I'm getting a lot of e-mail about this stamp thing. Here's a message from John Hedegor who seems to know what he's talking about…
I have been reading with interest your items concerning postage stamps that seemed to represent waivers to the rule that people have to be dead for ten years before their likenesses are allowed on stamps (Presidents excepted). However, I must clear up a misconception here: the "ten years" rule was not adopted by the CSAC (Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee) until some time in the late 1960s. Until then, there were no limitations concerning a person's appearance on a postage stamp (so long as that person was deceased). During the 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S. issued many memorial stamps to those who had recently died; besides Disney and Hammarskjold, these included
Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay (1957), Ernst Reuter, mayor of (West) Berlin (1959), former Senators Robert Taft and Walter George (1960), Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1960), Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn (1962), Eleanor Roosevelt (1963), and in 1965, Winston Churchill and Adlai Stevenson.Unfortunately, I do not know precisely when the "ten years" rule went into effect, but since no memorial stamps for non-Presidents have been issued since Disney's in 1968, I will assume it was around 1968 or 1969, when the Post Office underwent a series of reorganizations. Surely King and Robert Kennedy would have been honored had the rule not been in effect then.
Also, Harry McCracken is quite correct that the likeness of circus clown Lou Jacobs was used for the American Circus stamp of 1966. But since his face was used a symbol of circus performers in general, and not as a commemoration of Lou Jacobs specifically, it was acceptable. Many living people have posed, or had their likenesses used for, postage stamps. Other examples include the Drug Abuse prevention stamp of 1971 (a young woman slouched in agony), and, going much further back, the Arbor Day stamp of 1932 (a little boy and girl planting a tree) and a Los Angeles Olympics stamp of the same year (a runner on his mark).
Unlike McCracken, I do collect stamps (as you can tell!) and I hope the above helps to clarify things somewhat.
Yes, it does. And I suppose my lingering curiosity is what it was that prompted someone to say, "We need a ten year rule." Now that you mention it was enacted in the sixties, I seem to remember someone once charging that they instituted the policy to avoid the controversy that would might have erupted had they issued a Martin Luther King stamp then. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case but I wonder what it was.