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Christmas Seal Stamps, which were once a major source of revenue for the National Tuberculosis Association, may now be a thing of the past, but there was a time when a large portion of the population purchased them and affixed them to the envelopes of their Christmas cards.
Shown here on November 24, 1941 is a young girl, named Sally Russell, locally selling the first sheet of the newly designed Christmas Seal Lighthouse Stamps to Cyrus L. Gray, who was the U.S. Coast Guard lighthouse keeper at the Saugerties Lighthouse on the Hudson River in New York. At the time, the young Sally Russell, who was the daughter of Mrs. Fabian L. Russell, was the vice president of the local Saugerties Christian Myer Society, Children of the American Revolution. Cyrus L. Gray had been the keeper of the Saugerties Lighthouse since February 27, 1940 when he replaced lighthouse keeper Conrad Hawk who had died on the job.
The 1941 Christmas Seal Stamps were special because this time they featured a lighthouse on them from a painting by famous artist Stevan Dohanos. In later years, Dohanos paintings of Maine’s West Quoddy Head Lighthouse and Massachusetts’s Brant Point Lighthouse appeared on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post in 1945 and 1954 respectively.
Sally Russell was brought out to the lighthouse on a Coast Guard patrol boat piloted by Chester B. Glunt, who was the keeper of the nearby Turkey Point Buoy and Beacon Station. His wife, Ruth Reynolds Glunt, a local historian and camera enthusiast, and who 35 years later would author the book Lighthouses and Legends of the Hudson, took the photo.
Little could any of them have known on that brisk and cold day of November 24, 1941, that a mere 13 days later, on December 7th, the United States would be plunged into a World War when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
A couple of days after the Japanese attack, Cyrus L. Gray was removed as the keeper of the Saugerties Lighthouse and was transferred to a Coast Guard Patrol Boat in New York Harbor.
This story appeared in the
Jan/Feb 2019 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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