STAMPS OF APPROVAL

Comics and cartoonists will show up in the Postal Service’s 2010 crop of commemorative stamps.  Bill Mauldin, whom Pat Oliphant always refers to as “the great Bill Mauldin,” is in the line-up as is a set of stamps featuring Archie, Beetle Bailey, Dennis the Menace, Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes.

February begins the Year of the Tiger, and a stamp in the lunar year series will be issued on January 14; the stamp will not apparently feature any of Tiger’s many mistresses mooning us.  Others of the 2010 commemoratives reported by the Associated Press include Mother Teresa, Katharine Hepburn, Winslow Homer, a four-stamp set of celluloid cowboys (Gene Autry, William S. Hart, Roy Rogers, and the pace-setting Tom Mix, about whom you can read more at the Usual Place, but in our Harv’s Hindsight department for October 2006, where we also log the deceptions of another fraudulent cowpoke, Will James), and stamps honoring Negro Leagues baseball, which operated from 1920 to about 1960, attracting some of the most remarkable athletes ever to play the sport.

Another stamp will commemorate celebrated singer Kate Smith, whose signature song, "God Bless America," was composed for her by Irving Berlin, who said, after composing it, that he now had songs for two of the country’s big holidays — Fourth of July (“God Bless America”) and Easter (“Easter Parade”) and if he could only nail Christmas, his annual income would be assured forever. Then he wrote “White Christmas.”