One of my favorite past-times is perusing my valuable postage-stamp collection. It is an avocation I took up shortly after my court-enforced retirement in 1954. I was a skeptic at first, but my son R. Buckminster is an avid hobbyist, and he assured me that stamp-collecting is the sport of manly gentlemen.
My faithful man-servant Standish assists me in my stamp-collecting past-time by acquiring first-run editions of every stamp released around the world, which he then fastidiously pastes into my scrap-book. Last week, I asked him to fetch my most recent stamp acquisitions, so that I could inspect them more closely.
Lorgnette in hand, I searched the new entries. I must say that, in addition to the great rise in cost, I am vexed and disheartened by the images put on postage-stamps to-day. In my day, a postage-stamp featured one of three things: a clipper-ship, a late president, or an allegorical figure of Liberty with at least one of her beautiful, milky-white bosoms hanging out of her tunic. But, apparently, the Postmaster-General has grown tired of such things and prefers instead to put images of house-plants and various nobodies on our Republic’s postage-stamps. Who, for example, is “Bugs Bunny”? I am glad that such an immodest cox-comb is now deceased.
After scrutinizing a number of these items, I chanced upon a familiar figure. It took me a few seconds to realize that the figure was myself! Beside my portrait read the words, “T. Herman Zweibel, American newspaper publisher.”
Words cannot properly express the depths of my shock and furor. In order to be on a postage-stamp, one must be deceased, which I most emphatically am not! An honor it may be, but an inappropriate one whilst I still draw breath!
After many threatening telegrams from my legal counselor, the Postmaster-General withdrew the stamp from circulation and apologized to me. Apparently, it is a widely held notion that I died in 1962. I suppose it is an understandable error, as I was indeed buried alive that year. But this has happened many times since 1947, and no one has seen fit to put me on a postage-stamp until now.
T. Herman Zweibel, the great grandson of Onion founder Friedrich Siegfried Zweibel, was born in 1868, became editor of The Onion at age 20, and persisted in various editorial posts until his launching into space in 2001. Zweibel’s name became synonymous with American business success in the 20th century. Many consider him the “Father Of American Journalism,” also the title of his well-known 1943 biography, written by Norman Rombauer.
