When William Allen White's sixteen-year-old daughter Mary was killed in a riding accident in 1921, he wrote her obituary for his Kansas newspaper. It became one of the most reprinted pieces of American journalism in the 20th century.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Catalog Number: Scott #960

• Denomination: 3 cents (3¢)

• Date of Issue: July 31, 1948

• Printing Method: Rotary Press, Engraved (Intaglio)

• Perforation: 10½ × 11

• Color: Bright Red Violet

• Subject: Portrait of William Allen White, journalist and editor of the Emporia Gazette

CONDITION ANALYSIS (Seller-Assessed)

• Status: Used

• Grading: Fine

• Postmark: Black machine slogan promoting U.S. Savings Bonds. Slogan cancels were widely used in the postwar years to carry government messages through the mail. The cancel does not obscure the portrait or principal design elements.

• Obverse: All major design features, including the portrait and decorative quill, scroll, and inkwell elements, remain clearly identifiable.

• Reverse: No original gum present, as expected for a used stamp. Reverse is clean with no visible tears, thinning, or repairs.

• Centering / Margins: Fine. Perforations remain clear of the design frame on all sides.

• Perforations: Intact on all four sides. No evidence of trimming, reperforation, or artificial alteration.

HISTORY

William Allen White spent nearly his entire career at the Emporia Gazette, a small daily newspaper in Emporia, Kansas, which he purchased in 1895 at age 27 and edited until his death in 1944. From that unlikely perch he became one of the most influential journalists in America - a progressive Republican whose editorials were reprinted nationally, whose friendships spanned presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt, and who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for his editorials defending civil liberties during the Red Scare.

His most enduring piece of writing was not an editorial but an obituary. When his sixteen-year-old daughter Mary died in a riding accident in 1921, White wrote about her for the Gazettem, a plainspoken account of who she was and what her life had meant. The piece was reprinted across the country and remains in American journalism curricula to this day.

The postmark on this example carries a slogan promoting U.S. Savings Bonds: a standard postwar government message that gives the stamp a specific historical context, circulating through the mail in the same years White's legacy was being consolidated.

STEVEN SAYS

White ran a small-town Kansas newspaper and became one of the most widely read journalists in the country. The obituary he wrote for his daughter is still taught in journalism schools. The Savings Bonds slogan postmark on this one places it squarely in the postwar years.