Hobbies: Postage Due

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Most boys go through a stamp-collecting phase and then forget it before their Scott's International Album is one-third filled. But Philip H. Ward Jr., who started his first collection at the age of four, stuck with stamps, and by the time he reached young manhood, was so wrapped up in perforations and first-day covers that he gave up an electrical engineering career to become a fulltime, professional philatelist. In the next 50 years, he built one of the finest U.S. collections of postage stamps ever assembled. He specialized in blocks of rare stamps—four or more stamps still connected by original perforation. There was a block of 16 50 stamps dating from 1847 (the first regular postal issue in the U.S.) in mint (uncanceled) condition, valued at $24,000, and several blocks of 1901 Pan American World Exposition stamps with inverted centers, worth a total of $39,250.

Ward died last year aged 76, and last week his stamps were sold for a record $1,100,000. The buyer was up-and-coming Stamp Dealer Raymond H. Weill, who seems intent on making New Orleans the new stamp capital of the U.S.; three months ago, he set a record by paying $78,400 for a two-stamp 1847 Mauritius cover. The Ward collection, now stashed in the silver vault of New Orleans' Whitney National Bank in 93 wooden boxes the size of whisky cases, will be broken up and sold piecemeal. Weill hopes to sell it for well over $2,000,000.