Two students striding forward with their books, the postwar country's small salute to its young people.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Catalog Number: Scott #963

• Denomination: 3 cents (3¢)

• Date of Issue: August 11, 1948

• Printing Method: Rotary Press, Engraved (Intaglio)

• Perforation: 11 × 10½

• Color: Deep Blue

• Subject: A young woman and young man carrying books beside a "Youth Month" shield

• Format: Commemorative single

CONDITION ANALYSIS (Seller-Assessed)

• Status: Used, on a piece

• Grading: Fine

• Postmark: Black machine slogan postmark of straight bars across the design. The two figures, shield, and both 3¢ numerals remain readable.

• Obverse: The striding students, the Youth Month shield with its five stars, are all identifiable. 

• Reverse: The stamp remains affixed to a fragment of its original postal cover, so the stamp's own reverse and gum cannot be assessed while it is on paper.

• Centering / Margins: The design sits comfortably within the frame, with subtle upward shift.

• Perforations: The visible perforations appear intact.

HISTORY

The Saluting Young America stamp was tied to a national Youth Month observed from September 1 to 30, 1948, a coordinated effort by civic, religious, and educational groups to focus public attention on the well-being of American children and teenagers. Coming three years after the end of World War II, it reflected a country turning its energy from the war effort toward the next generation, the baby-boom children then filling schools and the older youth who would inherit the postwar world.

The design is deliberately wholesome. A young woman and a young man stride forward carrying books, images of education and purpose, beside a shield reading "Youth Month." There are no soldiers and no monuments, just healthy, forward-looking young people, exactly the reassuring picture a nation recovering from war wanted to project about its future.

Issued August 11, 1948, in deep blue, the stamp was a modest civic gesture rather than a tribute to any single hero or event. It belongs to a family of postwar commemoratives that celebrated ordinary American life, and this example survives on a piece of its original envelope, a small trace of the everyday mail it once carried.

STEVEN SAYS

This one is very of its moment. Three years after the war, the country ran a whole "Youth Month" campaign about looking after the next generation, and the stamp is the salute to it. Just two kids walking forward with their books, nothing fancy. This copy is still on a scrap of its envelope.