NASA Meets Snail Mail

As you know, I am always on the lookout for space related items. If said item is related to Project Apollo, so much the better. One such piece I picked up in Denison, Tx a while back is this:

As you can see, it is a letter opener from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I found it sitting on a shelf of totally unrelated items at an antique mall. It was cheap (I think about a buck) so I snapped it up!

Now it is always neat to find a piece of space history, but it is even more fun to try to figure out when the object was purchased. In this case, I had precious few clues. Consulting "The Great and Mighty Google" was little help in that it simply pointed out that the letter opener isn't particularly rare, since there are no fewer than five for sale on eBay at the time of this writing. I therefore had to rely on some good guesswork. The date I came up with was....the 1970's.

The reason I chose this date is as follows:
1. All of the eBay listings state that it is "vintage." Now that can mean almost anything, but at least it tells me that the sellers didn't pick it up at the gift shop yesterday.
2. Speaking of the Kennedy Space Center gift shop, they don't sell letter openers now. I checked.
3. The vinyl case and plastic handle seem of that time period.
4.It isn't stamped "Made in China."
5. It has a Saturn V on the handle. The 80's would see merchandising shift to the Shuttle. (I saw it myself when I visited there in the early 90's. There was very little Saturn merchandise at that time.)
6. The graphic of the Saturn is detailed enough to make it pretty clear that it wasn't the 60's. 1960's pictures of the Saturns were often very simplistic.
7. It's a letter opener. How much more 70's can you get?

So there you have it. I might be right or I might be wrong, but it really doesn't matter. Either way, I think its a cool addition to my collection. If anyone has any more info on it, I'm all ears! (Well, not literally. That would be weird.)

Until next time, fly 'em fast and high!