Korean War Covers Garner Gold

For the past 35 years, Bob Collins, 76, of Westlake, Ohio collected mail sent or received by members of the U.S. military and several other countries that fought during the Korean War (1950-1953). This past summer, his exhibition of this material won a gold medal at the American Philatelic Society show in Columbus.

"Once, these envelopes held letters scrawled by American POWs, condolences from a commanding officer to a lost airman's wife, the death notification for a soldier of the Chinese People's Volunteer Army, and a missive sent to an American GI on the same day he was killed in action," writes reporter Brian Albrecht on the Cleveland.com website.

According to Albrecht, "The rarest items in his collection are covers for letters written by GIs from behind the barbed wire of POW camps in North Korea and China. Some of the envelopes bear the stamped notation (in red ink of course): "Via the Chinese People's Committee for World Peace and against American Aggression."

Collins is quoted as saying, "There's a big demand for these covers, especially in China, because they ran these POW camps."

Shown above, Bob Collins, who does the collecting and his wife, Beatrice, who helps with the display.

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