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Transcription: [00:02:01]
{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
basically there was a lot more to postal history then stamps.

{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
Yes, yes. Of course.

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
But, um, I did want to talk about my first day, because it was extremely goofy.
[00:02:09]
Um,

{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
[[laughs]]

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
I came and you have to go over the Castle at that point and get oriented.
[00:02:17]


{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
Oh, yes.

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
It was my first Smithsonian job, so by the time I came to my office, it was about 11:30.
[00:02:23]
And at that point I was being supervised by Ray Norby, who was the Foreign Stamps Curator.

{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
Yes, yes.
[00:02:30]


{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
Well, I didn't know at the time, but Ray had a habit of leaving for lunch - for a two hour lunch every day to go home and walk his dogs.
[00:02:36]


{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
Oh, for goodness sake. He didn't live very far.

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
[[laughs]] No, he didn't live very far and that was his habit. So, I got into the office and the first thing I saw was my boss, Ray Norby, leaving.
[00:02:45]
And he said "I won't be back till 2, so why don't you go around and go out and have lunch and come back." And I was so stunned that, I live nearby and I actually went home, I had three hours to kill. [[laughs]]
[00:02:59]
And I went home and sat in my apartment and I thought "Well, this is stamps, this is strange, I don't know what the heck is going on and do I even want to go back."
[00:03:07]


{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
[[laughs]] Well, you did, yes.

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
And around quarter to 2 came around, and I thought "Well, I've got to go back."
[00:03:12]
So, I went back and they gave me a little place to sit down, and they brought out 5 boxes that were just filled with photographs, all willy nilly. And they said, "You can organize the photographs".
[00:03:24]


{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
Organize?

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
Organize the photographs, so...

{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
Maybe this is the first, of sort of a practice session.
[00:03:30]


{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
Indeed it was. We had 10,000 photographs.

{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
Oh my goodness.

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
No one had done anything where, or anything really with them. There were photographs of trucks, of airplanes, of stamps...
[00:03:41]


{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
Of airplanes flying up side down [[laughs]] No, of course not.

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
[[laughs]] Not quite of that, but of people, of everything that you could imagine.
[00:03:51]
And I had just had no background in Philately. But I had a background in American History, thank goodness.

{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
Now tell me, Philately is what exactly?
[00:03:59]


{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
It's the collecting of these
[00:04:00]

Transcription Notes:
Reider Norby was Curator from 1966 to 1988 per Smithsonian website - must go by Ray.