Pieces of history

Eight yellowing pieces of paper sit on my desk.
They’re each about six inches wide, but they vary in length where they were torn almost 49 years ago.
Are they valuable?
Probably not.
But they’re too important as bits of history to throw away.
My sister Louise dropped them off the other day. She was clearing out some things and recognized the yellowing pieces of paper as mine.
Someone, back in February of 1962, sent them home with my dad, thinking that perhaps a junior high kid with an interest in history might find them interesting.
They were right, and I hung onto them.
What are they? The original Teletype reports from United Press International recounting the first orbit by an American around the earth, the Friendship 7 voyage of John Glenn.
As bits of history, they’re fascinating.
There are sidebars about President Kennedy watching the launch on TV and the reaction from Moscow, which was surprisingly positive given the Cold War and the Space Race that had occupied both superpowers.
There’s another sidebar that is a “diary” of Glenn’s day in space: “8:25 a.m. — Gantry wheeled back, leaving gleaming white rocket standing alone. Crews started fueling Atlas.”
There’s a national reaction story with some great color: “One of the largest mass TV audiences was the cheering, whistling, applauding crowd of 5,000 persons who jammed the main concourse of Grand Central Station in New York to watch the liftoff on a gigantic TV screen. Fathers hoisted small children to their shoulders to see the historic breakthrough. ‘Go, Glenn boy, go!’ shouted Ralph Mathieson, of the Bronx, who was carried away by the excitement.”
And there’s the first lead on the main story, slugged URGENT in red ink, by UPI reporter Alvin B. Webb Jr. The dateline is Cape Canaveral.
“The United States today launched astronaut John B. Glenn Jr. on a planned space flight around the earth,” Webb wrote.
“Glenn’s Atlas rocket lifted from its launch pad at 8:48 a.m. CST after 10 frustrating delays which had kept the 40-year-old Marine lieutenant colonel grounded for the past two months.
“It was the free world’s first attempt to put a man in orbit.”
When those words moved over the wire, when they chattered onto a stream of paper on the teletype at The Commercial Review’s newsroom at the speed of roughly 32 words a minute, the success of Glenn’s mission was still unknown. It was not a foregone conclusion.
Editors reading those words didn’t know if John Glenn would come back as an astronaut hero or go into the history books as the first American lost in space.
Looking back, it all seems a bit quaint.
There are probably bigger TV screens in Jay County than the one in Grand Central Station. The UPI is a shadow of itself. And the only place you’ll find a Teletype machine is in a museum.
And maybe a museum is where these eight pieces of yellowing paper, bits of ephemera, should go.
The appraisers on “Antiques Roadshow” have looked at similar items and said their value is more historic than monetary. Somebody’s hawking Teletype printouts about the Kennedy assassination on eBay, but there are few takers.
At any rate, they’re not for sale. After all, I’ve had them, off and on, for nearly 49 years now. I may as well hold onto them.[[In-content Ad]]