posted 01-23-2021 03:15 PM               

Space Cover #595: My First Space Cover

Above is a cover postmarked in Wichita, Ks., on July 20, 1969, the day that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. It carries a Dow-Unicover (later morphed into Fleetwood) cachet and every US space stamp that had been issued to that date. And it was addressed to a (much) younger version of yours truly.

As the launch of Apollo 11 approached, this 13-year-old in Wichita, KS had been a space geek for 7 years, and collecting US stamps for 5 years. One day I saw an ad from Dow-Unicover selling their self-serve printed cachets for the first moon landing. The ad said that anyplace that one had them postmarked would be significant, as-long-as it was postmarked on the day of the moon landing. I was hooked! Ordered two cachets.

Then I went down to the local stamp shop (in Wichita it was in the back part of a downtown stationery store called the Hande Shoppe) and bought two mint copies of each of the space stamps that the US had issued to date. I went through a lot of head scratching and mockups to figure out how to put one of each of those stamps on each cover, and still have room for the self-address. As you can see, it just barely worked out! And the post office 4 blocks away had an outdoor mailbox with Sunday evening collection (July 20, 1969 was a Sunday).

So as soon as Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on July 20, I zoomed down to the post office on my bike and mailed the covers. They arrived a couple days later, one with an illegible postmark, and the one above. I saved the one above for a lot of years. As my space cover collecting tastes matured, I began to look down on this cover, figuring that a Wichita postmark wasn't worth a plugged nickel. I ended up trading it away decades ago.

Then it showed up on eBay in October, 2020. It was like seeing an old childhood friend! And to my astonishment, someone paid $7.36 for it! Guess that Wichita postmark was worth something after all! Hopefully, the person who won it will see this story…

What was your first space cover? Let's post them here! And as always, if you can't host the cover image, email it to me, and I'll be glad to host it for you.

posted 01-24-2021 03:33 PM               

There was an unsigned Mercury FDC that I thought was really cool, but knew nothing about space cover collecting. It was my first space cover ever seen.

More than two months later, his daughter (in her young 20's) surprised this young shy boy (that's me) with an autographed Apollo 8 cachet cover before the launch of man's first lunar orbital mission. She had it signed by Bill Anders while working at KSC's Flight Crew Training Building as one of the support secretaries in early December of that year. Of course, like Dennis and Tom, I still have it after 52 years.