Findlay man gives stamp of approval to longtime collection

By his own admission, Philip Hendel is addicted to postage stamps. In fact, three rooms in his home are devoted to the hobby that keeps him busy eight to 10 hours each day. "I can't bite my fingernails. I don't watch television. I like stamps," he said. Hendel's parents came from Lithuania and he grew up, the youngest of three children, in Connecticut. Prompted by his older brother, Hendel began casually collecting stamps about 75 years ago in the third grade. "My older brother said that my sister collected stamps. And he, to this day, collects stamps," he said. Hendel was interested in journalism in high school and served as sports editor and then editor in chief of the school paper. He received a scholarship to study journalism at Boston University and graduated in 1959. After serving in the Army, Hendel joined the family-owned wholesale distributorship of toys to retail stores and took on the sales responsibilities. The toy distributorship later took on additional lines of general merchandise for supermarkets and drug stores. Hendel later went off on his own and accepted a regional manager position with World Toy House in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was appointed national sales manager and later accepted the position of sales manager and credit manager for Chicago-based Comet Industries, which made balsa airplane models and balsa gliders. Now 84, Hendel has been an avid collector for 50 years. He owned an indoor flea market along with a nostalgia and collectible store in New London, Connecticut. Among his interests were baseball cards, comic books, beer cans, Pez candy dispensers, ice cream scoops and Disney memorabilia. At one point, Hendel told his sons they were welcome to any of his treasures — except the stamps. "I don't do this for value," he explained. "I just do it because I like it and people like it." Hendel previously collected stamps from the United States. Now he's interested in foreign stamps and fills large binders by country, having finished about 30 albums. "Instead of starting with 'A,' I started with 'Z' — Zululand — and I worked forward," he said of the South African region. "This is a work in progress." He finds stamps at flea markets and stamp shows, and by networking at business meetings. "I tell people I collect stamps. 'Do you know anybody who has any foreign stamps?' And I tell them I'm hooked on stamps. I'm an addict," he said. Hendel would like to share his interest with others. Once he finds out a person's heritage, he wants to show them stamps from their country. "My concept is, there are a lot of people in Findlay or anywhere who don't know what their heritage is. So wouldn't people like to see stamps from their family heritage?" he asked. Hendel recalled a day when he was showing stamps to a man from Mexico. As he was looking through the book, the man became excited at a stamp depicting the person who was president of Mexico when the man was in 10th grade. "So I said, 'What do people have in common? They all came from somewhere,'" Hendel said. Wolf: 419-427-8419