The Nicholas G. Carter Volunteer Recognition Awards recognize the outstanding efforts of American Philatelic Society volunteers at the national, regional and local level, and also recognize our younger members whose contributions and abundant talents are crucial to our future.

National Service

Barbara Asher

Barbara Asher has collected stamps since she was in first grade. She has volunteered at the youth table at Southeastern Stamp Expo and other stamp shows in the Atlanta area. She has made hundreds of stamp packets for handouts at programs for youth and topical stamp packets for the American Topical Association (ATA) to give to the youth.

Asher joined the ATA in 2012 and has helped as an ATA ambassador at many stamp shows. Since 2019, Asher has been the Taste of Topicals coordinator, spending countless hours sorting stamps, making topical stamp packets for more than 400 different topics and assembling them into Taste of Topical kits. These are sold at a nominal fee to promote topical stamp collecting with youth, new collectors, and/or collectors who want to start collecting a new topic while making a small income for the ATA.

In 2020, Asher was honored to receive the ATA Volunteer of the Year award.

Asher is a member of the Atlanta Stamp Collectors Club, serving first as secretary and then treasurer for many years. She is on the Southeastern Stamp Expo planning committee in charge of the youth area and hospitality suite. She also is a member of ESPER and FSIP.

Asher and her husband have been married for 45 years. They have three daughters, all dentists, who were stamp collectors growing up and two granddaughters (and one on the way), and she hopes that they will become stamp collectors shortly. 

Chris Lazaroff

Chris Lazaroff’s first position in organized philately was president of the Outagamie Philatelic Society in Appleton, Wisconsin in the mid1980s. He founded the Pulaski Stamp Club (Pulaski, New York) in 1985. It was during this time that he developed a strong interest in first day covers, starting his own line of cachets: CL Cachets. He is a member of the APS, Royal Philatelic Society London, American Topical Association, American Ceremony Program Society, and the Graphic Philately Association.

Lazaroff attended his first international show, AMERIPEX, in 1986. It was during the 1980s that he started attending first day ceremonies and set a goal of wanting to attend one in every state. He achieved that goal in 2016 when he flew to Wyoming to attend the ceremony for the National Parks Centennial sheet in Yellowstone National Park. This made him the first collector to ever achieve this goal.

During the 1990s, Lazaroff worked with World Series of Philately shows across the country to start having a cachetmakers bourse at their shows. Prior to this, only Americover, the annual show of the AFDCS, would host such bourses. These shows included Philatelic Show, Compex, Plymouth Show, Southeastern Stamp Expo, Okpex, Pipex, Rompex, and several others.

Lazaroff has worked with the USPS (both headquarters and districts) in putting together first day ceremonies. He has acted as the event coordinator for many of the events and also been invited to serve as the master of ceremony, or to be a featured speaker.

In 2005, Lazaroff was elected the president of the AFDCS, a position he held for more than five years. Later, he stepped in when the show chairman for Americover resigned and served in that position for several years.

After the pandemic, Lazaroff attended his first international show outside the U.S. in Athens, Greece (NOTOS). Like attending first day ceremonies, he developed a love for this and has attended international shows on a regular basis, including those in Hungary, Canada, Czech Republic, New Zealand, Germany, Thailand, and Romania. In 2022, Lazaroff agreed to serve as the U.S. commissioner to international shows and served in that capacity at the shows in Germany (IBRA), Thailand (Thailand 2023 WSC), and Romania (EFIRO). He was recently asked to be a special commissioner at CHINA 2024 and bring 50 frames of first day cover exhibits, as well as give a seminar on first day cover collecting and exhibiting.

Vesma Grinfelds

Vesma Grinfelds also was awarded the Ernest A. Kehr Award. Please see her biography here.

Alex Haimann

A stamp collector since the age of 7 and an APS member since the age of 10, Alex Haimann has never met a stamp or cover he didn’t like. His passion for philately came from the encouragement and support of the West Suburban Stamp Club in Plymouth, Michigan. This extremely positive welcome to the hobby has inspired Alex to seek out collectors in the younger generations and make them feel welcome, along with helping them connect with others.

In January 2008 (at what would sadly be APS President Nick Carter’s final APS show), during his Tiffany Dinner speech, Haimann presented the original proposal for what would become the American Philatelic Society’s Young Philatelic Leaders Fellowship program, now in its 15th year. Between 2005 and 2010, Haimann worked for the Smithsonian National Postal Museum as a collections specialist and web projects developer. In a volunteer capacity, Haimann served the APS as the chair of the Board of Vice Presidents (2013-2016) and as the chair of the Campaign for Philately Committee (2016-2022). Haimann also served on the World Stamp Show-NY 2016 and the Stockholmia 2019 committees.

Since 2008, Haimann has given dozens of talks in person and online across the U.S. to philatelic and non-philatelic audiences. Continuing a passion to bring philately and postal history to new audiences, Haimann exhibited his Anglo-Zulu War collection during a summer exhibition (“Clash of Empires: The 1879 Anglo-Zulu War” (www.clashofempires.org), at the Royal Philatelic Society London last summer with more than 2,000 people from 29 countries attending. Since the exhibition, videos created around the content of the exhibition have generated more than 1 million views on YouTube.

Haimann is very proud to have sponsored 744 new APS members to date, the second most of any living APS member, behind Don Sundman.

Local Service

Michael A. Bach

Michael A. Bach is an active member of the Reading Stamp Collectors’ Club and the Philatelic
Society of Lancaster. In 2014, Bach introduced an email version of the Reading Stamp Collectors’ Club’s Overprint newsletter, and in 2015 created a more expansive newletter, sometimes as much as 20 pages, which he continued to do until stepping down in December 2023.

In 2016, Bach become the Reading club’s treasurer and continues that duty today. In addition, Bach organized the club’s Christmas luncheon, and assisted with bus trips for area clubs to New York, and also secured behind the scenes visits at the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C.

Since 2019, Bach has organized the the Reading Stamp Show in November of each year and continues to help with auctions at the Lancaster club as well as doing full presentations and “show and tell” items from his varied collections to both clubs.

Bach likes to find a better home for oddball items in his collection by donating them to other club members that might have an interest in them. More recently, Bach has been accumulating Reading club memorabilia and has beome the de facto club historian, which he shares with club members in current editions of the Overprint, which is now combined with the Lebanon Patent, the monthly newsletter of the Lebanon (PA) Stamp Society.

Joan Harmer

Joan Harmer’s interest in philately began 22 years ago when she met her husband-to-be, Keith, through a common interest in vintage car racing. She began helping Keith with the old H.R. Harmer firm by designing the website and providing business advice and counsel. Keith’s business and the philatelic auction industry became the subject of many of Harmer’s papers as she finished her Master of Business Administration and then her doctorate, which focused on organizational culture.

Harmer formed Harmers International, Inc. and began operating it as a boutique philatelic auction house when Keith’s clients urged him to re-enter the business.

Joan Harmer was happy to support British Empire Study Group founder Richard Maisel when he retired and carried on the group’s mission of providing open access to philatelic programs and related subjects.

Harmer serves on the Board of Governors for the Collectors Club, where she helps the club with technology. She designed and implemented the online webinar process.

Harmer recently became the awards coordinator for the American Association of Philatelic Exhibitors.

In addition to the family philatelic auction house, Harmer is a business management consultant, focusing on technology management of financial systems, not-for-profit management, government contracting, and disaster recovery (Katrina, Sandy etc.). She had an 11-year career at IBM as an operations manager before becoming a consultant, and has worked at McKinsey Group as a program compliance officer, the disaster recovery programs for the states of New York, New Jersey, and Louisiana, to name a few. Her work with Bob Markovitz in a hyperspectral imaging firm served as the foundation of her interest in technical philately.

Ricky Johnson

Ricky Johnson is fondly called “ambassador” by fellow stamp collectors because of his outreach
to encourage membership in and to work on behalf of the Ebony Society of Philatelic Events and Reflections (ESPER).

Johnson has been a member of the organization since 1998. Since then, he has become one of ESPER’s most ardent supporters and membership recruiters. He is greatly responsible for the successful establishment of ESPER state chapters in Georgia and South Carolina by utilizing his leadership and mentoring skills.

Johnson supplied stamps for children at Black History programs and his tenure Georgia ESPER Chapter director “would not have been as successful without the help and support I received from Ricky Johnson.”

Oneal Tyler, South Carolina ESPER Chapter director and his wife, Cassandra, also give reflections on Johnson’s support of the society.

“Ricky Johnson is our personal ESPER stamp ambassador and cheerleader,” the Tylers wrote. “He teaches and guides all on how to collect, view details about the stamp, as well as the stamp’s artist or designer.”

Oneal met Johnson at a cultural event and while there, Ricky took him under his wing and started sharing and teaching him about different Black stamps. “Ricky has traveled all over the United States attending various stamp shows on his own and by supporting various stamp organizations and events to represent ESPER. While attending all these shows he recruits ESPER membership. He always communicates by sending a letter covered with various stamps about the show he attended and cites any upcoming unveilings or stamp events.”

Many express how Johnson, who often works quietly in the background, stimulates collector’s interest in collecting stamps, wrote Beatrice Cox, chapter director for the North Carolina ESPER chapter. Conversations with Johnson, she continued, are always enlightening and rewarding. He is an unselfish, encouraging stamp collector with a willingness to instruct, share, guide, and teach everyone about the joys of stamp collecting.

Jean W. Lewis

Jean W. Lewis of Columbia, Maryland first became interested in philately 47 years ago, with the 1977 issuance of the Harriet Tubman stamp, the inaugural stamp in the U.S. Postal Service’s Black Heritage Series suggested by Clarence Irving. She thought philately would be a fun way to teach her children and their classmates the contributions of African Americans in the history of their country.

In 1990, the African American Travelling Stamp Exhibit was officially launched with a showing at Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland. The collection has been exhibited at universities, churches, Juneteenth celebrations, museums, professional conferences, seminars, and of course K-12 schools. The presentations of the exhibit use tools Lewis developed to extend students’ learning. Even during the pandemic, children had access to the exhibit in creative ways using Zoom, and no fees are ever charged.

Lewis currently serves as the director of The Ebony Society of Philatelic Events and Reflections (ESPER)’s Maryland, Delaware, and District of Columbia chapter, and is a member of the American Philatelic Society, the Howard County Center of African American Culture’s board of directors, and Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority’s Iota Lambda Omega chapter.

Lewis is enormously proud of her successful submission (July 2022) of her ancestors’ farm in the Georgia and National Registers of Historical Places. This inclusion is significant as an early example of a post-Civil War farm property owned and operated by a former enslaved person, Reuben Gay, and his descendants and as a center of the African American community in Inman, Georgia (1882-1972).

In her professional life, Lewis, an Atlanta, Georgia native, earned her Bachelor of Science from Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University), and her Master of Science from Howard University in Washington D.C. As a research biologist, she worked for Howard’s College of Medicine conducting cancer research and for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Later, Lewis worked for the Howard County, Maryland public school system as a specialist in family and community outreach.

James “Jim” Pettway

Jim Pettway was brought back to stamp collecting after being a collector in his younger years in 1985, when he was being interviewed for a job in Jackson, Mississippi, by Lamar Stout. The interview was just about to end when Mr. Stout noticed, under “Hobbies” on Jim’s resume, “stamp collecting.” Stout, a Life Member of the APS, hired him on the spot and was from that point on Jim’s stamp collecting mentor.

Pettway is a member of the American Philatelic Society (APS No. 162144) and the Jackson (Mississippi) Philatelic Society. Over his years of membership in the local club, he served as director, secretary, and president. Jim was editor of the club’s newsletter from 1997 until 2002.

In 2003, Pettway joined the Knoxville Philatelic Society (KPS), where he has served as secretary (2003-2005), president (2007-2008) and numerous terms as director. As newsletter editor/publisher from 2003-2005, the KPS News won a 2003 silver-bronze award and a 2004 vermeil award, its first-ever APS chapter newsletter awards. During his role as society webmaster, the club was awarded the APS Star Route Awards large gold in 2021 and gold in 2022.

In 2018, he created stamp collecting workshops for beginners, which ended up including many advanced collectors who offered their expertise. He also held stamp collecting workshops at senior centers in the area.

Pettway is an enthusiastic promoter for club membership and has been instrumental in the club’s growth from 45 members when he joined to more than 160 today.

In 2020, Jim moved to Roanoke, Virginia and was elected for a two-year term as a club director of the Big Lick Stamp Club. Pettway is currently ATA ambassador for the Roanoke club. Although the BLSC has been an APS chapter member for a number of years, it was not until 2023 that the club gained recognition for its monetary contributions to the society due to Jim’s motion to make regular donations to the APS. In 2020, Pettway began to update the BLSC website, thus making the BLSC winner of an APS Star Route large vermeil award (2022) and a vermeil award (2023).

Jim works in the community, answering inquiries about inherited stamp collections, reviewing and advising holders of these collections. He is an APS stamp estate advisor and writes articles for the Original Gum, newsletter of the BLSC.

Todd Ronnei

Todd Ronnei, of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, was introduced to stamp collecting as a 9-year-old and has been pursuing it continuously for more than 50 years. A regular attendee and exhibitor at the Minnesota Stamp Expo, Ronnei was invited to join the show committee in 2011. Under the tutelage of Ross Olson, Ronnei became the show’s exhibits chair, responsible for recruiting collectors to provide exhibits for the show, inviting judges to serve on the jury, determining the frame layout for each show, coordinating the mounting and takedown of exhibits, and attending to the needs of the jury before and during the show. His other duties include the design of show cachets and cancels. In addition, Todd has recently created and maintains a new website for the Minnesota Stamp Expo.

Beyond his local service, Todd is a past officer, director and board chairman of the American First Day Cover Society (AFDCS), and continues to serve the society in various roles, including its webmaster for 15 years. In 2012, he received the AFDCS Distinguished Service Award.

Randy A. Smith

Randy A. Smith of Minneapolis, Minnesota, began volunteering as a swap circuit manager for the
International Society of Worldwide Stamp Collectors (ISWSC) after college, eventually becoming the coordinator for the entire program, serving as editor of the society journal, serving on the board of directors and becoming president for several years. Smith also served as the awards chair for the ATA for several years and continues to serve in the same position for the AFDCS. Smith designed and created the current award given to the best first day cover exhibit at World Series of Philately shows.

Encouraged by the then chair of the Minnesota Stamp Expo exhibits committee, Smith volunteered to coordinate exhibitor awards, preparing the palmares and organizing the exhibitor’s reception and awards ceremony. Over the next few years, he expanded his duties with the World Series of Philately show by becoming responsible for publicity, inviting organizations to hold their annual conventions at the show, preparing show cachets and putting together the show program. Randy expanded the show to include APS On The Road educational courses, finding volunteers to provide seminars during the show, and by providing outreach to youth collectors through Stamp Camp USA and encouraging youth exhibits. Since 2010, Smith has served as the general show chair, and, more recently, as the president of the Minnesota Stamp Expo.

Sandy Warwick

Sandy Warwick and her husband, Andrew, are longtime members of Tulsa Stamp Club. Sandy became club vice president from the late 90s through 2018. In 2015, she ascended to the club presidency and has remained such to this date.

Sandy taught summer courses for nine years at Tulsa Community College. Her “College For Kids” program included a class on stamp collecting. It was wildly successful and was
one of the more popular classes. Warwick has organized a class night for the local Boy Scouts who want to earn the stamp collecting badge. She has organized and hosted the club
bourse for a number of years, always with a mind to entice new collectors by offering advice to beginners who came to the show.

As a couple, the Warwicks are the spark plugs who keep a very active Tulsa Stamp Club going.

The club meets twice a month, offering entertaining and educational presentations. Turnout is healthy and engaged. The club also holds auctions and fellowship get-togethers throughout the year. The highlight of the Tulsa Stamp Club year is an annual bourse that brings in as many as a dozen dealers.

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