Manfred Winternheimer Passing
All Olympic collectors are (or should be) familiar with the name, Manfred Winterheimer. For decades, he has catalogued Olympic cancellations, registration labels, postal stationery and airmail of the summer and winter Olympic Games dating back to 1964. Sadly, we have word that Manfred recently passed away. A longtime member of SPI, he will be greatly missed.
In 2010, IMOS honored Manfred with a special honorary membership in their organization. On that occasion, IMOS President Thomas Lippert delivered a wonderful tribute to this lion of Olympic philately:
Even as a collector, who grew up in practically far away East Germany and for a long time had no interest in following the cumbersome procedures of the GDR foreign exchange and therefore more or less renounced it, one could not avoid coming across your name. Even then, it appeared on many documents relating to sporting events.
It was not until 1990 before we met for the first time in Dresden at a meeting of GDR sports collectors with the IMOS board, still in a divided country, but with open borders then.
Since then I have also been with IMOS and was soon able to convince myself of how capable this club of interested Olympic and sports collectors is.
For the members – and above all they were the addressees of your work – efficiency means constant information about everything that has to do with sports philately in the world. You performed this task in an exemplary manner and still do it with great dedication.
The fruits of your work also include the catalogs for the Olympic Games (up to 1988) that were published in the “good FIPO times”. Who doesn’t know the notes such as “Wi.H.2” in auction catalogs in our collecting areas?
In the many years of intensive contact with foreign collector friends, it became very clear to me that you have shaped the image of IMOS abroad more than anyone else.
We met at the Olympic Games – be it in Barcelona, Athens, Atlanta or Beijing – where you always spent a lot of time on your IMOS colleagues in order to fulfill their request for original documents from the Games.
Here, however, I have to be critical: This IMOS news service made some in the IMOS very comfortable – “Manfred will do it!”.
Dear Manfred, in all of this you have always remained the accessible, modest collector’s friend, with whom one could talk well, who did not go where cameras clicked or where superficial publicity was involved.
I think you deserve to become an honorary member of the association whose face you have so significantly influenced.
— Thomas Lippert, 2010
