How a misspelling sparked a new collection

Philatelic Foreword by Jay Bigalke

How we end up on the journey to collect something seems to always have a story.

One of my smallest collections started with the somewhat frequent misspelling of my last name as “Biglake” instead of Bigalke. The “a” and “l” get transposed on occasion, and one of my friends even does it on purpose on mail he sends to me.

One day, the misspelling led me to look up to see if there were any towns in the United States named Big Lake. And I found one in Alaska that had its own post office for a few years.

In spring 2018, I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to Anchorage, Alaska, with my father without much of a plan for things to do. We explored Seward and then headed toward Wasilla, and that’s when I recalled that the town of Big Lake was nearby.

Figure 1 shows a cover from Dec. 31, 1955, the last day of operation for the post office in Big Lake. Its post office had only opened five years earlier, in 1950.

However, there still is a contract post office there, and it has a postmark, which I obtained. According to sources online, the area has a population of around 3,800.

Figure 2 shows two photographs I took to document the random experience. One shows me and the iconic green town sign, like so many across the United States, at the entrance to the community. And the second shows the nearby lake of the same name, mostly frozen over at the time.

A little postal history combined with a vacation. Not too bad in the grand scheme of things.

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