Monthly Archives: December 2024

Mueller Honored with Holiday Cachet

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[press release]
AFDCS Honors Tom Mueller with Holiday Cachet

The American First Day Cover Society in 2024 is honoring cachet artist Tom Mueller as its Court of Honor cachetmaker. The Santa Claus cachet is taken from a 1991 cover for the Holiday Celebrations issue with Santa in a chimney (Sc. 2579).

AFDCS Court of Honor No. 44 (an example of which is shown on the right) was serviced with singles of all the U.S. holiday issues, including Kwanzaa and Hanukkah, and with all of this year’s holiday first-day postmarks. They are available for sale in the Marketplace section of the AFDCS website, www.afdcs.net/AFDCS-Marketplace

Mueller, a self-taught Midwestern artist, began producing his hand-painted “Silverwing” cachets in 1990 (Dwight Eisenhower, Sc. 2513), and continued designing for new issues until 2006, concentrating then on add-on cachets. Most are one of a kind. His 1991 cachet for the Basketball stamp (Sc. 2560) won the top award in the AFDCS Cachet Contest and his work was featured in a gold-medal exhibit by Anthony Dewey shown at St. Louis Stamp Expo this past March. Nearly three dozen of his family members attended the show to celebrate his philatelic career. (photo left. Dewey is second from the left in the back row)

An article on Mueller by Patrick Morgan (on the left in the blue polo shirt) appeared in the November-December 2021 issue of First Days, the official journal of the AFDCS.

The Court of Honor series commemorates cachet artists who have, over the years, contributed so much to the hobby through the beauty of their art. It began in 1981 and the

The original 1991 FDC

first artist honored was Ralph Dyer. There has been a new Court of Honor FDC every year since then. Stamps with Christmas themes are used because the U.S. issues new ones every year. A different artist is selected each year.

Many of the earlier years’ covers are also available.

The AFDCS is the largest not-for-profit first day cover society in the world, with members in more than a dozen countries. In addition to publishing First Days and handbooks, catalogues and You-Tube videos, the society is a co-sponsor of the annual Great American Stamp Show. It holds an annual cachetmaking contest and two mail auctions a year, and encourages philatelic exhibiting and writing about FDCs.

For more information about the AFDCS, visit www.afdcs.org, e-mail afdcs@afdcs.org or write the AFDCS at Post Office Box 57, Somerset, WI 54025-0057

What’s Missing from U.S. 2025 Program?

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Only 14 issues have been announced, many of them “mail-use” or “definitive” stamps. Undoubtedly, more issues will be announced.

What do you think will be in the program? What do you think should be in the program for 2025?

We’ll start: 2025 will be the 250th anniversary (“semiquincentennial” if you want to be fancy) of the Battle of Lexington & Concord, of the Second Continental Congress, and other American Revolution milestones. It will also be the centennial of a Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby. The radio program Grand Ole Opry went on the air in 1925, too.

American entertainers born that year include Gwen Verdon, Paul Newman, Elaine Stritch, Jack Lemmon, Kim Stanley, Hal Holbrook, George Kennedy, Rod Steiger, Tony Curtis, Maureen Stepleton, June Lockhart, Merv Griffin, Donald O’Connor, Mel Torme, B.B. King, Lenny Bruce, Angela Lansbury, Johnny Carson, Rock Hudson, Jonathan Winters, and Sammy Davis Jr. (Me, I’d put my money on Davis and — if they can figure out which wife has the rights — Carson.) Dick Van Dyke will turn 100 in 2025 but he’s still with us.

Remember that the U.S. Postal Service doesn’t like to commemorate disasters and other unpleasantness, so a stamp for the massive 1925 Ku Klux Klan rally in Washington is unlikely.

We used Wikipedia’s pages for 1925 and there are similar pages for toher years. The oft-ignored guidelines say anniversary increments of 50 years, not 25 or 75, and no corporations or organizations, which could seem to eliminate the Chrysler Corporation.

So what do you think?