A Dry Cleaner Once Demanded Restitution from NASA

From the Nixon Library. The amazing thing about national archives is that these libraries contain absolutely everything. Case in point: I recently found a letter in the Nixon Library from the Apollo Dry & Wet Cleaners in Pakistan. The owner was, apparently, a little miffed NASA took his business’ name for the lunar landing program and wanted press materials as restitution. National archives, especially Presidential archives, are like a weird form of historical spelunking. Everything that anyone anywhere has ever sent a President (at least, in the last half-century or so) ends up as part of the national record in that president’s library. And those libraries are, of course, free and accessible to the public, which means they can be a treasure trove of strange little tidbits no one knows about. I was at the Nixon Library recently looking for such gems recently when I came across a letter from the Apollo Dry & Wet Cleaners in Karachi, Pakistan. It was sent to Sam Phillips, director of the Apollo program, cc’ed to President Nixon, the American Centre in Karachi, the American Ambassador in Karachi, as well as Rocco Petrone, Director of Launch Operations at Kennedy. The full text, without corrections for typos and somewhat awkward grammar, reads: