Astronaut’s widow overcame severe stutter
Glenn went on to become leading advocate of people with communication disorders
Annie Glenn, who reluctantly entered the public eye as the wife of astronaut and senator John Glenn and later overcame a severe stuttering problem to become a leading advocate for people with communication disorders, died May 19 at a nursing centre in St. Paul, Minn. She was 100.
The cause was COVID-19. Glenn met her future husband when they were toddlers, growing up in Ohio. They went to high school and college together and were married in 1943, while John was serving as a Marine Corps pilot.
She later said they moved 33 times for her husband’s career as he flew hundreds of missions in the Second World War and the Korean War and later became a test pilot. He was selected as part of the U. S.’s astronaut corps, the Mercury Seven, in 1959.
During the early years of the space program, the astronauts were seen as national heroes, and none more so than John Glenn.
He was not the first to go into space — that honour went to Alan Shepard in 1961. But perhaps more than the other astronauts, Glenn had a grasp of the historical and symbolic importance of the U. S.’s first voyages into space. He was also a squeaky-clean, churchgoing Midwesterner, a publicist’s dream.
He knew his wife and their two children were part of the astronauts’ larger story, whether they wanted to be or not. They appeared regularly in the pages of Life magazine, which had an exclusive contract to cover the private lives of the astronauts.
What was not widely known at the time was that his wife suffered from a severe stuttering problem that made it difficult for her to speak in public, give interviews or even talk on the telephone — a device he called “an instrument of the devil to a stutterer.”
It was particularly difficult when she accompanied her husband to meetings with top military and political officials, who seldom had the patience to wait for her to form her words.
“Lots of people thought when my jaws sort of started shaking,” as she tried to speak, she told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2001, “that I was cold.
Lots of people would turn their backs and walk away from me. I have been laughed at many times.”
After Shepard’s short flight in 1961, John Glenn was scheduled to become the first U. S. astronaut to orbit Earth. His launch was postponed several times, creating a steadily building sense of tension and expectation.
At one of the postponed launches, vice-president Lyndon Johnson wanted to visit Annie Glenn at home in Arlington, Va. In a celebrated scene in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff and the 1983 movie of the same name, Johnson demanded to meet her, with TV crews in tow.
NASA officials went so far as to call John, still wearing his spacesuit, after a scrapped mission at Cape Canaveral, telling him his wife was posing a problem.
According to The Right Stuff, he told his wife that, “Look, if you don’t want the vice- president or the TV networks or anybody else to come into the house, then that’s it as far as I’m concerned, they are not coming in — and I will back you up all the way, one hundred per cent, and you tell them that.”
She later told The Washington Post it wasn’t her stutter that made her unwilling to greet Johnson, but a migraine headache.
When that mission finally launched on Feb. 20, 1962, Life reporter Loudon Wainwright noted that Annie was watching the liftoff with her two children on three television sets.
“When the tears began to run down her daughter’s cheeks, Annie, without looking away from the triple view of the rising rocket, put one hand gently on her child’s foot.
“Finally, then as the television camera poked aimlessly through an empty sky, Annie put her head against her knees and sobbed.”
She later said her husband’s flight — marked by a dangerous re- entry, in which he had to pilot the spacecraft by manual controls — left her “the most scared I’ve ever been.”
In 1973, Glenn entered an intensive three-week speech therapy program. At the end of the program, she called her husband at his office. It was the first time she could speak in complete sentences. He was in tears.
A year later, with her at his side, John was elected to the first of four terms as a Democratic senator from Ohio.
Anna Margaret Castor was born Feb. 17, 1920, in Columbus, Ohio, and moved three years later to New Concord.
She was one year older than John, who was a childhood playmate and her high school and college sweetheart.
“The very first time I realized I was not like all other kids was in the sixth grade,” she said in a 2010 video made by Ohio State University. “I got up to give a poem, and one of the kids laughed.”
She graduated in 1942 from her hometown college, now called Muskingum University. An outstanding organist, she turned down a scholarship offer from the Juilliard School in New York.
While her husband was in the Senate, she became a leading advocate for people with communication disorders. The American Speech- Language- Hearing Association presents an annual award in her honour, dubbed the Annie, to someone who has an impact on people with speech or communication disorders. The first recipient, in 1987, was actor James Earl Jones. The award in 2009 was presented to Vice President Joe Biden.
Annie Glenn campaigned for her husband during his short-lived presidential run in 1984. In 1998, when he was 77 and in his final year in the Senate, he returned to space as NASA’S oldest astronaut.
The couple later established a college of public affairs at Ohio State University, where she was an adjunct professor of speech pathology. John Glenn died in 2016 at 95.
Survivors include two children and two grandchildren.
John was sometimes called America’s last great hero.
“America is made up of a whole nation of heroes who face problems that are very difficult, and their courage remains largely unsung,” he wrote in the book My Hero: Extraordinary People on the Heroes Who Inspire Them, “but millions of individuals are heroes in their own right.
“In my book, Annie is one of those heroes.”
The very first time I realized I was not like all other kids was in the sixth grade. I got up to give a poem, and one of the kids laughed. — annie glenn