Twelve Washingtons

While four bedraggled citizens stood waiting at 7:30 New Year's morning to get a look at the 31st U. S. President, an enthusiastic crowd of 2,500 swarmed into Washington's central post office to buy likenesses of the first U. S. President. By nightfall over 40,000 philatelists from far and near had secured more than a million stamps commemorating the 200th anniversary of George Washington's birth. First in line were Senator Simeon D. Fess of Ohio and Representative Sol Bloom of New York, members of the Washington Bicentennial Commission, which plans elaborate celebrations throughout 1932. After they were served, 25 clerks were kept busy distributing the new series of twelve Washington stamps, cancelling them so that collectors might have the valuable date of issue. One dealer came from New York with a truckful of commemorative envelopes, rented a store and hired a corps of assistants to help him stick on the new stamps and mail them to himself and customers.

No Government is kinder to philately than the U. S.* When the post office closed at 6 p. m. people were yet unserved. Postmaster William M. Mooney announced that anyone who came back next day could still have the cancellation dated Jan. 1 if he liked. It was the heaviest commemorative stamp sale in the history of the Post Office Department.

It is a wise citizen who knows the Father of His Country in all the new Washington Bicentennials. The Post Office Department has gone to some pains to obtain obscure likenesses. Of the issue, which ranges from 2-c- to 10-c-, there are four Charles Wilson Peales, two John Trumbulls, a reproduction of the Houdon bust, the famed Gilbert Stuart ($1 bill) Athenaeum portrait, the New York Historical Society's anonymous portrait, a crayon drawing made from life by Charles B. F. Saint-Memin, a portrait by William Williams.

Four unfamiliar pictures neatly quarter President Washington's life 1) a miniature attributed to John Singleton Copley executed when Washington was 25; 2) a Peale showing Washington, the Virginia colonel; 3) Trumbull's portrait of Washington, the General, painted in 1792, in which the subject is standing on a high cliff while a pickaninny in a turban holds his horse; 4) Washington, the Old Gentleman, with a somewhat rufous nose and in full Masonic regalia, done by William Williams for Alexandria (Va) Lodge No. 39. Their respective denominations: 1/2-c-, 1 1/2-c-, 7-c-, 9-c-.

The Post Office Department has about run out of old issues. It expects to use 14 billions of the Bicentennial Washingtons for the first seven or eight months of 1932. After that it will decide whether or not to issue them permanently.

*To be issued Jan. 25 is a 2-c- stamp picturing a ski juniper and memorializing the winter Olympics at Lake Placid.

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