Cheryl Ganz says she has always believed “every stamp tells a story.”
The recently retired chief curator of philately at the National Postal Museum was honored last week by her alma mater, the University of Illinois, for her efforts to transform stamp collecting.
“I wanted to bring more excitement to our exhibits, to use stamps as a way of understanding the larger events that produced them,” Ganz tells the university’s alumni magazine.
During her decade at the Washington, DC, museum, stamps became the centerpieces of exhibits like “Delivering Hope,” which showed how President Franklin Roosevelt used stamps to fight the Great Depression.
Said Gordon Morrison, former head of the Postal Service’s stamp program: “[Ganz] has demonstrated many times how stamps, [when] well presented, can reach very diverse audiences and make history come alive.”