1927 Lindbergh airmail stamp

The 1927 Lindbergh airmail stamp is both a carefully preserved object in Philip’s stamp collection and a link between national history and family memory. Its image of the Spirit of St. Louis recalls the flight that had made Lindbergh a neighborhood hero, while its personal associations give the stamp an importance that becomes newly charged as Philip fears what may happen to the country.

Design and Commemoration

Issued in 1927 to commemorate Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, the stamp is blue and about twice as long as it is high. Its central image shows the Spirit of St. Louis flying eastward over the ocean. The design also maps the journey: the coast of North America appears beside the words New York, while Ireland, Great Britain, and France line the opposite edge, with Paris at the end of a dotted arc between the two cities. The stamp compresses a celebrated journey into a small, legible object that Philip, at seven, can study in detail.

From National Hero to Family Anecdote

For nearly a decade, Lindbergh was a hero in Philip’s neighborhood. His nonstop solo flight from Long Island to Paris in the Spirit of St. Louis coincided with the day in spring 1927 when Philip’s mother discovered she was pregnant with Sandy. In the family’s anecdotes, the flight and the pregnancy became joined: Lindbergh’s achievement and the coming birth acquired a shared place in the story of the family’s beginnings.

Sandy later made that connection visible in a drawing he completed at nine. He pictured his mother in a crowd at Broad and Market, pointing up at the plane as she realized she had conceived Sandy. The stamp’s image of the aircraft had provided Sandy with his model for the plane, making the stamp an indirect source for the picture through which the family remembered the coincidence.

Collection, Value, and Foreboding

The stamp was the third-oldest U.S. stamp in Philip’s collection, and he could not bring himself to tear it up or throw it away. He recalls that the Scott’s Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue valued it at twenty cents, twice its ten-cent denomination, and imagines that its value would rise further if Alvin’s prediction of the worst came true. The stamp’s market value thus enters Philip’s private calculation of danger: its possible increase is inseparable from the catastrophe he fears.

That attachment returns when Philip prepares to go to Washington and worries about leaving his collection unattended. He fears that, because he has not removed the Lindbergh stamp or Sandy’s drawings remain hidden under Sandy’s bed, his Washington stamps might turn into Hitlers and swastikas appear on his National Parks stamps. The stamp is not merely a record of a celebrated flight; within Philip’s apprehension, it is one part of a collection through which political dread threatens to contaminate familiar images of American history.