posted February 20, 2012 05:54 AM               

Search continues for secret stamp honoring John Glenn's historic spaceflight

Fifty years ago Monday (Feb. 20), John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, relied on ground stations located across the planet to communicate with his control team. But after his Mercury spacecraft, Friendship 7, safely splashed down, it was another type of station that took over tracking his historic mission: U.S. post offices.

For the first and only time in the country's postal history, the United States Post Office Department — since 1971, the U.S. Postal Service — surprised the public with the release of a secret stamp celebrating Glenn's successful mission. The 4-cent "Project Mercury" postage stamp was revealed and immediately put on sale in 305 post offices within an hour of Glenn's triumphant return to Earth at 2:43 p.m. EST (1943 GMT) on Feb. 20, 1962.

Half a century later, collectors are still searching for those first-day-of-issue stamps.

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posted February 20, 2012 01:35 PM               

While Mercury astronaut John Glenn hurtled around his home planet three times on Feb. 20, 1962, Beaumont third-grader Billy Black, then 9 and a student at Sallie Curtis Elementary, stood in line at a post office to buy the brand-new Project Mercury postage stamps.

A picture in The Enterprise captured the smiling blond-ish boy with his mother, Inge, who had urged him to buy the stamps.

Fifty years later, William "Bill" Black, now a dentist for the Veterans Administration in Temple, still has that same sheet of stamps, kept in a safety deposit box.