From the nation's capital to a Missouri cave

By Michael Baadke

For the past 20 years, the United States Postal Service has been selling stamps out of a cave.

A 1939 postal card from the United States Post Office Department's third assistant postmaster general in the division of stamps. The card announced the forthcoming release of the 1939 3¢ 50th Anniversary of Statehood stamp (Scott 858).

The USPS moved its philatelic sales division to Kansas City, Mo., in 1990, and opened for business in the Hunt Midwest Subtropolis underground office park.

Collectors quickly began calling the new stamp center "the caves" and rightfully so. The extensive office park is located approximately 150 feet underground, carved out of a small mountain of limestone rock.

It is a remarkable environment for any business — and there are many other businesses in this subterranean setting — but it clearly works well for the Postal Service's Stamp Fulfillment Services division, as it's now called.

Linn's associate editor Jay Bigalke visited the caves recently to get a first-hand look at how the Postal Service uses automation to an extreme as it fills your stamp orders. His report begins on page 58.

Bigalke, a talented photographer, also has plenty of pictures to share, showing you a part of the Postal Service's operations that rarely sees the light of day.

Reading through Bigalke's account of that modern facility in its limestone setting made me think of the long history of how the Postal Service (and its predecessor, the United States Post Office Department) has served stamp collectors clamoring for the latest issues.

I turned to Linn's World Stamp Almanac to refresh my memory of how it all began.

In December 1921, with the number of stamp collectors in the United States estimated at 20,000 to 50,000, the first U.S. philatelic agency opened in room 217 of the city post office in Washington, D.C.

Today, that site is home to the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum.

As part of the division of stamps under the leadership of the third assistant postmaster general, the philatelic agency exceeded $100,000 in sales during fiscal year 1923, reaching an average of $2 million annually in the 1960s. Net revenue soared to $285 million by 1994, but settled back to $188 million a couple of years later.

Pictured here is a 1939 postal card from the division of stamps explaining how to obtain first-day cancels for the 50th Anniversary of Statehood stamp that would be issued Nov. 2 of that year.

The card is addressed to George W. Linn at Linn's Weekly Stamp News in Columbus, Ohio.

At that time, Linn was busy informing collectors about the latest stamp news in his 11-year-old newspaper, and the front page of the Oct. 14, 1939, issue reported those details about the forthcoming stamp that were sent to him on the postcard from the stamps division.

What's remarkable is that the postcard addressed to Linn and bearing the stamp details was postmarked just four days earlier, on Oct. 10.

Seventy years later, many collectors still get the latest stamp news from Linn's, and still buy U.S. stamps direct from the Postal Service.

While some collectors prefer to buy their stamps at the local post office window, many order direct from the caves by using information they read in Linn's or in the quarterly USA Philatelic mail-order catalog published by the Postal Service.

George W. Brett, who was one of the country's most knowledgeable experts on U.S. stamp production and history, once reported that in 1921 the Post Office Department's first philatelic agent, Percy W. Gibson, kept his stock of stamps in a box in his desk drawer.

Keep that in mind as you read Bigalke's article, and look at where the Postal Service's stamps are stored today.