First Day Project Mercury

Quote:
... By the time the stamp was withdrawn from sale on June 6, 1962, more than three million of the 310 million stamps ultimately produced had been postmarked on collectors' envelopes. By the end of the first day, some 10,290,850 of the stamps had been sold.

But the distribution of those millions of covers was not evenly spread across the country. At least 250,000, if not upwards of a million of the stamps were canceled at the Post Office Department's official Cape Canaveral station.

For the other 305 official cities, the number of covers were much smaller. In a few cities in fact, no covers may have been issued at all.

On Feb. 20, 1962, a snowstorm blanketed parts of Ohio, preventing stations in the towns of Mansfield and Marion from selling the stamps. Meanwhile in Warren, Pa., the mailbags were not opened until after the office's customer windows had closed.

Fifty years later, 17 other cities' covers are still missing, not all of them from small towns. Covers have yet to be found for Fort Lauderdale and Tallahassee, Fla., Atlantic City, NJ and Durham, NC, for example.

Quote:
... By the following year, one enthusiastic collector, Patricia Grace Siefert, had compiled a guide. The typewritten "An Unauthenticated Classification of the First Day Covers of the Project Mercury Stamp" documented postmarks from 248 of the official cities, as well as others including U.S. Navy ship-board cancels and "unofficial cities."

In the case of the latter, collectors had purchased stamps from one of the 305 post offices identified by the Post Office Department and then drove to other post offices to have them canceled. By July 1963, Seifert had cataloged 90 of these "unofficial" cities.

Quote:
Q/ Any of us chasing Project Mercury FDCs? How far did you get?