Are Astronaut Gus Grissom's 'Lost' Mercury Dimes Actually Selling at Flea Markets?

If you are one of those people drawn to flea markets like birds to worms, keep in mind the axiom caveat emptor. If the price of something seems too good to be true, it generally is. For those of us in this hobby that is especially true of numismatic items offered without credible documentation.

I knew Gus Grissom and the other Original 7 Project Mercury Astronauts, as well as dozens of other astronauts who came after them. Harper and Row published my 'The Space Program Quiz & Fact Book (ISBN 0060154543), now out of print, for which Astronaut Frank Borman wrote the introduction. I was present when more than once when Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, et al teased Grissom about the dimes and other trinkets he took aboard Liberty Bell 7. I know the story of the dimes and the Liberty Bell 7 flight as well as anyone involved in NASA at the time.

Nonetheless, this writer has come across no less than three table vendors at flea markets in the last two years offering genuine U.S. coins and stamps which, if real, would be historic keepsakes of the U.S. space program. Mercury dimes that Astronaut Virgil I. (Gus) Grissom had taken into space with him on only the second U.S. manned space flight ever, were my most recent discovery at a table in Warren, N.J. I don't recall what the stamps were being offered for, but the dimes, 3 of them all dated 1945, in plain cardboard holders, were priced at $50 each. And, trust me, Gus Grissom never owned these dimes.

The Liberty Bell 7 sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean when it was lost during recovery after Grissom's May, 1961 flight. Besides the one-man Project Mercury spacecraft itself, several interesting and historic items were recovered in July, 1999 when salvager Curt Newport brought the spacecraft up 15,000 feet back to the surface. For me, it was the wrapup of a saga that had begun three decades earlier.