Download this report as an MP3 sound file.

For broadcast on CBS Radio Network stations March 4-5, 2006:

Ben and the Boxer

The Stamp Collecting Report, I'm Lloyd de Vries. 

On April seventh, the U-S will issue stamps for two people with VERY different roles in our 
history: Benjamin Franklin and Sugar Ray Robinson.

It isn't either man's birthday. Founding Father Franklin was born in January, three hundred 
years ago, in Boston. Boxer Robinson was born in May of Nineteen-Twenty-One. But Philadelphia's 
big celebration for Franklin is in early April, while the Golden Gloves amateur boxing 
championships are the same weekend in New York. Robinson won the Golden Gloves, in two different 
classes.

The Postal Service is printing a hundred million Robinson stamps, and only forty million 
Franklins. But Ben gets four different stamps, featuring his roles as statesman, scientist, 
printer and the first postmaster general. 

"He was such a varied individual that we thought that if anybody needed to be featured in a 
block of four stamps, that Benjamin Franklin would certainly be the right subject matter."
RUNS :09

...says Dave Failor, chief of the stamps program.

And that's Stamp Collecting this week. 

I'm Lloyd de Vries, CBS News. 

----------------------------------------------------------
Go to Previous Report
Go to Next Report 

Go to Report Index