John Glenn, the first American (and third person) to orbit the earth, wasn’t my favorite astronaut in the mid 1960s. That honor belonged to the lesser known Wally Schirra, who was the fifth American and ninth person to orbit the earth. And that’s why the gerbil I accidentally killed was named Wally, not John.

Glenn and Schirra were two of the seven military pilots selected in 1959 to be part of Project Mercury, which aimed to launch a man into orbit and return him safely to earth. Of these men, Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Right Stuff”, Glenn “came out of it as tops among seven very fair-haired boys. He had the hottest record as a pilot, he was the most quotable, the most photogenic, and the lone Marine.”

While two other Mercury pilots – Alan Sheppard and Gus Grissom – had flown short suborbital flights and two Russians (Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov) had flown orbital flights, on February 20, 1962, Glenn became the first American to break through Earth’s atmosphere. Today’s #stampoftheday, a 4-cent stamp issued that day of the flight honors that mission.

The stamp, which was the result of secret postal effort, surprised collectors. Work on it had begun in the summer of 1961. Working from home, Charles Chickering, a Bureau of Printing and Engraving official who the New York Times, which ran three lengthy articles about the stamp in four days, called “the dean of American designers,” finalized the stamp’s design. Bureau engravers worked on the stamp at night or on the weekend. The stamps themselves were printed on a new, technologically advanced printing press that was housed in a locked and guarded room. Once printed, another group of employees worked at night to put the stamps on a million, specially prepared first-day covers while others packed stamps in sealed envelopes that were sent to more than 300 postmasters around the country with the instructions, “Classified Material. Do Not Open.”

The plan was to release the stamps as soon as Glenn safely returned to earth from his mission, which was scheduled for December 21, 1961. But weather and mechanical problems delayed the launch. On February 20, NASA tried again. Equipment problems and weather issues caused 11 delays during the countdown but finally, at 9:48 am, the rocket took off.

During Glenn’s first orbit, ground control engineers detected a failure in the automatic-control system, which forced Glen to use manual mode for the second and third orbits, and for re-entry. Later in the flight, telemetry indicated that the heat shield had loosened. If this reading had been accurate, Glenn and his spacecraft would have burned up on re-entry. After a lengthy discussion on how to deal with this problem, ground controllers decided that leaving the retrorocket pack in place might help keep the loose heat shield in place. They relayed these instructions to Glenn, but did not tell him why. Although confused, he complied.

During reentry, the retrorocket pack broke up into large chunks of flaming debris that flew past the window of his capsule. Glenn, who thought this might have been the heat shield, later told an interviewer “fortunately it was the rocket pack-or I wouldn’t be answering these questions.” (After the flight, NASA engineers determined that the heat shield was not loose; the sensor was faulty.)

At 2:43 pm, Friendship 7 safely splashed down about 800 miles of Cape Canaveral, which meant Glenn didn’t have to use a note he’d carried in case he had been forced to land near islands in the south Pacific. Written in several languages, it stated “I am a stranger. I come in peace. Take me to your leader and there will be a massive reward for you in eternity.”

At 3:30 p.m., the Post Office Department used telephones, teletype machine, and telegrams to tell postmasters to “open package and sell stamps” which proved to be very popular. By the end of the day, 5.5 million of the stamps had been sold at post offices in New York City alone. In Cincinnati, officials kept the post office open for three extra hours to meet the demand for the stamps.

Glenn quickly became an American hero. He met with President John F. Kennedy, and received a ticker-tape parade in New York. He went on to serve as a US Senator from Ohio from 1974 until 1999 and, in 1998, at age 77, he got to fly in space again.

For his part, Schirra flew a six-orbit mission in October 1962. He then went on to fly two more missions, in December 1965 and October 1968, which means I probably saw the launch and/or splashdown of at least one of those flights. Although this made Schirra the first astronaut to go into space three times, he was nowhere near as famous as Glenn, which is what made him appealing to me.

And, for one unfortunate gerbil, that was a big problem. One summer in the late 1960s or early 1970s a good friend of mine had gotten into model rockets. We had the not-very-brilliant idea of buying a gerbil, putting it in a model rocket’s small payload compartment, and sending him off on his own mini-Mercury mission. I don’t recall what we were going to do with him after his adventure.

We went to the local pet store, bought a gerbil, named it Wally, and, despite its efforts to escape, squeezed it into the small payload tube. We launched the rocket on the fields next to a local elementary school and immediately lost sight of it. After a lengthy and guilt-ridden search, we went home and never spoke of it again.

I wasn’t a bad kid but like most kids I did some stupid things. Fortunately, the times I played with matches and fire didn’t result in major fires (though they well could have). Thankfully, I never got caught when I shoplifted baseball cards, which I did from time to time. I felt bad about the time I took some money off a friend’s desk but couldn’t figure out how to return it without making things worse. But my angst about all those transgressions pales in comparison to the guilt I felt – and still feel – about what we did to poor Wally. Wherever he is now, I hope he forgives me.

Be well, stay safe, don’t send gerbils to space, fight for justice, and work for peace.