Award Recipients 2017-18

Award Recipients 2017 – 2018

            The Stanley B. Ashbrook Cup is awarded to authors of articles, books, or other studies concerning United States postal history from the Colonial Period to 1894.

            The Tracy Simpson Cup is awarded for outstanding service to the Society.

            The Susan McDonald Award is given annually by the Section Editors of The Chronicle of the U.S. Classic Postal Issues to recognize the year’s best Chronicle article. The winner for 2017 is James G. Baird, for his thoughtful and provocative essay, “About Steamboat and Way Markings,” that appeared in the November 2017 Chronicle.

            In this meticulously researched article, Baird shed new light on an old subject, putting to rest a canard going back many decades that erroneously interpreted WAY and STEAM markings as they appear on waterway mail. Baird’s research methodology—reading and understanding the PL&Rs and then bumping what he learned against a huge database of covers—is unassailable. In addition to persuasive cover illustrations, the article quoted extensively from various early PL&Rs and included a useful tabular listing of almost 1200 “Steamboat” and “Way” covers from 39 cities where those markings were extensively used.

            John H. Barwis was born in New York and started collecting stamps at the age of seven while living in the Philadelphia area. This helps explain why he has studied stamps and postal history of both New York and Philadelphia, but not his primary area of interest, which is colonial Victoria. That is a very interesting story, but, in reality, it happened purely by chance in the early 1990s while he was in Australia on a business trip.

            Although Barwis wrote his first philatelic article in 1993 for the Cancellation Club News, he did not start writing in earnest until 2000. Since that time, he has written continuously for several journals, including The Chronicle of the U.S. Classic Postal Issues and The Collectors Club Philatelist, as well as four volumes of The Congress Book. His most important publication was a 520 page book in his primary area of interest. The work was published in 2009 as The Half-Lengths of Victoria: The Stamps and Postal History 1850-59. It was well received and was awarded the Reserve Grand at the 2009 APS StampShow in Pittsburgh. Not surprisingly, it did even better in Australia, receiving the highest points in the 2009 Australian National Philatelic Exhibition, the Grand Award at the 2009 New Zealand National Literature Competition, the John Gartner Medal for best Australian Philatelic Literature in 2010, and another gold medal at the 2013 FIP World Stamp Exhibition in Melbourne.

            After several years of collecting and studying, John showed his first exhibit in 1999 at Stampex in London. Not only did he win a special prize for the best first-time exhibit, he also won the first of his many grand awards. In all, Barwis has shown a half-dozen different exhibits, including traditional and postal history, at numerous national and international shows, winning gold and large gold medals, as well as reserve grand and grand awards. In the United States, John has competed for the Champion of Champions award with four different grand award winning exhibits. He won the Champion of Champions in 2011 with The Half Lengths of Victoria. The other grand award exhibits are The Path to a Philadelphia Exchange Office for U.S.-British Mails, Philadelphia-Great Britain Mail, and Carrying the Mail from Victoria.

            As a professional geologist, John worked in six different countries in a career that spanned over thirty years. He retired in 2003 and, fortunately for philately, has been extraordinarily active in organized philately since. His service began on the board of the Arizona Philatelic Rangers in 2004 soon after retirement. He was a Member of the Council for the American Philatelic Congress and served on the board of the Society of Australasian Specialists/Oceania. His service to the American Philatelic Society began in 2007 as a member of the Finance Committee, a position he still holds. Since then, he has conducted flood-risk analysis for them, strategic financial analysis, and served on the long-range planning committee from 2009-2010. He co-founded and is the current president of the Institute for Analytical Philately. Some of his most important service has been to our society, the U.S. Philatelic Classics Society. He was first elected to the board in 2006, became vice-president in 2007, and served as president from 2012 to 2016. His white paper on the economics and membership impact of publishing The Chronicle in color led to its most successful adoption. Some of his other efforts for the society have resulted in very large donations from the David T. Beals III Charitable Trust, the posting of the Travers Papers on the USPCS website along with Post Office Department correspondence, and the overall improvement of the society website.

            John lives with his wife Susie in Holland, Michigan.