Award Recipients 2019-2020
Fred F. Gregory
The Board of Directors of the U.S. Philatelic Classics Society awards the Tracey W. Simpson Cup to Fred F. Gregory in recognition of his outstanding service to the society. Fred is a 20-plus year member of the society. He joined the Board of Directors in 2014 and served as the society’s Secretary from 2014 to 2016. As Secretary, Fred reorganized the membership recordkeeping system and cleaned-up the membership records. He also initiated a process for tracking and retaining members that were not current with their dues in order to limit membership losses. From 2016 until present, Fred has served as the President of the Society. As President, Fred has continued his focus on member recruitment and retention, allowing the Society to maintain its membership base while other societies have faced continuing membership declines. Fred was also the guiding force behind the expansion of the Society’s focus to the end of the nineteenth century. For his continuing support and dedication to the Society, the Board of Directors recognizes Fred as a deserving recipient of the Simpson Cup.
Mark Schwartz
For 2019 the Winter Cup is awarded to Mark Schwartz for his two-part article “The New York Postmaster Provisional and its Postal History” published in the London Philatelist. Mark is a long-time member of the U.S. Philatelic Classics Society as well as an award-winning exhibitor of classic postal history.
It has been many years since a comprehensive survey of the New York Provisional was published and Schwartz’s postal history focused study sheds much light on the most important and widely used of the 1845 Postmaster Provisionals. Schwartz describes and illustrates the uses and most important covers of the issue, and analyzes the rates employed, using covers from his own collection and from other prominent collections of the past. The reader leaves with a solid understanding of the typical as well as rare uses of the stamp and gains a much greater appreciation for the importance of the New York Provisional as a precursor for the 1847 U.S. First Issue. The novice as well as the advanced collector will benefit from Mark’s efforts. We congratulate him as the first recipient of the Winter Cup.
Chip Gliedman
David D’Alessandris
The Honorable David D’Alessandris is a life-long stamp collector, having started collecting actively in high school. While in college, he joined the Garfield-Perry Stamp Club and Tom Allen encouraged him to join the USPCS. When David moved to the Washington, DC area for graduate school, he joined the Baltimore-Washington USPCS Chapter, organized at that time by Dick Winter.
Through the late 1990s, David primarily collected stamps, with a focus on revenue issues. He wanted to collect postal history, but was at a loss for a suitable topic. He eventually chose what he thought would be the inexpensive topic of Washington County, Maine postal history, the county where his then bride-to-be, Kim, was raised. David quickly became fascinated by the rates and markings on covers passing through the Washington County exchange offices in transit to and from the Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. However, much of the published information on cross-border mail seemed inaccurate based on his knowledge of the geography and history of Eastern Maine. This led to David’s research in libraries and archives in Washington, D.C., Maine, and Canada to understand the transportation routes, and leading to a number of articles published in the Chronicle. Three of these articles were awarded the Susan M. McDonald award for the best article in a given year in the Chronicle.
David subsequently expanded to other areas of postal history, and is also an active collector of revenue stamps, especially essays, the Match and Medicine issues and embossed revenue stamped paper. David has been a director of the American Revenue Association since 2008, and has published several articles in The American Revenuer. He has also published articles in the Congress Book, Western Express, American Stamp Dealer & Collector, the North Carolina Postal Historian and Linn’s Stamp News.
David is an occasional exhibitor, most recently receiving 94 points at the New York 2016 international show for his single-frame exhibit of Cunard Line mail between Halifax and the United States. He has given a number of presentations at society annual meetings, and also at Richard Frajola’s Taos Philatelic Rendezvous, and the International Postal History Fellowship.
David has been a director of the Society since 2009 and is currently the Vice President. He is also the assistant section editor for the Foreign Mails section of the Chronicle, and currently writes the “Member Spotlight” column in the Chatter. He previously served as the advertising sales manager.
Professionally, David is an Administrative Judge on the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals, where he presides over, and decides, contractual disputes including multi-million dollar claims involving some of the largest defense contractors. Prior to joining the bench, he was a trial attorney for the Department of Justice. He holds a B.A. from Case Western Reserve University, a M.A. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a J.D. with high honors from the George Mason University School of Law. David lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife and two teen daughters.
James A. Allen
James A. Allen bought his first 3c 1851 stamp in 1961 and took a career detour for 30 years before returning to the hobby, ‘with a vengeance’, as he might describe it. He started collecting the 12c 1851-1861 in 1989 along with other classic US philately. A research manager by profession, having worked with all manner of plastics, R&D and tech service, testing, color labs, and the paper industry, he quickly discovered many opportunities for investigation in this new found stamp world. This resulted in numerous comprehensive articles and several key documented discoveries, initially for the 12c 1851 stamp. Three chapters in the 2006 USPCS 1851 “Sesquicentennial Book” capture a few of them; others are recorded in the Collector’s Club Philatelist or the USPCS Chronicle. That 12c collection led him to win 4 Grand Awards, the APS “Champion of Champions” award in 2018, and two international gold awards to date.
He maintains collections of all the 1851 classic issues, with special emphasis on markings and color varieties. He acknowledges a penchant for color cancels of the 1869’a and Banknotes as well. Working with the late Wilbur Amonette and Wilson Hulme starting in 1997, he developed a comprehensive standards collection and located all the key color rarities of the 3c 1851 issue which he maintains today. He credits the open sharing and infectious enthusiasm of the 3c study group at the time with stimulating his initial interests in this area. That interest led to breakthroughs in the 1851 3c color issues based on modern analytical technology at the National Postal Museum (recorded in the Smithsonian Scholarly Press) and the co-founding the Institute of Analytical Philately in 2009 where he has served as a director since 2009. He won a large gold medal the first time out with a single frame of this 1851 3c work. He continues to share his color work and knowledge with others and has done consulting for the PF, the PSE and independent dealers.
While researching a US classic cover in 2010, he began a shameless pursuit of a defunct Canadian railroad (he admits he is easily amused), the Grand Trunk Railway. That led to 2 comprehensive articles in the USPCS Chronicle with Dwayne Littauer on the US Exchange Office systems incorporating Portland, Detroit, and Chicago, based on original research of Canadian Archival records. He is continuing to research and develop a large Display exhibit based on this subject, documentation of which is available from the American Philatelic Research Library, some of which he presented at stamp shows.
He has served as USPCS Publications Business Manager since 2010 after a brief stint as advertising manager. He served as a director of that board, during that 2010-2019 period of rapid transition, moving the USPCS into the digital world, while streamlining several business processes. He shepherded the move of the Chatter and Chronicle to one publisher through contract management. He has managed our other publishing issues problems along the way, saving the Society tens of thousands of dollars during this period, getting those publications produced in fine final form we enjoy today, a crucial last step after the superior writing and editing processes are deployed. He continues that today.
