Post Office reveals new stamps for '09

Commemorative issues to include early TV shows

WASHINGTON - Folks who grew up as television came of age will delight in a 20-stamp set included in the Postal Service's plans for 2009 recalling early memories of the medium.

Besides commemorating black-and-white TV, the service's 2009 postage stamp program ranges from commemorating President Lincoln to the Thanksgiving Day parade, civil rights pioneers, actor Gary Cooper, poet Edgar Allan Poe, Supreme Court justices, and Alaska and Hawaii statehood.

Most of the commemorative stamps are priced at 42 cents, the current first-class rate. However, a rate increase is scheduled in May and the size will depend on the consumer price index.

The Early TV Memories stamp set is scheduled for release Aug. 11 in Los Angeles.

One recalls the quiz show "You Bet Your Life," on which the unflappable Groucho Marx awarded prizes to contestants who answered questions. If they said a secret word, a toy duck dropped down with a cash reward.

In a memorable scene from "I Love Lucy," Lucille Ball and sidekick Ethel Mertz work at an assembly line that speeds up and they can't wrap the candy quickly enough, causing panic.

September brings a series honoring the contributions of Supreme Court associate justices Joseph Story, Louis D. Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and William J. Brennan Jr.

A dozen pioneers of the civil rights movement will be honored with stamps scheduled for release Feb. 21 in New York.

Included are writer and lecturer Mary Church Terrell; journalist Mary White Ovington; J.R. Clifford, the first black attorney licensed in West Virginia; Joel Elias Spingarn, who endowed the Spingarn Medal, awarded by the NAACP for outstanding achievement by a black American; Oswald Garrison Villard, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Daisy Gatson Bates, who mentored nine black students enrolled at all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957.

Also Charles Hamilton Houston, an architect of the civil rights movement; Walter White, who conducted undercover investigations for the NAACP; Medgar Evers, an NAACP official in Mississippi until his assassination in 1963; Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper who fought for black voting rights; lifetime activist Ella Baker, and NAACP leader Ruby Hurley.