S. Garton Churchill papers on Churchill-Hoffman U.P.U. stamp collection

Universal Postal Union (Union générale de postes) was founded in 1874. It became a specialized agency of the United Nations in 1947. U.P.U. stamps were issued in 1949 to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the formation of the U.P.U.

Seymour Garton Churchill was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio in 1900 and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University (B.A. 1922) and Harvard Law School (1926). He spent most of his legal career at the firm of Loeb, Churchill & Lawther in Manhattan. He began playing competitive bridge in 1928 and became one of the great American bridge players and bridge theorists. He wrote Contract bidding tactics at match-point play (1937) and Churchill natural bidding style at contract bridge (1979). He died of pneumonia in Fairview North Carolina in at age 92 in 1992. His wife was Mary Ellen Peck Churchill (d.1973), and they had two children, James Garton Churchill and Barbara F. Churchill Thompson.

In the introduction to these papers, Churchill states that for over twenty years he had been collecting United States commemorative stamps for his two children, through an invalid friend of his, Lester L. Hoffman of Brooklyn, New York. In 1949, at Hoffman's urging, Churchill began collecting foreign Universal Postal Union stamps issued to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the forming of the U.P.U. Churchill gifted this stamp collection to Houghton in November of 1952.