From: Carlsbad Current - Argus

Article Last Updated:
Wednesday, October 23, 2002 - 11:05:31 PM MST

Since starting in 1981, she has ordered stamps, friends have given her stamps, and she has meticulously removed stamps from old letters by a proven process and dried them in a spare room of her house.

After her husband, Hal, moved into the nursing home from their village home, she wanted to do something for Lakeview. Donating her stamp collection seemed the perfect way because none of her children felt they had time to spend on it, she said.

"I didn't collect anything but United States stamps because I didn't want any foreign stamps," she said. "I was the stamp collector, and my husband didn't like me spending that much time, but I'll tell you it's been interesting and a hobby I absolutely loved.

"I hadn't donated anything to the home, and I knew I couldn't sell these," Cox added. "I gave them to Peggy (Moore) to sell and give the money to the Boathouse. Peggy has been so good to the villagers, and she goes out of her way for us."

What Cox donated were four large albums and 262 plastic bags of loose stamps with 20 in each. None of the stamps are glued on the pages in the albums but rather protected in plastic sleeves that helped hold their value.

"When I asked Peggy about the collection she didn't think she'd get more than a couple hundred dollars, but when I brought them down, she quickly changed her mind," Cox said.

"Every stamp in these books I've looked up and put a price next to each," said Moore, who has worked at Lakeview for 28 years in activities. "I've probably spent over 300 hours on this."

"Right now, the best I can come up with is that the entire collection is worth around $6,000," added Moore. "There are a couple of stamps that are worth $675 a piece. One of those is a 1861 George Washington pink stamp.

"When I took the stamps to Mike Veilleux at the post office, he said, You have a mint here,'" Moore said.

Now that Moore has done all of the research on each stamp through Scott's Stamp Book and other reference material at the library, she'll be meeting with a woman in Roswell who is an E-Bay representative and has agreed to put the stamps on the Internet to sell.

Moore said she feels Lakeview will be lucky to get half the value of the stamps because it all depends on how the representative sells them, who views them, what the collector is looking for and how much they're willing to pay.

"She'll probably put them on E-Bay one book at a time," said Moore, who added that she got an intense crash course in stamp collecting.

Photo information:

Valerie Cranston/Current-Argus

Dessie Cox, left, Lakeview Retirement Village resident, and Peggy Moore, Lakeview activities director, discuss one of the many stamps in a collection Cox donated to Lakeview Christian Home. The stamp they are looking at in one of four albums is an 1861 George Washington pink stamp worth $675.