- Some people think it's not Christmas till this card comes,
so they're going to their mailbox in rural Vermont
or Connecticut or Pennsylvania.
And then the holiday starts once they open our card.
And there are people that look forward to it.
People that are like little old ladies who are 90 years old
will send me notes saying, "It's my favorite card.
"I saved every one."
I've been back to Ireland, and people have said,
"I have your card on the telly."
That's a lot of fun; a little bit of pressure. (laughing)
I guess we're in it.
And on one hand we're pretty ordinary, normal...
conventional family people. But we have a collection of
Space Age artifacts.
So, I don't think we'd want to be portrayed as being too...
wiggy.
- [Producer] Don't worry.
- [Veronica] It's too late for that? (laughter)
- My name's John Kleeman, and with my son Peter
and with the support of my wife Veronica
we collect dreams of the future in outer space.
We collect space toys.
We collect Space Age advertising, Space Age costumes,
Space Age lighting fixtures, furniture.
Everything we can think of that tells the story
of how people dreamed of the future
during the 1930s through the 1980s,
we collect it.
- It started as a father-son hobby
in the mid-'80s.
It felt like that scene early on
in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'
when he's scratching the mashed potato mountains
and he's saying, "This means something; this is important."
- These were actually a little bit harder to find.
Now, that could be a hiker.
One of the things I love about ... (laughter)
about license plates is they have more than one meaning.
It's a person telling the unknown...
highway drivers, people they never know,
"This is my passion; in seven letters or less,
"this is what I care about."
During the Mercury program and then later during Gemini
and Apollo, I think people really felt proud.
And when the plaque that the astronauts planted on the moon
said, "we come in peace for all mankind,"
or even, "one small step for man, one giant leap,
for mankind," I think people really took that to heart.
I think they felt this is something
that is being done by all of us.
- There was a time when I was wondering, what are we doing?
(chuckling)
And then I reflected on it.
And it occurred to me that some of the pieces
reminded me of the shards from archeology.
- And there it is.
The Velveteen Rabbit of spacecraft.
It had a nice, big dorsal fin.
It had a tail fin.
All gone.
This is what it once looked like.
And somebody...
riveted it together, on the two...
fins here, here, here and here.
And some father, or brother, or uncle, or mother, or aunt
really worked it to serve as a substitute for the original.
And suddenly that made it special.
And through play there is this concept of participation
in which these toys take on something more significant
than just entertainment playthings.
It really reflects the adventure that we're all on,
that we're hurtling through the universe
and that we're moving towards a future
and that part of that future may be
that we leave this planet.
I think Peter and I hope, and Veronica too,
that someday, somewhere off on a space station,
there'll be some little offshoot satellite
of Space Age Museum, and the people will wander around
and they'll think, "Gee, that's where we came from."
- [Ground Control] Six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.
All engine running.
Liftoff, we have a liftoff. (applause)
32 minutes past the hour.
Liftoff on Apollo 11.
Tower clear.