Check your collection of first day covers of the 2c III Olympic Winter Games stamp issued on January 25, 1932 in Lake Placid, NY and you will probably notice all are postmarked 10:30 a.m.

Over the past 25 years I have built a large collection of first day covers of this stamp concentrating mainly on cachets and cachet varieties. At the current time, I have almost 100 cacheted examples of the first day cover.

Obviously, first day covers is not usually a subject of a postal history publication such as the Journal of New York Postal History. Nevertheless, I have found an interesting sideline to collecting the various cachets.

According to contemporary newspaper reports, 75,000 first day covers were canceled for the Lake Placid stamp. Almost every first day cover seen has the same cancellation time: 10:30 a.m.

But, a few of these first day covers show a different time cancel. Some covers show three other times: 11:30 a.m., 7 p.m., and 7:30 p.m. I have no explanation for the 11:30 a.m. cancel. However, the 7 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. time cancels can be explained.

I have seen the 7 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. cancels on covers which had gone through the cancellation machine earlier in the day and for some reason, the cancel had missed the stamps. I believe that the late time cancels appear on these skipped covers as the post office workers attempted to make sure that all covers at hand in the post office were truly canceled on the first day of issue.

One of the most unusual first day cancels I've encountered is reproduced below. Notice that the time is 10:00 a.m. and and the spacing of the wording in the dial is completely different from the other cancellations. The letters in "LAKE PLACID" and "N.Y." are squeezed more closely together.

A similar machine cancel is known from Lake Placid both before and after the Olympic Games. It is my belief that the cancellation dial (10:30 a.m.) usually found on first day covers was a new machine placed in use for the Olympics. This would make sense: the post office expected hundreds, if not thousand, of covers to be mailed throughout the Olympic period (Feb. 2-Feb. 14). Having a new machine in place would lessen the possibility of breakdown.

I originally wrote this article for the Journal of Sports Philately (November /December 1998). One of the great joys of collecting is finding unexplained or new material.

Since this article appeared in the Journal of Sports Philately, I have discovered a completely new time/dial combination. The illustration below shows the discovery copy of the new cancellation dial with the time of 10:00 a.m. Notice that the wording "LAKE PLACID" and "N.Y." is spaced like the common 10:30 a.m. cancel found on most fdc's. This discovery has been reported both in the Journal of Sports Philately and FIRST DAYS, the journal of the American First Day Cover Society. There have been no other reports of this 10:00 am time used on first day cover. Indeed, in over 35 years of collecting this issue, this is the only example of the time that I have seen.

I have no explanation for this time variety. Perhaps it was a initial test of the new canceling machine before beginning the complete run using the 10:30 a.m. time.

If any reader has different time cancels, please contact the author at: PO Box 451, Westport, NY or by e-mail at gestus@westelcom.com

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March 19. 2004