This is not the nephew of steel magnate Charles Michael Schwab. The kid appears to be the son of Frederick and Molly Schwab. In 1930, age 21, he was still living at home and working as a bookkeeper. But you coulda guessed that.

I would wager that posing him this way was the photographer's idea. I once saw a newspaper photographer talk two boys into posing INSIDE a huge pile of leaves they had raked up. The photo got published.

I stopped collecting stamps - I'm collecting email headers now.

I started collecting stamps around 1957, when I was ten, when my parents bought me an orange cloth bag of foreign stamps from the local 5 & 10 store for a dollar. The stamps were still on the envelope paper like Chuck's. You had to soak them off with water. Lots of duplicate general postage stamps from the UK. My grade school collected US postage stamps and sent them to a company which bagged them up for sale overseas. Some of the girls in my class sorted these stamps and gave me the foreign stamps which the company did not want. One time I was given a large amount of foreign stamps which someone had taken out of a stamp collection and donated to the school. What a treasure trove that was. My Aunt from New York worked in an office which received a large amount of foreign correspondence. She would save up the stamps and mail them to me. One of my boyhood friends had a grandfather who collected stamps for years and who would buy sheets of stamps and store them away. When I saw the collection of these sheets from the 1920's through the 1940's (including zeppelin airmail stamps) it was like entering King Tut's tomb. Back in these early days of my collecting, the US Postal Service issued very few commerative stamps each year. As the US and other counties began to issue large numbers of commerative stamps each year, my interest in collecting waned, however I still have my collection.

Charles Michael Schwab (1862-1939) was an American steel magnate. Not related to the founder of the brokerage firm Charles Schwab Corporation

He had a namesake nephew, the son of his brother Joseph. Could this be who this is? This boy certainly has the elder Charles Michael Schwab ears.

Is this not a rather odd way to display your collection, valuable or not?

Did getting go on to found a brokerage firm? Or was that his son?

[No relation. -tterrace]

A thin line separates collecting from accumulating. I think this kids just crossed that line. 90% of the stamps piled here are from the Franklin (1cent) / Washington (3cent) series which where the common stamps of the day at that time and are worthless (with some exceptions) today. Because most of the stamps are still attached to the envelop paper they were sent on, I can make an educated guess that this kid's father worked in a big office and brought home all of these stamps for him.

[Speaking as a fellow sometime-philatelist, I'd say the album indicates he also has a real stamp collection. -tterrace]