#1 First cover in the 1000 Navy Series. 1962

Special "S" cover USS Enterprise Est. $85

Mercury Flight of Cooper

USS Hornet-Neil Armstrong

How Mr. Beck's cover service worked

Updated October 2023
We've had some inquires from newer collectors trying to understand how Mr. Beck's cover service worked
and how there can be several covers from a recovery ship with different "B" cachet numbers.

Morris W. Beck of Wisconsin was a collector starting while in high school in the early 1940's and later was a
cover dealer after he returned from service in WWII. He stopped producing covers in the mid 1970’s.  

His most popular series of Naval covers was the set from 1962-1975 and consisted of 1000 cachets (covers).

He advertised his cover service in the philatelic newspapers offering to print a cachet on collector’s envelopes for a few cents each.
  See  http://beck.ormurray.com/advertising.htm

 He printed cachets for Navy ship commissioning, launchings, anniversaries, first day covers, etc.  
The most popular cachets (covers) were the space recovery covers.

Mr. Beck tried very hard to get the recovery force information from the US Navy as early as he could before a flight, but as
time went on, timely information became hard to get in time for printing and shipping deadlines.

Early in his efforts, he tried to print the name of the recovery ship on the envelope but that didn’t work very well, so most of
his space covers DO NOT have the ships name on the printed cachet. (although the ships name does appear in the postmark
(cancellation).

The US Navy had a coordinator  to receive space cover postmarking requests from collectors and dealers.  
Generally, the Navy had a 2 cover limit per collector, per event.  
Collectors sent their requests for rubber stamp cachets directly to the Navy.  
Mr. Beck was one of a number of dealers that provided the service of a printed color cachet.  

As a "side note" please note that Beck's printed color cachets and the rubber stamp cachets used by the US Navy were very
similar.  This is because Mr. Beck produced the rubber stamp cachets used by the US Navy. 
He sent them to the US Navy for each space flight at no charge.

  
Above Left: Envelope sent to US Navy by collector.  Navy applied cachet and postmark.

Above Right: Envelope with Mr. Beck's printed color cachet and "B Cachet Number".  Navy applied postmark only.

Both the example ASTP covers probably had address removable labels and both were sent to the collector as usual
mail after postmarking.

On the later Apollo flights you will notice that the image of the rubber stamp cachet that the US Navy used was smaller than the cachet Mr. Beck printed.  Large rubber stamps were hard for the US Navy to apply so they requested smaller images.  Remember that Mr. Beck provided the rubber stamp cachets to the US Navy free.

Mr. Beck's Naval Cover Service

Mr. Beck provided the service of printing a multicolor cachet on collector’s SASE (self addressed stamped envelope) envelopes sent to him.

Collectors could also send a SASE directly to the Navy for the single color rubber stamp cachet and postmarking.   

For Mr. Beck's cover service, Collectors would send a supply (25-50) of SASE to Mr. Beck with a small service fee for cachet printing.
See  http://beck.ormurray.com/advertising.htm

Using the information provided by the Navy regarding the total number of ships in the recovery force,
Mr. Beck would assign a cachet number accordingly, such as B 708, B 709, etc.

Look at some of the print log sheets Mr. Beck filled out that are shown on our site.  http://beck.ormurray.com/becklog/index.htm

So if the Navy told Mr. Beck there would be 12 ships in the recovery force, then
Mr. Beck would print 12 different cachet designs and assign/print accordingly.  B708, B709, Cachet ID, etc.

Mr. Beck would print the multicolor color cachet on the envelopes sent to him by collectors.  
The printed multi color cacheted envelopes were sent by Mr. Beck in bulk to the Navy for postmarking.  
He prepared 400-1000 envelopes per ship according to his customers orders.  Most customers requested one or two covers of each event.
He packed all the envelopes for one ship into a bulk container marked accordingly.

When the Navy received the shipments of printed color cacheted envelops from Mr. Beck, they distributed the envelopes to the ships of the recovery force.

This is where it got “messy” because someone at the Navy opened boxes and redistributed envelopes without
regard to the various cachet ID numbers.  So, ships received envelopes all mixed up.