AMERICAN HERO
Combat fighter pilot made history by rocketing into the future as a pioneer of space travel
President John F. Kennedy described John Glenn as “the type of American of whom we are most proud.”
Over the long arc of John Glenn’s life, it proved impossible to ever ask him to do something for his country. No matter the mission, no matter the risk, he had already stepped forward, his hand raised, his jaw set, ready to go.
Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, and later a fourterm U.S. senator from Ohio, died Thursday at the Ohio State Cancer Center. He was 95.
Glenn became a hero in World War II and Korea, flying an astounding 149 combat missions in the two conflicts. He earned the Distinguished Flying Cross on six occasions and an Air Medal with 18 clusters. In Korea, he downed three Russian MiGs in air-to-air combat during the last nine days of that war. Baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams was sometimes his wing man.
After the war, he heard about the space program, an outrageous idea of risk and service open to military test pilots. Of course, he was interested. After rigorous and competitive testing, Glenn was chosen as one of the Mercury Seven, America’s first astronauts.
On April 8, 1959, Glenn was introduced at a press conference with Scott Carpenter, Walter M. Schirra Jr., Alan Shepard, L. Gordon Cooper, Virgil “Gus” Grissom
and Donald “Deke” Slayton as the country’s Project Mercury astronauts. Glenn was the last surviving member of the group.
To understand why Glenn became so important in America, it is important to remember how badly the United States was losing the space race in the early 1960s. The Soviet Union had pulled ahead in this Cold War battle when it launched Sputnik, the first man-made object to be placed into orbit. It then made a mockery of the American program by sending the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Then the Soviets sent a second cosmonaut into orbit.
So all of America was watching at 9:47 in the morning on Feb. 20, 1962. Sitting in the cramped quarters of the Friendship 7 spacecraft, Glenn took off from Cape Canaveral. Scott Carpenter, the backup astronaut for the mission, famously said, “Godspeed, John Glenn.”
Astronaut Glenn climbed into space, circled the globe three times, then dropped into the Atlantic Ocean. The flight took all of four hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds, but it changed the space race and restored American pride.
President John F. Kennedy watched the news from the Oval Office, then came out and described Glenn as “the type of American of whom we are most proud.”
Space travel held far more unknowns than it does today. “Ophthalmologists were literally concerned at that time that your eyes might change shape and your vision might change enough you couldn’t even see the instrument panel enough to make an emergency re-entry if you had to,” Glenn said during the celebration in 2012 of the 50th anniversary of his flight.
“They were enough concerned about it, we actually put a little, miniaturized eye chart at the top of the instrument panel,” Glenn said, according to an account of the celebration on Space.com. “And that’s still in Friendship 7, up in the Smithsonian (National Air and Space Museum).”
As Glenn prepared to re-enter the atmosphere, mission managers told him Friendship 7’s protective heat shield might have come loose. If the shield came off, the capsule would almost certainly burn up, killing Glenn.
Strapped to the outside of the spacecraft was a package of small retro-rockets, which were designed to help slow the capsule’s re-entry. Glenn was told not to jettison the rockets after firing them, in the hopes that the straps would help hold the heat shield on.
During re-entry, “there were flaming chunks of the retro-pack burning off and coming back by the window,” Glenn told Space.com. “I didn’t know for sure whether it was the retro-pack or the heat shield, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it either way, except just keep trying to work and keep the spacecraft on its actual best attitude coming back in.”
When Glenn returned, the nation and the free world celebrated on a historic scale. On Feb. 23, Vice President Lyndon Johnson escorted Glenn back to Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. Glenn, his family and Johnson then drove back to Cape Canaveral. The streets were lined with people the entire 18 miles. That afternoon, Glenn met with Kennedy who presented him with NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal.
Glenn was 40 years old and soon became aware of the widely held belief that he was too valuable as an icon to risk in spaceflight. But his career in public service was only at the halfway point.
In the months after his orbit, Glenn became close with President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, who was attorney general. They urged him to run for office.
Two years after circling the globe, and six weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, Glenn resigned from NASA. The next day, he announced he was going home to Ohio to be a politician. Returning made perfect sense. Nobody represented small-town Ohio more than John Glenn.
He was born in 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio, the son of John Sr. and Clara. Two years later, the family moved to New Concord where his father opened a plumbing business. Glenn would say of his childhood, “A boy could not have had a more idyllic early childhood than I did.”
Glenn’s first flight was in Ohio when he was 8 years old. A barnstorming pilot in an open-cockpit plane took Glenn and his father up for a flight. The future spaceman was never the same.
In 1939, Glenn graduated from New Concord High, which was later named John Glenn High School. It is one of at least five high schools in the country with that name.
Glenn went to Muskingum College, down the road from his home. In his sophomore year, he learned how to fly through the Civilian Pilot Training Program funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The program paid the cost of the flight instructions and gave college credits in physics. Glenn applied, was accepted and earned his private pilot’s license June 26, 1941.
The most important thing to happen to Glenn in Ohio was meeting Anna Margaret Castor. He started dating Annie, the daughter of the town dentist, in high school, and they were married April 6, 1943. They had two children, John David Glenn and Carolyn Ann Glenn.
Glenn’s political career could not have had a worse beginning.
He entered the Democratic primary in Ohio in 1964 for a seat in the U.S. Senate held by Democratic incumbent Stephen Young.
Less than a month into the race, a bathroom rug slipped under his feet, and Glenn hit his head against a tub. The fall was devastating, and he could not campaign. It would take nearly a year to recover.
Glenn dropped out of the race and began to work as a consultant with NASA and as vice president of Royal Crown Cola. Two years later, he was named the president of the company.
In 1970, Glenn ran again. He ran in the primary against Cleveland real estate and parking magnate Howard Metzenbaum, who had the support of the state Democratic Party and the unions.
Metzenbaum, who ran Young ’s successful campaign in 1964 against Glenn, had more money and was better organized. He beat Glenn in a close primary, then lost in the general election to Republican Robert Taft Jr.
In 1974, Glenn tried to get the Senate seat that opened when William Saxbe resigned after being named President Richard Nixon’s attorney general. Gov. John Gilligan chose Metzenbaum instead.
Glenn went back to Royal Crown, but his dreams of the Senate survived. He got another shot at Metzenbaum. This time, Metzenbaum made a mistake. In a speech in Toledo, he said Glenn did not deserve Ohio’s vote because he “never worked for a living.”
Glenn won the primary and the general election and would represent Ohio for 24 years. During his time in the Senate, he was chief author of the 1978 Non-proliferation Act, served as chairman of the Committee on Governmental Affairs from 1987 until 1995 and sat on the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees and the Special Committee on Aging.
In 1984, Glenn ran for president, but he dropped out when his campaign never gained much traction.
On Oct. 29, 1998, months from the end of his time in the Senate, Glenn became the oldest person to go into space. He was 77 years old when he finally got his second mission, this time aboard the space shuttle Discovery.
The flight involved 134 orbits of the Earth, instead of the three trips around he took in 1962. He said the same thing to his wife he used to tell her every time he’d embark on a dangerous mission in war or in space. “I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum,” Glenn would say. She responded, “Don’t be long.”