Class Syory 64 Stealing from Mr Waddell

·       (vi) Class Story 064 -- Stealing from Mr. Waddell 1953

My mother was in tears, crying, "My son is going to jail!"  The policeman in our front room had just informed my parents that the rare stamp dealer over on Pine Avenue, Mr. Waddell was pressing charges of theft against me for stealing a dozen rare stamps.  There was no denying it for I was guilty.  The stamps were in my album and it was immediately brought out to put into the hands of the policeman.  "You will have to appear before a judge to answer for these charges" said the cop.

One of my talents is the same as one of my failings, the obsessive wish to focus in and excel at some selected thing.  In this case I had taken off in a big way for stamp collecting. I wanted to compete with my friend Bruce Rancadore and in some way be better than him.  His prize collection was of British stamps.  It was complete and spanned two of those large stamp albums.

I had started collecting stamps when my father would bring home to me little envelopes of assorted stamps from around the world.  These were the grab bag type of assortments that you could pick up for a dime or a quarter.  This was my entrée to geography and I loved reading up about these places; Swaziland, Manchuko, and Danzig.  At some point in California, I graduated to a more proper stamp album.  Not the loose leaf variety that Bruce had. This one was fairly complete at maybe 250 pages.

This coincided with my starting to visit with Mr. Waddell to begin collecting American corner plates, the four stamps in the corner of a sheet that still have the margin with a serial number on it.  Mr. Waddell had recommended this and bragged about that he had been doing this for 25 years and the older sheets he still had were worth hundreds of dollars each.

I went to him on Saturday mornings for about a year, never able to spend more than about ten dollars.  On one occasion, the last, as it turns out, he was taken away to the telephone, or at least I thought he was taken away.  I lusted after some fairly rare stamps that would complete some sets or series for me.  When he was out of the room I slipped these into my pocket.  As it turns out, he was watching me while talking on the phone.

I'm not sure I went up before a judge, I think it was just the desk sergeant at the police station, but in the event they scared the bejeebers out of me.  I had returned the stamps but there were some sorts of other penalties involved that I can't remember.

It didn't stop me from stamp collecting in the long run, nor did it stop me from shop-lifting.