Meet precocious 10-year-old stamp collector Ava Rose

Delivering the Mail by Allen Abel

The most precocious stamp collector in the great state of Wisconsin might be a 10-year-old girl named Ava Rose. Ava’s stock books are mostly filled with stamps picturing dogs and cats, along with stamps featuring butterflies, snakes and dinosaurs. You never put a dog and a cat together on the same page, of course. They just wouldn’t get along.

Ava is a child with special needs and special talents, including extraordinary senses of touch and taste. “She can take one look at a puzzle and tell you where all the pieces go,” her father, James Rose, told Linn’s Stamp News. “She can tell the difference between Sprite from a bottle and Sprite from a soda fountain.”

“She can smoke everybody and anybody in checkers,” James warned potential challengers.

Stamps came to Ava by way of her mother, Erica, who pored over her own grandfather’s collection in Illinois when she was young.

A couple of years ago, James was opening some Christmas cards and preparing to discard the envelopes when Erica urged him not to throw them away.

“You mean you’re going to collect the stamps?” James recalled exclaiming. “Are you crazy?”

Crazy she wasn’t, remembering her own fascination with her grandfather’s collection. Erica showed the stamps to Ava.

The little girl’s attention, often unfocused and easily distracted, zoomed in on the tiny, colorful images. Here were birds, flowers, elephants, sharks, dolls, puppies and kittens.

“Stamps have really calmed her down on a major level,” Erica said.

“They are a gateway for her to learn and decompress,” James explained. “She looks at her stamps and sorts them and that calms her down. Some days, if you saw Ava with her stamps, you would never know.”

At this point on her collecting journey, Ava has accumulated a lot of stamps: sheets of stamps, albums of stamps, folders of stamps, boxes of stamps, tubs of stamps.

She and her father have attended big shows in Chicago and Milwaukee and have been gifted with thousands of stamps. Dealers have warmly embraced the most precocious collector in America’s dairy state.

“Everywhere we go, it’s a breath of fresh air,” her father said. “People are joyous to see a little girl collecting stamps.”

He remembered a visit with stamp dealer Mark Reasoner at a Chicago bourse and how Reasoner patiently talked to Ava at length about the story that every stamp has to tell.

“I was very, very impressed,” James recalled. “She was perfectly still and quiet, focused on every word. Right then I knew she was hooked.”

“I was a bit apprehensive — it had been a long time since I had tried to talk with a 10-year-old,” Reasoner told Linn’s.

“But stamps provided the bridge for our interaction, especially butterfly stamps,” Reasoner said.

A few months ago, the Rose family made a journey to Alabama. There, they met a woman who had experienced some of the same sensitivities that have defined young Ava’s childhood.

That woman was also a stamp collector.

“She wanted to pass on her joy of stamp collecting and the different pictures and things that she had collected over her years as a child on to someone who could appreciate it,” James said. “Ava really enjoyed the visit and there were a lot of similarities between the two. That was the only time Ava found somebody with the same issues and struggles that she encounters.”

“I saw a 10-year-old girl connect with elders the way many kids don’t do today,” James said. “It was an open door and she went through it.”

Back in Wisconsin, there are stuffed animals, Lego sets and stamps.

“This has been very emotional and rewarding for us as parents,” James said. All of this has opened up a lot of doors and has enabled a lot of things to become easier and more obtainable.”

“Sometimes the stamping is a decompression moment that can relieve a massive amount of pressure on a situation, not to mention all of the learning and organization skills that go with it,” James continued. “Ava has met a lot of great people in the stamp industry and is very grateful and appreciative of everything small and big that she has received from such gracious and giving individuals.”

“All parents should know about this, especially parents of kids with these kinds of tendencies,” James said. “Stamps are something that a lot of families with kids today don’t know about. But there is such a huge amount of learning, It teaches you so much. It shows you the world in a completely different light.”

“As long as she can keep evolving in it, she can collect stamps for the rest of her life,” James said. “It’s not about value. It’s about education. When she is with her stamps, a lot of things get wiped away.”.

Connect with Linn’s Stamp News: 

    Sign up for our newsletter
    Like us on Facebook
    Follow us on Twitter