Saturday, April 18, 1998

You on that stamp -- straighten up

By Bob Greene

SANTA ANA, Calif.-- I reached across the table to borrow a Jimi Hendrix postage stamp so that I could mail a letter.

I was about to stick it on the envelope when the person from whom I was borrowing it pointed out that the Jimi Hendrix stamp is not official U.S. postage. The stamp was just a little sticker, one of several that had come with a Hendrix CD.

How stupid of me. To think the U.S. Postal Service would issue an official stamp to honor a rock musician who died after swallowing too many pills.

Oh, that's right. The U.S. Postal Service did issue such a stamp. For the late Mr. Presley.

The point here is that it was easy to assume there is a Jimi Hendrix postage stamp, because postage stamps these days are no big deal. As you may have heard, the Postal Service recently invited the public to vote on which subjects should be featured on stamps that will commemorate the decade of the 1950s. On the ballot were "Teen Fashions," "I Love Lucy," "Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round the World Home Run" and "Stock Car Racing."

A while back, there was a small proposal in this column: To keep the cost of stamps down, sell the front of stamps to the highest corporate bidder. Let Coca-Cola and Chevrolet and McDonald's advertise on postage stamps, and use the money to avoid raising the price of stamps.

The Postal Service rejected the idea, which I figured it would. Stamps are supposed to have dignity; stamps are supposed to have a certain historic weight.

Which is precisely why perhaps we ought to go back to the old way of issuing stamps:

Make them no fun.

Look at U.S. postage stamps down through the years. In 1954 you had your 2-cent Thomas Jefferson stamp, with Jefferson looking as somber as if he were on a piece of currency. You had your 4-cent Abraham Lincoln stamp (Lincoln wasn't exactly guffawing, either). You had your 1955 6-cent Theodore Roosevelt stamp (he looked constipated, and I say that with admiration) and your 7-cent Woodrow Wilson stamp (he looked as if he wanted to weep). You had your 1955 half-cent Benjamin Franklin stamp (try to imagine the government issuing a half-cent stamp today).

The stamps then were all business, the opposite of frivolous, as buttoned-up and constrained and mirthless as could be. Since that time, of course, society has loosened considerably. Now the world is unzipped and casual and without many rules. Renowned social observers say there's probably no going back -- the formal days are over forever.

So if it's nostalgia the Postal Service is after, why not forget Elvis and "The Cat in the Hat" (which is on the commemorate-the-'50s ballot), and return to the days when to make it onto the front of a stamp you were best advised to be a frowning dead president, a flag or a flower?

This would serve two purposes: It would be a small, symbolic nod to the concept that some things are at least occasionally supposed to be serious and short on mirth -- the federal government doesn't need to be giggling all the time -- and it would be more of a throwback to American days long gone than any stamps-with-a-wink the Postal Service might issue.

As it is, these are some of the stamps that have been issued in recent years:

Lon Chaney as "The Phantom of the Opera." Boris Karloff as "The Mummy." Grace Kelly. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The musical "Show Boat." Marilyn Monroe. James Dean. The Keystone Cops.

Nothing wrong with any of those people (or books, or plays). And there are some great subjects on the front of unconventional stamps -- Humphrey Bogart, for one.

But this should not be a case of personal preference. We all admire different stars and performers, but that doesn't mean we have to stick them on the fronts of letters. There has been much talk about how this country is always "lowering the bar" in determining what is acceptable. Why not, just this once, raise the bar?

You get to be on a stamp if you are a deceased president, if you wave from a flagpole, or if you grow out of the dirt in a garden.

Otherwise, you get to be famous, but you don't get a stamp.

Rule of thumb: Grover Cleveland, yes; Latrell Sprewell, no. Rhododendron, yes; Fran Drescher, no.

Chicago Tribune