posted 07-12-2022 10:00 AM               

Depicted below are both front and back cover surfaces and note the interesting front-side cachet and back-side informative write-up with a meter cancel slogan. The cover is #115 of a limited edition of 150 as stated.

It's an amazing space cover with a charity theme from one of Jerry Lewis' Labor Day Telethons for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) in San Francisco, CA, on Sept. 2, 1979.

The actual envelope cover was onboard a "real" Mercury spacecraft as a broadcast vehicle for Carter B. Smith's 24-hour Radiothon for MDA on a radio station from 6 pm Sept. 2nd to 6 pm Sept. 3rd in 1979. The cachet describes the Mercury capsule as a back-up to Shepard's flown Freedom 7 vehicle in May 1961.

I think the "carried" cover inception, cachet design with a photo of Smith suited-up in an Apollo WSS along with the capsule in which he lived in for a full day, postage stamps used, numbered, plus the signatures of Smith and Shepard as "Command Pilots," makes a perfect space-themed charity space cover in which all of the proceeds of the cover sales benefited the MDA. I wonder how much each of the special covers went for.

While I have seen and own other astronaut-signed items for charity functions like this, it's not too common in seeing a space cover like this. My firm proposed an Apollo 13 charity cover project (see below) for the aborted lunar landing mission's 30th anniversary in which crewmen Jim Lovell and Fred Haise signed 348 original emblem cachet covers of three types with all sale proceeds supporting The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation along with The Astronauts Memorial Foundation.