How it Began:
The Prologue from First To Fifty

One, Two, Free—and the Journey of a Lifetime

I wasn’t planning to start a thirty-year journey.

I was just trying to use a free airline ticket.

In the fall of 1988, Northwest Airlines ran a promotion that would accidentally change the course of my life. It sounded like it had been dreamed up by someone who had just discovered frequent flyer miles and a little too much coffee: “One, Two, Free—Fly Once, Fly Twice, Fly Free.” The premise was simple. Take two roundtrip flights between September and December, and they would hand you a free roundtrip ticket to anywhere in the continental United States. No blackout dates. No fine print, or at least not much. No strings attached, except one. You had to use the ticket between January 1 and March 31 of the following year.

Now, I have always believed that when someone offers you a free ticket to anywhere, you ought to say yes. And I am not one to pass up a good deal, especially when it involves airplanes and the possibility of escaping yardwork. With work trips, I quickly booked two roundtrips and had that free ticket in my hand before the Halloween candy had even gone half-price.

Then I ran into two snags.

First, I only had one ticket, not four, which meant Denise and the girls could not join me. Second, January through March is not exactly when we pack up for a family vacation, unless you count shoveling snow as a bonding activity.

So there I was, sitting at home, when the mail arrived and dropped the latest edition of Linn’s Stamp News right into my lap. Back in those days, the USPS would announce the entire stamp program for the upcoming year in one glorious issue: designs, dates, cities, the whole shebang. For a stamp guy like me, it was better than Christmas morning. I would flip through the pages like a kid with a toy catalog, circling the ones I wanted to see in person, imagining the cachets I might design, and plotting out which ceremonies I might be able to attend.

As I scanned the listings, my eyes locked onto one in particular: the Montana Statehood stamp, scheduled for release in January. I had never been to Montana. Had no reason to go. But a first day ceremony? That changed everything. I thought, “How many ceremonies happen in Montana anyway?” The answer, as it turns out, was not many. At the time, I just figured it would be an adventure.

I pulled out my trusty Franklin Planner, remember those, and saw the ceremony was on a Sunday. My brain started clicking like a slot machine. Does Northwest fly to Helena? Can I get there and back without using vacation days? What about hotel, car, snacks, emergency chocolate?

But the biggest question of all was this: How do I ask Denise in a way that gets me a yes?

I checked the flight schedule and realized I could leave Saturday, attend the ceremony Sunday morning, and be home by Sunday night. No vacation days needed. No major disruption to the family routine. Now I just had to make the pitch. 

So, after the girls were tucked in and we were watching Cheers, because nothing says strategic timing like Norm walking into a bar, I casually mentioned that I had figured out what to do with my free ticket. I told her about the ceremony in Montana, how I had never been there, how it would not cost us any vacation time, and how it seemed a shame to let the ticket go to waste.

She nodded and said, “Okay.”

And to this day, I joke that she has been regretting that “okay” ever since.

Because that trip to Montana? That was Day One.

From that snowy Sunday in Helena to the day I left the international stamp show in New York in 2016, flew to Denver, drove to Yellowstone, and attended a ceremony in Wyoming, I managed to attend a first day ceremony in all fifty states. And here is the part that still makes me smile: that Wyoming ceremony was 10,000 days after the one in Montana. It was also my 300th ceremony.

Now, I did not set out with a grand plan. There was no spreadsheet. No checklist taped to the fridge. No foam board map waiting for pins. It started with one free ticket and a hunch that a stamp ceremony in Montana might be worth the trip.

Somewhere along the way, it became something more.

It became a journey. A quest. A slightly obsessive, occasionally chaotic, always memorable adventure that took me from coast to coast, from big cities to small towns, from the predictable to the downright peculiar.

There were ceremonies held in libraries, post offices, museums, and once, if memory serves, in a place that doubled as a bait shop. I met collectors who had driven cross-country in RVs, kids who had just discovered stamp collecting, and postal workers who could recite ZIP codes like poetry. I learned that no matter how well you plan, something will go wrong. A flight will be delayed. A hotel will lose your reservation. A ceremony will be moved to a different building with no signage and one very confused janitor.

But somehow, it all works out.

This book is not just about stamps. It is about the places I have been, the friends I have made, the family who supported me, and the occasional fellow traveler who looked at me like I was a little off my rocker. It is about the planning and the improvising, the triumphs and the travel delays, the ceremonies that went off without a hitch and the ones that nearly did not happen at all.

Sometimes it was pure luck that got me to a ceremony. Other times, no matter how well I planned, something went sideways. That, as it turns out, is part of the fun.

Snowstorms do not consult your itinerary. I learned that if you show up early, you meet the most interesting people. That a folding TV tray can become a sales counter. That kindness often appears in unexpected places, sometimes from a postal clerk who goes out of her way to help, sometimes from a stranger who simply says, “You came all this way? Welcome.”

And through it all, there was Denise.

She said “okay” that first night. She would say it many more times. She designed cachets, packed diaper bags, stood in autograph lines, and listened patiently to stories about cancellations and plate numbers. What began as my trip slowly became our journey.

It is a travelogue. A scrapbook of stories. A celebration of the journey.

Because if there is one thing I have learned, besides always packing an extra envelope, it is this: the real value is not in the stamp itself. It is in the adventure it takes you on.

So here it is. The story of how one free ticket turned into a 10,000-day odyssey. A tale of cachets and ceremonies, of missed connections and unexpected friendships, of family, faith, and a whole lot of frequent flyer miles.

It is not just about achieving the goal.

It is about the journey.

And I hope you will enjoy every step of it, just like I did.