Finding the 6 February 1911 Serendipity Stamp
When former President Ronald Reagan died in June 2004, I came across an extraordinary found object from his day of birth in the year 1911. Read on for the full story:
On Saturday June 5th, 2004 I was making preparations to open up a Serendipity feature box on my website pi365 dot com, with a found object of interest in light of the D-Day 60th anniversary commemorations under way: a U.S. postmark made on D-Day itself, June 6, 1944, from Watertown, Iowa. This had an interesting resonance to events of that day: the invasion of Normandy certainly began on water, and the first town in France was successfully taken by the Allies that day, namely Ste. Mere Eglise. Like all items displayed on the pi365 website, this D-Day postmark was found while sorting through an ordinary bulk mixture of used postage stamps sold quite inexpensively by weight in multiple pound quantities, which I purchased sometime in the past few years over eBay or from a Linn's Stamp News classified. If you're curious to see the D-Day serendipity item, it's here.
About 4:30 in the afternoon that day, I heard the news of President Reagan's death and decided I'd postpone revising my website for a day or so, to allow time for a sort and scan of my accumulation of February postmarks from the 1910 to 1914 half-decade to see if I had one for the day of his birth, the 6th of February 1911. The plan was simply to display such a birthdate postmark, once retrieved, alongside a couple of shoeprint postmarks with numerals special to his life, such as 40 for his presidency and 77 for the number of rescues he had performed over seven years in his youth working as a lifeguard.
As it turns out, I completed the February 1910-1914 sort and found three matches for the birthdate, two of which had recognizable dates but at odd angles and with unrecognizable strikes of city names. The third, though, was a quite nice postmark on a stamp from Switzerland, with the city name of Bern fully readable and right side up as well. I showed it to my wife Jean and mentioned my website plan so she'd understand why I'd had the dining room table covered with stamps the past few hours while listening to the television news coverage. At that moment, I had no idea it could be a serendipity, although a thought passed through my mind of looking up the Reagan family genealogy on the Internet to see if there might be some Swiss ancestry alongside the Irish.
Late Sunday evening I logged onto the Internet, but simply to read through a few of the most recent news headlines just posted from the next day's issue of the New York Times. One caught my eye, something about a papal visit to Switzerland. I immediately remembered the Bern postmark and clicked open the article to see where in Switzerland the Pope had visited, expecting it would probably be somewhere else, such as Geneva. When it turned out the Pope had indeed been in Bern not only on Sunday but also on Saturday at the very time President Reagan passed on from this earth, I knew instantly that the 6 II 11 Bern circular date stamp was not just a birthdate match but a quite extraordinary instance of serendipity.
Does something like this happen by sheer chance, or could there be some providential aspect to my finding it, perhaps related to the uncanny calendar timing of my birthday and that of my wife Jean being March 30 and May 13? Perhaps instead, or as well, somehow my thoughts of the previous day concerning historical accuracy (I have a Masters degree in history, and so have a questioning attitude toward any glib claims) were somehow heard: I had been listening to the "instant obituaries" on cable news channels and thinking the Pope (and perhaps Mikhail Gorbachev) surely deserve equal mention for facilitating the end of the Cold War, rather than Reagan getting sole credit.
But, on the other hand, our pair of birthdays is quite impressive: These were, after all, the two dates in 1981 on which Ronald Reagan and the Pope both survived close brushes with death after gunshot wounds to the chest at the hands of an assassin. The latter was also the 64th anniversary of the first apparition at Lourdes on May 13, 1917, a fact which the Pope himself later spoke of as no mere coincidence but directly connected to the miracle of his deflecting his body at the exact instant the shot was fired, bending to look at a medallion of the Virgin Mary on a nearby well-wisher.
Looking again at the stamp itself, with its allegorical figure of Helvetia with a cross emblazoned over her heart, I recalled that Jean and I had that morning at church done something quite uncharacteristic in Lutheran worship: making the sign of the cross. Yes, that very morning of June 6th, our pastor had led the congregation through making the sign of the cross as part of our 10:30 AM contemporary service, and had even joked about how this was something you didn't have to be Roman Catholic to do. So for me, the finder of this Reagan birthdate Bern postmark, the Helvetia figure made it not just an old postmark with the date and place meaningfully linked, but an astonishing triple serendipity, with the stamp design of profound significance as well. The sign of the cross is part of worship throughout Christendom, including the countries of the former Soviet empire, now liberated from the atheism that was part of the dialectical materialist ideology imposed there throughout the Cold War. Indeed, it was on Christmas Day of 1991 that the Soviet Union officially dissolved.
All in all, a remarkable item by which to remember our 40th President, who shares with Pope John Paul II the honor of having peacefully brought about the end of the Cold War.
To return to the 6th of February 1911 stamp image, click here.