posted 04-23-2023 10:41 AM               

Space Cover 698: Unicover Apollo 11 25th anniversary cachets

In 1993, I was approached by Unicover Corporation (the parent company of Fleetwood) President Jim Helzer to produce a series of sketch-type drawings documenting many of the most significant moments in United States manned space exploration from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs culminating in the Apollo 11 moon landing. My father Paul Calle was also attached to the project and served as a co-designer Art Director and certainly had great great opinions and ideas as always!

The idea was to design First Day Cover (FDC) cachets, which would be used on FDCs issued by countries around the world all celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1994.

I remember thinking how interesting the project was having this international collection of covers. Of course there were the philatelists that complained that some of the countries that issued stamps to celebrate an event like this have nothing to do directly with the Apollo moon landings, but that made me think even further that everyone on Earth seemed to celebrate in Apollo 11's amazing achievement. For that moment in history, this truly was a global event, not solely an American success.

There is a scene towards the end of the movie "First Man," the Damien Chazelle film about Neil Armstrong based on James Hansen's fantastic book, where there are historical film clips of the American flag waving all over the country and also clips of people all over the world celebrating this incredible technological achievement. Humanity was together as one as hundreds of millions of people across the planet watched Neil Armstrong take those first steps onto another world.

For the Sweden stamp celebrating the Apollo 11 moon Landing, Jim Helzer contacted Sweden Post with the idea that the U.S. father and son artist team of Paul and Chris Calle could design the stamp for Sweden. This was unprecedented as no artist from another country had designed a postage stamp for Sweden.

They were excited as were we especially when we were told that world renowned Czeslaw Slania would be the engraver of the stamp. I had met Slania several years earlier at a Stamp show and when he found out I was there he asked his daughter to bring me over to their booth to meet me. More importantly to tell me through his translator daughter, that "your father is an artistic genius!"

The one design requirement was that we needed to include the Hasselblad camera in the painting. A signed and numbered Artist Proof print was produced for the stamp FDC.

As humanity is planning to return to the Moon, we are in the midst a new age of space exploration. I look forward to seeing many interesting covers for the upcoming launches of Artemis and beyond...