems to be part of their nature. My mother always tells the story about when I was three years old they’d give me dolls. I never played mother and baby. Instead, I put my dolls on a shelf and spent every day rearranging them. Collectors not only care about acquisitions; they care about organizing their stuff and figuring out what’s missing and how to make a good story of their collection. And so, as a child, I collected a lot of things, including coins, stamps, and seashells.

She goes on to say, "In my teenage years, my grandfather gave me some photographs of zeppelins. I got really excited and started reading books about them. I’d go to flea markets and find zeppelin postcards and memorabilia. So I started collecting zeppelin stuff.

"After I’d been collecting zeppelin material for maybe two or three years, I discovered that they carried mail, and that you could buy postcards and envelopes with zeppelin stamps on them that had been aboard these zeppelins. It was so exciting to me, I just dropped all my other collections, and I’ve been a zeppelin researcher ever since."

To read the entire interview and learn more about zeppelins and the mail, click here.