Annie Glenn
Astronaut’s wife who became a campaigner for the disabled
ANNIE GLENN, who has died from complications of Covid-19 aged 100, was a campaigner for the disabled and devoted wife of the astronaut and senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.
Suffering from a debilitating stutter since childhood, she was belittled for being unresponsive in social situations. The people she met would turn away, assuming she had cognitive problems.
Her disability condemned her to years of silence. Even a short phone call filled her with terror. As blood poured from a deep wound when her daughter had an accident, Annie could not utter a coherent word over the telephone to the emergency services – she had to run for a neighbour. A shopping trip became a fearful ordeal.
Being the wife of one of the most famous living Americans propelled her into her worst nightmares of public exposure, formal socialising and press interest. Neither Annie nor her husband anticipated the near hysteria that would greet Glenn’s space flight – after all, he had been preceded into space by two Americans, as well as by the pioneering cosmonauts of the Soviet Union.
But with their Soviet opponents far ahead in the space race, Glenn’s five-hour trip, three times around the Earth, gave the American public some hope that their nation might catch up.
When Glenn went through several launch attempts in the weeks leading up to his success in February 1962, Annie was aghast as reporters swamped her street in Arlington, Virginia, even turning up at their little Presbyterian church on Sundays.
When vice president Lyndon Johnson arrived unannounced at the family home with a gaggle of TV crews in tow, Annie froze in horror and refused to see him. Her husband backed her up against the pleadings of the Nasa PR machine, and Johnson was left fuming in his limousine.
In 1974, the year her husband entered the Senate, Annie began treatment at the Hollins Communications Research Institute, and steadily overcame her stuttering. “I vowed that someday, somehow I would give a speech for John,” she recalled.
Eventually she managed to coax out fluent public speeches as her husband served in the Senate for 24 years and campaigned in the 1984 presidential race. She later gave lectures about speech disorders and other disabilities. She felt, she said, “like a bird being let out of a cage”.
Anna Margaret Castor was born on February 17 1920 in Columbus, Ohio. Her father Homer was a dentist, and also a stutterer; her mother was Margaret née Alley. When the family moved across state to New Concord, they developed a friendship with the nearby Glenn family.
Annie and John dated through college, where Annie qualified in music, secretarial skills and physical education. They married in 1943 and had two children. During the early years of her marriage to Glenn, then a US Marine pilot, Annie worked as an organist in churches and taught the trombone.
Annie and the other wives of the Mercury astronauts became a close-knit group, supporting one another through the intense publicity, the pressures of absent husbands, and the ever-present fear of widowhood. They appeared in the pages of Life as model American housewives, roles they continued to act out as the quid pro quo for lucrative publicity contracts with the magazine.
As her speech improved, Annie Glenn used her newfound voice to bring attention to disabilities of all sorts. She became an adjunct professor with Ohio State’s speech pathology department and served on advisory boards. An Annie Glenn Award was created by the American Speechlanguage-hearing Association to honour people who overcome a communication disorder.
John Glenn died in 2016 and Annie is survived by their daughter and son.
Annie Glenn, born February 17 1920, died May 19 2020