But there comes a time to let go of childish things, and the stamps, plate blocks and first-day covers I collected in the 1950s had sat in a box in the basement for too many years, unlooked at, unattended to, low-hanging fruit in my efforts to downsize.

So off I went, with my collection, first to Maryland Stamps and Coins, open for 42 years and among the dwindling number of businesses still serving a dying hobby.

There I learned the sad truth: There is no longer a market for the collection I once so greatly valued. Collectors are passing on at an alarming rate; the average collector, I was told, is 65 to 70 years old. There was a time when the Inverted Jenny stamp was a household name; though examples continue to fetch seven figures at auction, how many people have even heard of it?

Judy Johnson, the membership manager of the American Philatelic Society, the world’s largest nonprofit organization for stamp collectors, confirmed all of this. The society has 28,953 members today, compared with 56,532 two decades years ago — a 50 percent drop in 20 years, and prospects are not good.

“Trying to bring in the younger 30-to-50-year-old crowd is really difficult,” she said. The continuing decline is because of “things you can’t control, illness and death.”

The Maryland stamp dealer had no commercial use for my collection. But, he said, I could donate them to Stamps for the Wounded, a veterans organization. It was, the brochure he handed me stated, “Philately’s Volunteer Service Committee.” I called Bruce Unkel, who helps organize donations. He invited me to bring my collection to a storage facility in Falls Church, Va., where, every Saturday for four hours, volunteers sort and prepare the donations for shipment to Veterans Affairs hospitals and residences across the country.

Arriving at the facility, I walked through deserted hallways to reach the locker where three men, Bruce, 76, Larry, 74, and Drew (“just old,” he told me), sat and sorted. Except for when the facility “puts their intercom on and we get music and advertisements,” Drew said, it is quiet in the storage unit where they go about their work.

On average, they get one collection a week. It cost $30 to ship a box, and they ship about eight a month, mostly to veterans of Vietnam and Korea. In addition to stamps, they accept cash, to cover the cost of the storage rental and, well, postage. All three men still collect, but Bruce won’t touch anything “worldwide” issued after 1970 because there is just too much of it, and every two years you must buy a new stamp album to accommodate new additions. It is all just too much, even for the die-hards.