Salinas and John

Salinas, CA lays claim not only to John Cerney's plywood art but to John Steinbeck who was born there in 1902 and graduated from high school in 1919. And it's home to the National Steinbeck Center. He was an American novelist, story writer, playwright, and essayist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 and is perhaps best remembered for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a novel widely considered to be a 20th-century classic.

And the USPS created a stamp for him in 1979! Which brings me to stamp collecting and first-day covers (FDCs) of US stamps. One of my most fun collections, in clip frames, is of FDCs related to anything that is meaningful to me, like Steinbeck, the Woody Wagon, Biltmore House, Acadia Nat'l Park, Man of the Mountain, Norman Rockwell, Columbia University, Dartmouth, fly fishing, Jim Thorpe, 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the Gutenberg Bible, Crayolas, pharmacy, USS Constitution, Jonas Salk, polio eradication, Gone With the Wind, the box turtle, gray wolf, etc.

Don't even get me started on the wall of world-wide stamps on meaningful FDCs!