posted 05-21-2023 09:16 AM               

Space Cover 702: Sputnik, Arkansas and Georgi Grechko

Above is a cover postmarked on October 4, 1957, the day that the first Earth satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into orbit from the Soviet Union. It was postmarked in Summers, Arkansas in the United States. And it has been autographed by Soviet cosmonaut Georgi Grechko (Soyuz 17, 26, and T-14). Seems like a rather disjointed assembly of event, postmark and autograph, doesn't it? Well, they all tie together, and here is the story...

Because of my interest in collecting worldwide stamps from the age of 8, my parents gave me a short wave radio receiver for Christmas in 1956 when I was 16 years old.  Less than 10 months later, on October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 was launched. 1t became the first man-made object to fly around the world.  The Soviet government did not issue covers on that date due to the secrecy of their program.  But when stamps were created for the event, weeks later, they backdated the first day of issue covers which they sold to the public. I recall that a TV newscaster reported that short wave enthusiasts could listen to the beeping of Sputnik 1 on the "B" band, and I actually heard its sounds beeping as it orbited over Chicago. It was something that I could never forget. The first day of the Space Age!

A collector in Summers, Arkansas heard the news on TV in the late afternoon on Oct. 4th and rushed to his nearby post office to have an unknown, but small, number of envelopes cancelled. He later mimeographed a cachet he drew, based on the image that he saw on TV and applied that to his covers.  I bought one of those covers a few years later for $3.
 
In October 1991, Georgi Grechko was the featured cosmonaut at the touring "Soviet Space" exhibit show, which was on display in Fort Worth.  Fellow astrophilatelist Bob Boyd and I attended that show on the day that the wall between East and West Germany came down.  Somehow, Bob found out that Grechko's "assistants," who were all KGB agents, had contacted their Soviet handlers in Moscow to ask what they should do, and were told to return home.  So Bob decided to see if Grechko would like to meet some space cover collectors in Texas. Grechko's response was, "I would LOVE to!" 

Bob told him that he would pick him up on Saturday at his hotel.  I contacted Dennis Dillman, then in Houston — and asked if he'd like to gather some local Space Unit members to drive up and he did.  Bob contacted Terry Chamberlin and one or two other local DFW area SUers.  I think that we had about 8 or 9 of us waiting for Bob to return home in his pickup truck with Grechko in tow.  We became, probably, the first Americans, to talk to a Soviet Cosmonaut without any KGB agents looking over his shoulder.  Grechko HATED the "experts" as he would call them by tapping his ankles to represent their boots, and his shoulders to represent their epilates. He told us how they wanted him to lie about a prior docking in space that didn't work well, by blaming a prior crew for hitting the docking mechanism. But the blame was to be placed on close friends of Grechko, and he refused to do that.

He also related that as a recent college graduate in the mid-1950's, he worked for Korolev, (the Soviet equivalent of Wernher von Braun) and that he had been assigned to calculate the amount of fuel and the orbit for Sputnik 1!  And after the launch, he calculated the first stage impact point, went out there, and collected a souvenir. WOW!!!  My home was just six blocks from Bob's and I raced home to get my Sputnik 1 dated cover. I asked Grechko to sign it.

The cover shown here is, to the best of my knowledge, the only properly dated cover for Sputnik 1 which has been signed by a member of the launch team. It represents the first day that an artificial satellite flew over the United States as it orbited the Earth. The large "B" looking signature was Grechko's normal way of signing things.