Voices of the Korean War echo in collection

From Cleveland.com: Voices of the Korean War echo in collection

The envelopes were mailed more than a half-century ago, but they still speak in the bygone voices of the Korean War.

Once, these envelopes held letters scrawled by American POWs, condolences from a commanding officer to a lost airman's wife, the death notification for a soldier of the Chinese People's Volunteer Army, and a missive sent to an American GI on the same day he was killed in action.

There's a story behind many of the several hundred "covers" -- the philatelic term for envelopes -- that Bob Collins, 76, of Westlake, has collected the past 35 years.

Collins' covers represent mail sent or received by combatants from all branches of the U.S. forces and several different countries that fought during the Korean War (1950-1953). The collection took gold medal honors in August at an American Philatelic Society show in Columbus.

His collecting interest started with stamps, as a child growing up in Lakewood, then later evolved into a fascination for the various postmarks and exotic locales of mailed envelopes.

Collins served in the Army shortly after the Korean War, and most of his sergeants and officers were veterans of that conflict. That experience led to his subsequent desire to start collecting envelopes of that era.

The relative rarity of letters from that war on the collectors' market also was a draw, as Collins said mail from World War II and even the Civil War (if you've got the bucks) is fairly common.

His collection was gleaned from stamp shows and auctions, catalogs, flea markets, eBay or sheer happenstance.

Most covers usually cost him from $3 to $30. Some are now worth from $100 to $300 among specialized collectors, such as those seeking features like hand-stamped "hubba-hubba" (a World War II term for "hurry up") artwork.

Though Collins still keeps an eye out for occasional additions to his collection, he noted, "I enjoy it for myself. I don't buy to sell. I just buy to keep and exhibit.

"I enjoy when some veteran comes to a show and looks at my exhibit," he added.

The rarest items in his collection are covers for letters written by GIs from behind the barbed wire of POW camps in North Korea and China. Some of the envelopes bear the stamped notation (in red ink of course): "Via the Chinese People's Committee for World Peace and against American Aggression."

Collins noted, "There's a big demand for these covers, especially in China, because they ran these POW camps."

Even rarer is correspondence from American POWs who refused to be repatriated after the war, choosing instead to stay with their captors.

To Collins, however, the real value of these covers lies not in the money or rarity, but in the stories that go with certain envelopes.

Such as envelope that still bears the lipstick kiss that the sister of a serviceman bestowed on a letter she got from the front. Or the cover for a letter written by a Red Cross nurse for a wounded soldier.

"I love that stuff," Collins said. "To me, it adds a little pizazz to it."

The retired Westlake police officer has two sons who served in the Army -- one during Desert Storm, and the other recently deployed twice to Iraq.

The older son "wrote me a lot of letters," Collins said. The younger son, maybe three or four.

He wonders if the Korean War may have been the last big letter-writing war, given a scarcity of Vietnam-era letters on the market. "A lot of those [Vietnam-era] guys said they didn't send letters, they sent tapes," he noted.

But Collins said he's still a dedicated letter-writer and cover-collector. As for his hobby, he said, "It's been a lot of fun. To me, it's like history. It's a part of our lives."