W. Wilson Hulme, Stamp Historian, Dies at 60
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W. Wilson Hulme II, a leading collector and historian of postage stamps, who became the first curator of philately at the National Postal Museum, died January 10 of a heart attack while on museum business in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 60.
A stamp collector since childhood, Hulme had a career as a Navy officer and corporate executive before joining the Postal Museum, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution, in 2002. In the years since, he raised the profile of the museum, housed in the old City Post Office Building near Union Station, and of philately, the study of stamps.
With a philosophy of “accessing the inaccessible,” Hulme put rare collections on view and put the Postal Museum at the center of the stamp-collecting world. Last year, it drew more than 500,000 visitors.
Hulme lived in Morristown, N.J.
