Howard Paine dead, designer who changed face of stamps and National Geographic magazine was 85
You probably don't know who Howard Paine was, but you've seen his graphic artistry probably thousands of times.
You've seen it if you've ever licked a postage stamp -- back in the days when they had to be licked -- mailed a letter, or thumbed the pages of National Geographic.
For more than 30 years, Paine was a stamp design coordinator of the Postal Service. For more than 30 years, he also was a graphic artist at the National Geographic Society, retiring as art director.
At the Postal Service, Paine helped bring out the 29-cent Elvis Presley stamp in 1993. After 21 years, it remains the all-time leader in commemorative stamps, with 500 million sold. Paine also helped create the Ronald Reagan stamp, as well as stamps commemorating the planets, gospel singers, movie stars and comedians. He had a role in the design of 400 stamps in all, according to Terry McCaffrey, the retired manager of stamp development at the Postal Service.
At National Geographic, it took more than 20 years but, beginning in 1959, Paine changed the basic cover design of the magazine. Ever so gradually, he removed a leaf here and a leaf there from the borders of clustered oak and laurel leaves that had graced the magazine's monthly covers since 1910.
"We went ahead with glacial speed," Paine told historian Eugene Scheel in a 2010 Washington Post interview. "We didn't want members writing in with, 'Where are my oak leaves.' "
On Paine's watch, color photography became the basic ingredient of National Geographic covers.
On Sept. 13, at the age of 85, Paine died at a health care center in Front Royal, Virginia. The cause was Alzheimer's disease, said a daughter, Michelle Pellatt.
At the Postal Service, where he became a stamp design coordinator in 1981 while still working for National Geographic, Paine once declared that he wanted to "do some adventurous things" with stamps.
He was the idea man and the persuasive force behind a series of cloudscape stamps that were issued by a skeptical Postal Service.
Word of the upcoming series reached the nation's corps of radio and television weather forecasters. They talked it up in their broadcasts, and the series sold surprisingly well, said McCaffrey, the retired postal official.
Howard Erwin Paine was born May 1, 1929, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and he began stamp collecting in childhood. He was a 1950 philosophy graduate of American International College in Springfield.
Paine was known for his bow ties and a soft-spoken manner. At staff meetings, he tended to be silent and sometimes appeared to be doodling, former Postal Service staffer McCaffrey said. Then he would stand up, walk over to whoever was leading the meeting, and hand him a napkin or scrap of paper with a stamp design drawn on it. Frequently it was just what was needed.
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