This is a Mercury 7 Launch Print numbered 505 of 1500 signed by Mercury 7 Astronauts Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton. It is also signed by Betty Grissom, wife of Mercury 7 Astronaut Gus Grissom who perished in the Apollo 1 launch pad capsule fire in 1967.
I obtained this item in May 2012 in an online auction. I have not seen too many of these come up for auction since I obtained this one. A very cool item. But the reason I am only just now putting this item on my blog, is because of something that happened very recently with regards to the COA for this item which I find to be very interesting and quite serendipitous.
Approximately 5 years ago, in anticipation of selling my house, I packed most of my personal belongings and put them in storage. Among these items were a number of what I assumed to be empty shipping tubes, including the shipping tube used by the auction house to send this item to me in 2012. I made a habit of keeping these shipping tubes in case I ever needed to ship/transport any of my posters. I am sort of a hoarder that way so I had a number of these empty shipping tubes hanging around my house, which were also packed up and put in storage with the rest of my personal belongings. Now this storage locker was the size of a single car garage and was stacked front to back and top to bottom! Well, personal circumstances dictated that this stuff stayed in storage for the past five years, patiently waiting for me to come and get it.
For the past two weeks I have spent everyday moving the contents of that storage locker to my new house. I cleared out the last of the items this past weekend, leaving only a huge table and a couple of what I believed to be empty shipping tubes in the storage locker. Didn't really give the shipping tubes still in the locker much thought as I had decided just to throw them out. I assumed they were empty. But something inside me told me to check the tubes before throwing them in the trash. And it was a good thing I did!
When I checked the inside of the tube used to ship this item to me in 2012, I noticed something was still inside, curled up. Sooo..... I pulled it out and hot damn if it wasn't the below COA for this item which I had not even noticed being in there back in 2012! It had just been sitting patiently inside that tube for the past 9 years waiting for me to bring it home.
Just an interesting chain of events I needed to share.
The moral is never throw any shipping tubes out!
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