Stamp illustrator Craig Frazier loves seeing his work in the mail — or rather, on the mail. “I never get tired of seeing my stamps on an envelope. It’s thrilling,” he says. “There’s something very ‘official’ about it.”
Therein lies a challenge for the U.S. Postal Service. As Frazier recognizes, commemoration on a stamp is a nearly universal symbol of arrival into national significance. Yet how many worthy organizations might deserve such recognition? Many. How many slots are available? Not many.
Back in the 1980s, pressure to recognize different groups grew so great that the Postal Service had to issue a blanket policy: We don’t do organizations.
But occasionally, they will “do” activities — things like scouting. “We chose to do a stamp about scouting because it so deeply embraces the culture of our country,” says Terry McCaffrey, manager of stamp development for the Postal Service.
Scouting runs deep in our national consciousness. Many people treasure the scouting experiences of their own past, or that of siblings, parents, or friends. What’s more, scouting calls to mind the simpler times of a nation shaped by the frontier.
Although the unveiling of the Scouting stamp also coincides with the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts, the stamp will celebrate far more. “It‘s not only Boy Scouts, but it’s Girl Scouts, it‘s Camp Fire USA,” McCaffrey says. “It’s all the organizations that embody the ideals of scouting.”
Pulling it off creates a challenge. A stamp that celebrates a generic activity rather than a particular organization can only succeed by harnessing the viewer’s own cultural memory and personal connections.
“A stamp is really a combination of hints,” says Craig Frazier, who created the Scouting stamp. “As an illustrator, I’m looking to include the symbols that let you in as a viewer, to remind you of something deeper still. It‘s what we all want to think of scouting adventures as being — whether we climbed a high mountain or not.”
“Craig Frazier often gets difficult assignments from us,” says Derry Noyes, art director for the stamp, “because he is so good at distilling information into something tangible and accessible.”
Frazier originally imagined the project from two approaches — “sea level and up in the sky.” The first try yielded lakeside tranquility; the second offered mountaintop adventure. Adventure won out. The final design shows a “dual read,” an image within an image. The colorful foreground figure scans the horizon in garb suggesting a modern scout. The wide-brim hat of the background silhouette calls to mind a bygone era — more romantic than historic.
“Scouting is a timeless activity,” Frazier says. Although scouting organizations work hard to keep up with the times and changing technology, “we want the same things out of scouting that we wanted 100 years ago.”
Whether our own connection to any stamp is cultural or personal, tied to memories of last summer or decades ago, the unofficial goal of any great stamp is bring us together as a society — to put us all back in touch with our childhood, our past, and our national heritage.