MT. VERNON — Theodore Roosevelt was one, as is Karl Rove and English dignitaries such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the Queen of England.

They’re called philatelists — also known as stamp collectors — and one local resident has made it his goal to not only promote the hobby, but get more youth interested in it.

Ryan Wellmaker was recently named a Senior Fellow with the Youth Philatelic Leaders Fellowship Class of 2011 at the American Philatelic StampShow held in Richmond, Va. Wellmaker, a sophomore at Tulane University in New Orleans, said collecting stamps has been a hobby of his since he was a young teen.

“My grandfather, Bob Metcalf, and I are the best of friends,” he explained. “We do absolutely everything together — anything business-related or hobby-related. He’s a big stamp collector and when I was about 14 I tried it out one day.”

Wellmaker said he found himself fascinated with English Victorian stamps, which were first produced in 1840.

“(My grandfather) has practically everything produced since 1847, and I wanted to collect something different. It’s no fun collecting duplications,” he joked.

Wellmaker began collecting stamps in earnest, searching for his Victorian “penny black stamps” — which not only are sometimes difficult to find, but may also be worth a lot of money.

“Stamps in general, well, today they’re only 44 cents,” he remarked. “The first U.S. stamp cost around 5 and 10 cents. The first English was worth about a penny. They get extremely expensive. A never-used English (penny black) stamp can go up to $3 million, while a mint U.S. (first stamp) can go up to $100,000.”

And while there have been a variety of stamps produced over the last 260 years, Wellmaker is particular about his collection.

“I really go for the good stuff,” he admitted. “I have a concept that junk stays junk and I look at (stamps) as investment pieces. Stamps are most valuable for their weight and size. For example, you could have a thing of gold, but you would have to have so much to amount to those millions of dollars (like stamps bring). What makes them expensive is the scarcity. They don’t produce them from the 1840s anymore. Primarily I collect England pre-Victorian. Great Britain was the first country to issue stamps on paper and it started with the penny blacks.”

Wellmaker enjoys locating a rare find, but he also enjoys being able to work the stamps like a puzzle.

“I enjoy plating the penny stamp. When you get stamps, they come in a sheet — you peel them off and put them on an envelope. But each stamp is also categorized by its placement. It has a specific number or plate number and you can tell what part of the sheet it was located. It’s easier to do with older ones and more fun. And because there’s so many out there, I like to plate them to see where they were on a sheet. That’s what makes collecting so fun, because you keep looking for it.”

This is Wellmaker’s first year as a Senior Fellow, which will be a two-year term he intends to utilize to encourage other youth to get involved with stamp collecting — or philately. He said numbers are decreasing in the hobby, because many of the older generation who began collecting as children are now passing away.

“Sometimes people pick up the hobby in later years, but most kids back in the day were collectors. My grandfather told me a story of when he was in middle school, he and others would go to people’s houses and trade stamps,” he said. “And with more people passing away, and less people adopting the hobby, the stamps become more expensive.”

He added the advancement of technology — such as the Internet and e-mail — is also another reason people have lost interest in collecting stamps.

Wellmaker was named in the recent October issue of American Philatelist Magazine about being a Senior Fellow and has plans to travel to Washington, D.C. in December to visit the postal history exhibit at the Smithsonian.

“I really enjoy it,” he said. “It’s a fantastic pastime, a great hobby and something you can control — no one can tell you what you can or can’t collect.”