POSTCARD N.89 - RUSSIA

Postcrossing postcard sent on the 25th August inside cover #163, received on the 9th September 2022

Postcard image: Yuri Gagarin
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I was born  in 1960, so I can say that my infancy and that of the space race were somehow contemporary .

I have already written here about the National Geographic magazines my father signed, so the likes of John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and Neil Armstrong, to mention but a few of the more sounding names, were faces that, even though I was still a child, were no strangers to me, the curious little prick I was.

All things Soviet would not be easily distributed in the Portugal of that era, locked in a stupid monolithic and cruel fascistoid dictatorship  as senseless and persecutory as  any of the sad regimes of the Soviet block countries. But the space race was such an huge  thing in its heyday that Sputnik, Laika and most of all, Yuri Gagarin, would also be household names for those infants like me that would marvel at the black and white newspaper photos of rockets lifting off Cape Canaveral…no images of Baikonour, then, and TV... 

train of thought...

When I was a kid I  only had access to TV at home for 3 years from 65 to 68, because then I went to live in the Azores, where no such luxury was available. In fact, I would only watch TV again upon my return to the mainland in 73...

Lucky me, I had the best youth years a child can get: a bicycle, a fishing rod, a spear fishing gun... I was literally King of the World, long before DiCaprio...

back  to our regularly scheduled program:

Yuri Gagarin was, of course, the first man to be sent to space. This having happened in 1961, I, small wonder, couldn’t not even be bothered with it, but when he unfortunately died in an accident while flying a Mig-15, in 1968, I was already aware of his place in the history of space exploration and he too, as well as Valentina Tereshkova (whom I remember visiting my country in 1975) were names that I revered.

Knowing my interest in all things that fly, be it animals, aircraft or men,  Julia sent me, a very nice card with a photo of a young Yuri Gagarin and a varnished 60 superimposed  on it, commemorative of the 60th anniversary of his famous flight, which took place on the 12th April 1961.

Curiously, CTT, the Portuguese Postal Service, had also issued last year a pre-stamped postcard commemorating Gagarin's flight, thus I now have to very nice postcards to present side by side.