Closet Space
Carol Armstrong, a widow, was cleaning out her late husband’s closet, going through his old belongings, when she found something unexpected. She described it as “a white cloth bag filled with assorted small items that looked like they may have come from a spacecraft. “
Carol’s husband was Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, and like most men who go on business trips, he brought back a few souvenirs and forgot to tell his wife about them. The items inside the bag (which was actually a “McDivitt purse,” a temporary stowage bag used by astronauts and named after Apollo 9 Commander James McDivitt) included the 16mm data acquisition camera that recorded Armstrong’s landing on the moon and the planting of the American Flag. There was a waist tether used by Armstrong (astronauts used these tethers as security in case they were forced to do a spacewalk during orbit.).
The items are currently on display at the Air and Space Museum’s temporary exhibition, Outside the Spacecraft: 50 Years of Extra-Vehicular Activity.” A team of experts is still working on analyzing items found in the bag to determine if any of the other items in the bag were used on the Apollo 11 mission.
This is hardly the first time unusual and even historically significant items have been found inside an ordinary home by an unsuspecting person doing a bit of cleaning.
In 1991, Alexandra Besymenskaja was visiting the family home near Moscow when she went up to her her father’s attic, to retrieve a badminton racket. Instead, she found something her Dad had been keeping up there for years: Adolf Hitler’s personal record collection. Lew Besymenski, Captain in a Russian Military Intelligence unit, was one of the people sent to the recently captured headquarters of the Nazi Party in the days after the fall of Nazi Germany. The stacks of wax were labeled , Führerhauptquartier, German for Reich Chancellery. Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Rachmaninoff were all represented in Der Führer’s collection, despite the fact that all had been labeled “subhuman” by the Nazi’s (I guess you don’t have to be a fan of the person to appreciate their music.)
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In 2013 in Elbow Lake, Minnesota, David Gonzalez bought a fixer-upper home for only $10,100. After knocking down a wall, Gonzalez found a comic book that had been used as insulation. But it wasn’t just any comic book: it was a first edition of “Action Comics #1,” which is best remembered for introducing a new comic book character known as “Superman.” Since the comic wasn’t in mint condition, it only sold for $175,000 anyway. (A near mint copy owned by actor Nicolas Cage sold for $2.16 million.).
While going through some old boxes in his father’s attic in Nashville in 2012, he discovered a tape marked “Dr. King Interview Dec. 26, 1960.” After borrowing a reel-to-reel tape recorder he was able to listen to a recording of a conversation between his father and Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Non-violence means the refusal to use violence in any way in order to achieve a social end. It is a method that seeks to secure moral ends through moral means,” said Dr. King in the interview. “It grows out of the whole concept of love because if one is truly non-violent that person has a loving spirit, he refuses to inflict injury upon the opponent because he loves the opponent.”
An insurance salesman and aspiring author who hoped to write a book about the civil rights movement, Tull’s father interviewed Dr. King, but when the book never came together, the tapes just ended up in the attic collecting dust.
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I’m doing my Spring cleaning in the next month or two, I think I’m going to pay a little extra attention to what I am throwing in the trash.
