Singers, Actors Get Stamps of Approval : Mail: Postal Service’s 1994 offerings will include tributes to Bing Crosby, Ethel Merman, Muddy Waters, Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Kops.

Is there life after Elvis? Or, as Postmaster General Marvin T. Runyon would probably phrase it, is there money after Elvis?

The U.S. Postal Service, which made more money off this year’s Elvis Presley stamp than any stamp in its history, has revealed its plans for next year.

There are no more rockers, but there are entertainers galore on the 102 planned stamps--enough, perhaps, to come close to the $36 million profit that the Postal Service says it made off its 29-cent tribute to the King.

Next year postal workers will be honoring singers Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Ethel Merman and Muddy Waters to turn back the agency’s sea of red ink. There will be stamps for eight blues and jazz singers, Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Kops and nine others from the silent screen, and even Wild West stars Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley.

It’s almost as if the postal executives have discovered the drawing power of People magazine, albeit that the first requirement for getting on a stamp is being dead at least 10 years. For an agency that used to revel in releasing stamps for little-known historic figures and events, 1993 may have been a watershed.

“Once Elvis was out, everything else falls in line,” said Mary Ann Owens, a member of the panel that recommends stamp designs. The subjects were culled from an estimated 30,000 petitions for new stamps.

Runyon seems delighted, describing the new stamps as “a celebration of American history.”

Last week he got some help from an emotional Mark Matthews, 99, of Washington state, as the postmaster general disclosed plans to honor Matthews’ old Army cavalry unit, the all-black Buffalo Soldiers. Matthews said he had not been so excited since 1940. “That’s when I couldn’t ride my horse no more,” he told a hushed audience. “That’s when I cried.”

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s delegate in Congress and one of Runyon’s sharpest critics on Capitol Hill, showed up at the National Postal Museum to praise the postmaster general for honoring 15 African Americans with stamps next year, more than in any year.

“We’ve come to a point where you are a nobody until you are a somebody on a stamp,” she said.

“I must say I’m very proud,” said a smiling Mercy Morganfield of New York as she and Runyon unveiled a huge reproduction of the stamp that will honor her father, blues musician Muddy Waters. He will be honored in June along with Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mildred Bailey, Jimmy Rushing, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey and Howlin’ Wolf.

In September, Crosby, Cole and Merman join with Al Jolson and Ethel Waters in a set of stamps dedicated to popular singers.

When Presley was selected for the first stamp in a series dedicated to the “Legends of American Music” two years ago, fans of Crosby and Cole inundated postal officials with demands for more stamps. Earlier this year, a Country-Western series came out; it included Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, the Carter Family and Bob Wills. Future series will be dedicated to opera singers and other musicians.

Sheets of 50 stamps each are available inside a replica of an old record jacket.

Illustrator Al Hirschfeld, who created the 1991 comedians series, will return with 10 stamps dedicated to silent movie stars. In addition to Chaplin and the Keystone Kops, the stamps will feature Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, ZaSu Pitts, Lon Chaney, Theda Bara, John Gilbert and Buster Keaton.

There will be little great art. A Madonna by Italian baroque artist Elisabetta Sirani will adorn next year’s Christmas stamp, but most of the year’s issues will feature the colorful pop art that postal executives say their customers want.

Norman Rockwell, that sturdy painter of small-town America, is being honored with five stamps on the centennial of his birth. One shows his famous self-portrait and others celebrate the “four freedoms”--freedom from want and fear, and freedom of speech and of worship--that President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid out in a World War II speech.

There will be two stamps, an Express Mail $9.95 stamp and a first-class 29-cent stamp, to mark the 25th anniversary of the first landing on the moon. After he unveiled a large reproduction of the $9.95 stamp, Runyon was asked why the stamp was so expensive:

“It’s the highest-priced stamp, I guess, because it cost a lot of money to go to the moon,” he said.