‘Jenny’ Stamp Centerpiece Of Show At Museum

On the morning of May 14, 1918, William R. Robey, a 29-year-old cashier for a Washington brokerage firm, walked into a Post Office to purchase a sheet of the new 24-cent airmail stamps.

When the clerk tossed a sheet of 100 stamps on the counter, “my heart stood still,” Robey later recalled. The airplanes were printed upside down and Robey, a stamp collector, quickly grabbed them. This was “a thrill that comes once in a lifetime,” he said.

Now 24 of Robey’s stamps - the most celebrated of U.S. stamp errors - have been reunited in the nation’s capital after a 78-year absence. The result has to be one of the most spectacular stamp exhibitions Washington has seen, a must-see for anyone who ever saved a postage stamp or wondered about why thousands of other people do.

The National Postal Museum has billed its exhibit “The Jenny Class Reunion” after the Curtiss JN-4D “Jenny” aircraft that is featured on the stamp. The display marks the third anniversary of the Smithsonian museum and is the first of what museum director James Bruns promises will be annual “blockbuster” exhibits.

“This is our Vermeer!” says Bruns, referring to the spectacular success the National Gallery of Art had earlier this year with its display of paintings by the 17th-century Dutch master. “We’re doing what art museums have done for generations.”

Perhaps no stamps are more deserving of debuting the museum’s series than the stamps collectors call “the Jennies.”

Only one misprinted sheet, the one Robey purchased, with 100 upside down airmail stamps, got into public hands when the stamps were hurriedly produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing for the nation’s first scheduled airmail service. Today, the individual stamps are valued at $135,000 each and a block of four bearing the printing plant numbers sold for more than $1 million several years ago.

After 18 months of planning and negotiations with the stamps’ current owners, Bruns was able to persuade the owners of 23 of the stamps to return them to Washington for an unprecedented joint exhibit with the Postal Museum’s lone Jenny. That stamp is the most popular item in the Smithsonian’s collection of 16 million philatelic items and has become an icon of American culture.

Because of fears that the stamp’s rich red and blue design would fade from display, Bruns has not allowed the stamp to be on permanent exhibit. “You put it on permanent display, you destroy it,” he said.

Most of the stamps displayed under the heading “A Lucky Purchase” have not been back in Washington since Robey sold them to a Philadelphia stamp dealer seven days after his purchase for $15,000. Thanks to the improved fiber-optic lighting in the museum’s rare-stamp vault, these tiny red, white and blue stamps appear much clearer and brighter than stamps did there in the past.

The centerpiece of the six-panel Jenny exhibit is a re-creation of the 10-1/2-by-9-inch sheet of airmail stamps that Robey purchased, with all of the reunited stamps returned to their original positions on the sheet. (It’s possible to do this because the Philadelphia stamp dealer who bought the stamps from Robey carefully wrote the position of each stamp on the back in pencil before he broke the sheet apart and sold the stamps individually and in blocks.)

The exhibit does not end with the stamps. It also includes rarely seen press proofs from the Bureau of Engraving and tells of the first regular airmail flight, the event that prompted the stamps.

That flight became famous because Army Lt. George R. Boyle flew south instead of north with the first dispatch of airmail letters. After an hour Boyle sensed he was off course, landed and confirmed his error, but damaged his plane in the process. He had to return the letters to Washington by car. The next day another pilot in another plane made the scheduled flight to Philadelphia with the letters.

“The Jenny Class Reunion” continues through Sept. 30 at the National Postal Museum, (202) 357-2700.