“Whatcha got in the bag, Mike?”

From Carrying the Fire by Mike Collins:

The security people have roped off a walkway for us, and we give jerky little waves to the photographers as we walk stiff-legged toward the van. Charlie Buckley, the head security man at the Cape, is there to greet us—another little pre-flight ritual. There are certain amenities to be observed, such as presenting Guenter Wendt, the czar of the launch pad, with a going-away present. Guenter has spent the past couple of weeks telling me what a great fisherman he is, and how he regularly plucks giant trout from the ocean. In return, I have located the smallest trout to be found in these parts, a minnow really, and have had it, uncured, nailed to a plaque and inscribed GUENTER’S TROPHY TROUT. I carry it now inside a brown paper shopping bag, which Charlie Buckley eyes suspiciously. I am a bit nervous about it myself. What if my awkward gloved hands drop it and the trout tumbles out in front of all those photographers? They are here to see us leave the earth, with dignity and perhaps a little pomp, but what if their cameras instead record an ungainly scramble after a tiny dead fish? What would Walter Cronkite say?

I knew about the trout, but after reading of it again the other day and then watching the new Apollo 11 film Blu-ray, my eyebrows shot up when I saw he had good reason to be nervous: The bag was safely upright as they left the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, but when Collins turned left to follow Armstrong into the Astrovan (a converted Clark Cortez Motorhome), it caught on his Portable Oxygen Ventilator and tilted dangerously downward; another five or ten degrees and he would have let the trout out of the bag.

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In the White Room, Guenter’s estimate of his fishing prowess:

Mike’s counter-estimate:

Wendt, who died in 2010, still had the trout when he was interviewed in 1992 below – after having it gutted and properly mounted, of course. The video is cued up to the trout bit.

Armstrong gave Wendt a voucher for a free ride in a space taxi and Aldrin presented a booklet called “Good News for Modern Man”, a condensed modern version of the New Testament. In 2015, the trout plaque, taxi voucher, and booklet sold at auction for US$10,625, $8,125, and $5,000, respectively.


“No ‘General’, just Mike. Old Mike if you want to be formal. And if you really want to get into it, Lucky Old Mike.”
– Collins during this interview at the National Press Club, April 2019