The One-Cent Magenta by James Barron

Author:James Barron [Barron, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781616207175
Published: 2017-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

NINE

$286,000

1970: The Wilkes-Barre Eight

The distance to Manhattan from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—a fading little city in coal country—is 134 miles. For the ten years that the stamp was owned by eight people from Wilkes-Barre, it stayed in a safe-deposit box in a Fifth Avenue bank. The one-cent magenta went to Philadelphia for the nation’s bicentennial. It went to Canada. It went to India and Australia. But it never went to its owners’ hometown.

I did, on a Sunday morning, because I had decided that Wilkes-Barre was another important stop in my journey through Stamp World.

From reading up on Wilkes-Barre, I had a sense that it was a shot-and-a-beer town, and like so many blue-collar strongholds across the nation’s industrial crescent, it was in decline almost before people realized it. From 1950 to 1960, the postwar boom decade when white-collar jobs surpassed blue-collar jobs, Wilkes-Barre’s population fell 17 percent; by 1970, it was two-thirds its size in 1940. After so many years of industrial losses, Wilkes-Barre was a past-tense kind of place, a place to have left after growing up. The actor Jerry Orbach did. Even Joe Palooka, the naive comic-strip prizefighter, did.

But clearly a few of those who remained in Wilkes-Barre, or who moved back after a year or two in Manhattan during their twenties, did well there—very well. The stamp’s new owners were wealthy enough to put up $50,000 apiece (as much as $834,000 apiece in 2016 dollars). Seven of them were not stamp people. The eighth was, and the whole adventure was his idea—the partnership to buy the stamp, the trips to display it at philatelic conventions around the world, the stunts to promote it. His name was Irwin Weinberg. For more than half his life, his business address had been a suite in a bank building: two cluttered rooms and an old-fashioned vault with a military-green door that swung open when he dialed in the combination.

Which is what he did when my wife and I finally got there, and it took him a couple of tries. Inside the vault were stacks and stacks of stamps on shelves that reached to the ceiling. Weinberg said, proudly, that the shelves were rigged with an alarm that would go off if anyone touched anything. The words “booby-trapped” popped into my mind, and I wondered whether “anyone” included Weinberg himself. He showed us any number of stamps in the vault, but he pulled them from boxes on the floor, not the trip-wired shelves. (I’d bet that Ferrary, another shelf-storer, would have rushed back to Paris to install the same kind of security setup if he had tiptoed through Weinberg’s vault.)

We had gone to Weinberg’s office after a couple of hours at his house, which turned out to be a large, comfortable Leave It to Beaver kind of place a mile or so from downtown Wilkes-Barre. The front door had swung open as my wife and I started up the walk, and a tallish blonde woman had stepped out. She was wearing a fur coat over what looked like pajamas.

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