Washington – When Stanley Parkes was a teenager, he gave his grade-school cousin a hardcover stamp album. The cousin’s interest in stamps lasted a few years. Yet because of history and fame, curiosity about the stamp collection and its owner continues.
So Thursday, Parkes, now 72, found himself talking about his cousin John Lennon and a circa-1950 album at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum.
“When I was at home from school” in Liverpool, “he noticed I had this stamp album and I was collecting stamps, and he took an interest in it,” said Parkes, who resembles his Beatles kin in voice, though not in face. “I said, ‘Well, John, the great thing about collecting stamps is that it helps with your geography. You see, the stamps come from all different countries, and you see the people on the stamps, and you take an interest in why the country exists,’ ” he said.
In an alcove of the museum, the album is displayed in a case and opened to the flyleaf, where Lennon wrote his name and address, and how many stamps had been collected. His notation says 800, but only 565 are in the vintage album.
Parkes said Lennon persuaded his Aunt Mimi to give him the postage from their relatives’ letters from New Zealand. Lennon added his own touches, drawing mustaches and whiskers in blue ink on the images of Queen Victoria and King George VI.
The exhibit’s recent opening marked Parkes’ first visit to the United States, and he was amused at the reappearance of the album and its new status as a museum artifact.
In Parkes’ local newspaper, “It said John Lennon’s stamp album had just been sold. And it quoted 30,000, and I thought, my God, I wonder if that is my stamp album that I gave to John,” said Parkes.
Neither Parkes nor the Smithsonian knew where the album was until it appeared at an auction in June, when the museum purchased it for about $53,000.
Over the years the cousins met at family gatherings and wrote to each other until Lennon’s murder almost 25 years ago: “The last letter I got from him,” remembered Parkes, said: ” ‘It is a bright moonlit night tonight. Come on, man, send me a postcard. Life is short.’ Shortly after that he was killed.”
