Claude Pepper stamp is redrawn

The newer version looks more like the politician known for championing older Americans.

By STEPHEN NOHLGREN

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 4, 2000

OLD STAMP

NEW STAMP The postal service released the old stamp in October and won’t release the new one for another week or two. The reproduction was provided by the Pepper Foundation.

More than a decade after his death, Claude Pepper is looking more like his old self again. A 33-cent postage stamp, designed to honor the feisty Florida politician, has been redrawn.

Gone are the sharp facial angles and gaunt visage that peered out from the stamp when the U.S. Postal Service publicized its first design last October.

A new design shows Pepper with the same thinning hair, the same black aviator glasses and the same jug ears.

But his face is fuller, his jowls droopier. He looks more like the old Southern pol we once knew, the lionhearted lawmaker who could spellbind us with oratorical passion.

The redesign stemmed from an October St. Petersburg Times story that questioned why the former U.S. senator and congressman looked so young and thin in the proposed stamp.

Above all, Pepper was a champion of the elderly. Voters all over the country looked for his guidance on Medicare and Social Security. The oldest sitting member of Congress when he died at 88, his leathery face symbolized vital, successful aging.

After the story, Pepper's brother, Frank, asked the postal service to change the design. He sent photographs to stamp development manager Terry McCaffrey showing Pepper at older stages in his life.

"I hardly recognized him as my brother," Frank Pepper said last week. "I told McCaffrey I wasn't trying to make him look like a matinee idol, because he wasn't. But I thought they could do better."

Ontario artist Mark Summers had never met Pepper. He worked off a photograph that the postal service gave him. He didn't set out to make Pepper look younger, he said last October, but he did make a few cosmetic changes.

"You want to be complimentary to a subject," Summers said. "I made sure his hair was nicely combed. He had a slight squint in one eye, so I opened them up. I gave him more of a smile."

What emerged was a trim Pepper, looking more like he was in his 50s or 60s.

After Frank Pepper's entreaties, the postal service asked Summers to have another go at it, using a photograph taken in 1984, four years before Claude Pepper's death. The family "felt more people identify him as an older man," McCaffrey said.

Once again, Summers used the "scratch board" technique most commonly associated with his work for Barnes & Noble's posters and advertisements. He covers a wax surface with ink, then scratches out white lines to create the image.

The new stamps are due out Sept. 7, when the first batch will be postmarked from Tallahassee for collectors. The public can buy them from any post office the next day.

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