In 1999 I was Security Officer on another Cunard ship, MS Vistafjord, we were based in Venice for the summer doing 14 day cruises around the Med. It was on one of these cruises that Buzz Aldrin sailed as a guest speaker.
At the time I was collecting phone cards and used to get many slipped underneath my cabin door by crew, once they’d used them to phone home. Among the wealth of different Italian cards was one of the 5000 lire value ones that featured a photo of the first man to walk on the moon. When I saw these, and heard that Buzz Aldrin was going to be onboard, I collected several and planned to approach him when he was onboard and ask him if he would be so kind as to sign a couple for me!
As a ‘test run’ I got hold of a dry wipe pen and tested out how to sign on the plastic phone card. After many attempts, and trying different types of pen, I came to the conclusion that a felt tip was best but… there was no way that the signature would dry properly and remain on the card, so it required a bit of thought. The conclusion was that I would need to laminate the card to retain the signature. On one of the sea days I arranged to meet Buzz Aldrin and his wife for coffee in one of the bars onboard, taking with me some of the cards and a felt tip. I had already spoken to him about signing them and, with him being an avid collector of anything space related, he was very interested, especially as he was not aware that these phone cards existed. He also confirmed that the person in the photo on the card was definitely him! We chatted for a short while and then he signed two cards for me, on completion he asked if I had a spare he could have for his collection, which I was more than happy to give him.
After i made my farewells I very quickly, and being careful not to smudge the signatures, returned to my cabin, where I had borrowed the crew card laminating machine from the crew office and quickly laminated both of the phone cards, preserving the genuine signatures for ever.
With the meteoric rise in the use of and ownership of mobile phones around this time the use of, and need, for phone cards swiftly disappeared and, with them, this particular Italian phone card.
As Buzz Aldrin had never seen one prior to our meeting, and I feel has possibly not seen one since, I can only deduce that mine are the only two, personally signed by Buzz Aldrin, copies of this particular Italian phone card in the World!
As to Buzz himself, when he was with us he was a truly amazing person and very ‘ordinary’ in the nicest meaning of that word. Some Guest Lecturers we had over the years were a bit ‘up their own…’ but he was incredibly interesting and a genuinely humble man. Often in his lectures echoing what Michael Collins & Neil Armstrong had said many times over the years; ‘It was a TEAM effort, we were just the small, front and visible part of the team’.
Attached is a scan of an unsigned copy of the phone card; sorry but I’m not that stupid as to post a scan of the signed one!