Christmas Seals
Several years later, in 1907, she was drawn to the cause of helping people with tuberculosis (TB). She had already heard of an idea in Denmark in which people attached a special stamp to their mail, the proceeds of which would go to fight the disease, and decided to introduce the same idea in Delaware. Her goal was to raise $300 for a local sanitarium, using a bright red stamp she designed herself, and convinced local post offices to sell them for just 1 cent. This way, she believed, even the poorest people could help in the fight against TB.
Though the idea failed at first, Bissell was able to gain enough publicity from a Philadelphia newspaper to make $3,000, ten times the amount she originally hoped to get. People were intrigued by the idea of Christmas Seals, and the following year, Howard Pyle, a notable illustrator from Wilmington, donated the design of the second stamp.
Bissell wrote under the pseudonym Priscilla Leonard.
Bissell spent the remainder of her life promoting Christmas stamps and helping to eliminate tuberculosis. She died in 1948. A public hospital outside Wilmington bears her name.
In 1980, on the 119th anniversary of her birth, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 15 cent stamp in her honor.
Read more about this topic: Emily Bissell
Famous quotes containing the words christmas and/or seals:
““End of tomorrow.
Don’t try to start the car or look deeper
Into the eternal wimpling of the sky: luster
On luster, transparency floated onto the topmost layer
Until the whole thing overflows like a silver
Wedding cake or Christmas tree, in a cascade of tears.””
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Social and scientific progress are assured, sir, once our great system of postpossession payments is in operation, not the installment plan, no sir, but a system of small postpossession payments that clinch the investment. No possible rational human wish unfulfilled. A man with a salary of fifty dollars a week can start payments on a Rolls-Royce, the Waldorf-Astoria, or a troupe of trained seals if he so desires.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)