What wonderful memories!
One of my friends was on the pad during the Apollo 1 disaster. He was at the Cape from Mercury all the way thru Shuttle. I am trying to get him to write his stories as well.
Having grown up with the space program, I tend to forget that much of it is passing into dim memory already, and the first artifacts from it are like primitive relics now. Somewhere I have a chunk of rock from the Lunar Landing Simulator, a Viking pin, and about 10 cans of 16mm film shot during the assembly of a Scout rocket.