Ken Havekotte
Member Posts: 4091
From: Merritt Island, Florida, Brevard
Registered: Mar 2001
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posted 10-12-2026 12:08 PM
   
For those space cover collectors of Apollo 13 in April 1970, check to see if you have any cachet add-ons from a popular Apollo cachet maker. Heritage Craft of Titusville, Florida, in my opinion, "the best" Apollo cachet designs produced by Dave Ouellette with designer Don Wiles, created a series of Apollo emblem covers with astronaut crew faces.
Those covers above (top four) are Heritage Craft Apollo 13 mission covers, but there is something unusual about two of them (note the yellow arrows attached). The space philatelic company here on the Florida space coast, in which Ouellette and Wiles were Kennedy Space Center employees, tried to add Swigert's portrait on a couple of their regular Heritage Craft cover emblem/crew faces throughout the mission when NASA announced April 10 that prime command module pilot Ken Mattingly would be replaced by backup John "Jack" Swigert when flying to the moon.
There had been a very limited attempt to "changeout" Mattingly with Swigert. The easiest way to do this was to imprint Swigert's portrait at bottom with a couple of small text lines, as you can see on three of the depicted covers. But there was a second design attempt that is hardly known of or ever seen. Two of the covers have the faces of Lovell, Haise, and Swigert together with no image of Mattingly at top left. While thousands of Heritage Craft covers were printed before launch with the original crew (Mattingly instead of Swigert), it would appear from my observations and research that perhaps only a handful of an added-on "corrected" Swigert face at top left were made.
Check to see if you have any of the hardly-ever-seen Swigert add-on at top left. Would like to know and more so if any of those corrected Apollo 13 covers were signed by the crew with Swigert included. |
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