posted 08-21-2015 12:15 PM               

This lady's father was a local reporter with a Florida TV station and she was a teenage girl when she met the duo just after Shepard's flight and just before Grissom's flight. With the autographs she included to me a large stack of old 1962 newspaper clippings all about Wally Schirra's Sigma 7 Mercury flight which will take me a few weeks to read them all. This was not part of the purchase. She simply gifted them to me. So her credibility is strong.

Today she sent me the following email:

I also wanted to let you know that my brother has a packet of "stuff" called "Mercury to Gemini" that is stuffed full of official NASA fact packets that were only issued by NASA to the news media. Three of the packets have over 60 pages of unofficial transcripts. The first is between Mercury Control and Gordon Cooper aboard the Mercury spacecraft Faith 7 on May 14, 1963 which was later scrubbed. The second packet is on May 15, 1963 which with the third document follows his many orbits around the earth and what he sees plus experiments he performs. There are quite a few photographs as well in this folder of many components such as the Atlas missile, the stabilization and control board,the computer flight simulator, Atlas on the launch pad, the sea landing system of the Mercury capsules.

There are 36 of the press packs that have info from the different suppliers of systems to make parts for the rockets or capsules such as the launch escape rocket and the Project Mercury Astronaut Training Program requirements.

In the very front of the folder there is the iconic photo of the original 7 Mercury Astronauts in full spacesuits.

There is also a pair of cufflinks given to each member of the CBS crew by Walter Cronkite after the successful launch of Alan Shepard's "Freedom 7".

My brother wants me to put this on eBay but I told him I knew someone who might be interested in it and in a more scholarly way take care of it. He wants $400 but might come down. Let me know what you think.