Sometimes I've tried various designs and not liked the results. Other times, my friends don't like the results and advise against using the earlier versions. Sometimes I just come up with something better. Here's one issue, 1992's Olympic Baseball, where I went so far as to print the cards and apply the stamps, but for some reason, never serviced them:

The cards were designed on an Apple IIgs (remember them?) and the designs were printed out on a dot-matrix printer (remember them?) and taken to a commercial printer. The card on the left was the same size as a #6¾ envelop; on the right, 5"x7". Single stamps were also affixed to the smaller-size cards, but since I collect ZIP blocks on FDCs, I always tried to service at least one Dragon Card that way. Somewhere, there's also a 5"x7" card with a ZIP block affixed.

Here are some designs not used in the first half of 2010.

The theme of the Singing Cowboys combo was that Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were, well, singing cowboys. But Autry's biggest hit song, still being played on the radio every Christmas, is "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer." So I inserted Rudolph into this roundup of horses. No one except me thought it was funny or made sense.

The United Nations had planned to issue at the NAPEX stamp show near Washington, D.C., two definitives and a stamped envelope showing the New York City skyline. It makes about as much sense as some other first-day cities. The picture shows the NYC skyline, including the United Nations, from the vantage of a park on Roosevelt Island in the East River. However, it takes a lot of 3¢ and 4¢ stamps to make the 44¢ rate, so then the concept was to recrop the photo and make a label cachet for the stamped envelope. But the UN postponed the issuance of the envelope, and I lost enthusiasm for the definitives. But I'm ready for the UN's 75th anniversary in 2020!

These are some of the screen shots from "The African Queen" that I considered before choosing the one I used for Dgn 372, the African Queen Katharine Hepburn/Humphrey Bogart combo (shown on the right).

These designs drew big yawns from the friends to whom I showed them. I was trying to pick up the hiking theme and style of the stamp. The horizontal version came first, and would have been fine, until I saw the postmarks intended for the issue. Then I switched to the vertical format. Twenty-four hours later, though, I came up with the idea of using my own Boy Scout patches and membership cards from the mid 1960s. I couldn't find my Stamp Collecting merit badge, however.

The patches include a Trekoree-gone-bad along the Appalachian Trail on Bear Mountain (New York), when the adult planners provided faulty maps and everyone got lost. Some groups were out well past mealtime; no one had brought food since this was supposed to be something like "a three-hour cruise" — um, hike. There's also my Troop Scribe patch, 1967 membership card, one of my Totin' Chip card certifying knife safety (we all had several, in case a senior leader tore one up for playing with a knife) and a Klondike Derby. The red Camporee 1966 patch (my first) shows the 1964-65 World's Fair Unisphere; the Council was not far from Flushing, and I'm sure I wasn't the only Scout who attended the Fair many times during its run. (I went 13 times in 1964 and 9 more in 1965.)

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