 Photo courtesy of Connie Kale Johnson |
About 900 people attended the ceremony on January 11 and over 70,000 stamps were sold that day. This was the largest attendance at a first day issue in the history of the U.S. Postal Service. A similar ceremony was also scheduled for Monday, January 13, Jack London Square, Oakland. Russ and Winnie Kingman, Becky London, and Oakland Postmaster Austin Simon officiated. Russ and Becky felt Glen Ellen and Oakland were more appropriate sites for celebrations than San Francisco, even though London was born in San Francisco. As Becky said in an article in the Oakland Tribune, Sunday, January 12, 1986, "All San Francisco has is a plaque on a building [now a Wells Fargo Bank] that was the site of the house where Daddy was born." Close up view of stamp |
