John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95
John Glenn, a freckle-faced son of Ohio who was hailed as a national hero and a symbol of the space age as the first American to orbit Earth, then became a national political figure for 24 years in the Senate, died on Thursday in Columbus, Ohio. He was 95.
His death was announced on Twitter by Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.
Mr. Glenn had recently been hospitalized at the James Cancer Center at Ohio State University in Columbus, though university officials said at the time that admission there did not necessarily mean he had cancer. He had heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014 and a stroke around that time.
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He had kept an office on the campus at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, which he helped found, and had a home in Columbus.
In just five hours on Feb. 20, 1962, Mr. Glenn joined a select roster of Americans whose feats have seized the country’s imagination and come to embody a moment in its history, figures like Lewis and Clark, the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh.
Sputnik 1
Explorer I
Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn
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John Glenn Jr. was a famed Marine Corps aviator who was selected as one of the military test pilots for the American space program in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Apart from being the first American to orbit Earth and the fifth person in space, Glenn also participated in World War II and the Korean War. He passed away on Dec. 8, 2016 at the age of 95.
Let’s take a look at his life and contributions to the American space program.
To the America of the 1960s, Mr. Glenn was a clean-cut, good-natured, well-grounded Midwesterner, raised in Presbyterian rectitude, nurtured in patriotism and tested in war, who stepped forward to risk the unknown and succeeded spectacularly, lifting his country’s morale and restoring its self-confidence.
It was an anxious nation that watched and listened that February morning, as Mr. Glenn, 40 years old, a Marine Corps test pilot and one of the seven original American astronauts, climbed into Friendship 7, the tiny Mercury capsule atop an Atlas rocket rising from the concrete flats of Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The Cold War had long stoked fears of nuclear destruction, and the Russians seemed to be winning the contest with their unsettling ascent into outer space. Two Russians, Yuri A. Gagarin and Gherman S. Titov, had already orbited Earth the year before, overshadowing the feats of two Americans, Alan B. Shepard and Virgil I. Grissom, who had been launched in separate missions only to the fringes of space.
What, people asked with rising urgency, had happened to the United States’ vaunted technology and can-do spirit?
The answer came at 2:47 p.m. Eastern time, when after weeks of delays the rocket achieved liftoff. It was a short flight, just three orbits. But when Mr. Glenn was safely back, flashing the world a triumphant grin, doubts were replaced by a broad, new faith that the United States could indeed hold its own against the Soviet Union in the Cold War and might someday prevail.
No flier since Lindbergh had received such a cheering welcome. Bands played. People cried with relief and joy. Mr. Glenn was invited to the White House by President John F. Kennedy and paraded up Broadway and across the land. A joint meeting of Congress stood and applauded vigorously as Mr. Glenn spoke at the Capitol.
People we lost in 2016
This undated photo made available by NASA shows astronaut John Glenn in his Mercury flight suit. Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth who later spent 24 years representing Ohio in the Senate, died Thursday, Dec. 8, 2016, at the age of 95. (NASA via AP)
Peter Vaughan out and about, London, Britain - 27 May 2016 Peter Vaughan
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In his political history of the space age, “…The Heavens and the Earth,” the author Walter A. McDougall described Mr. Glenn’s space mission as a “national catharsis unparalleled.”
“It seemed that he had given Americans back their self-respect,” Mr. McDougall added, “and more than that — it seemed Americans dared again to hope.”
Mr. Glenn was reluctant to talk about himself as a hero. “I figure I’m the same person who grew up in New Concord, Ohio, and went off through the years to participate in a lot of events of importance,” he said in an interview years later. “What got a lot of attention, I think, was the tenuous times we thought we were living in back in the Cold War. I don’t think it was about me. All this would have happened to anyone who happened to be selected for that flight.”
Mr. Glenn did not return to space for a long time. Kennedy thought him too valuable as a hero to risk losing in an accident. So Mr. Glenn resigned from the astronaut corps in 1964, became an executive in private industry and entered politics, serving four full terms as a Democratic senator from Ohio and in 1984 running unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Finally, 36 years after his Mercury flight, in the last months of his final Senate term, he got his wish for a return to orbit. Despite some criticism that his presence on the mission was a political payoff, a waste of money and of doubtful scientific merit, the hero of yesteryear brought out the crowds again, cheering out of nostalgia and enduring respect as he was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery on Oct. 29, 1998. At 77, he became the oldest person to go into space.
In retirement from the Senate, Mr. Glenn lived with his wife of 73 years, Anna (he always called her Annie), in a suburb of Washington in addition to Columbus. Ohio State University is the repository of papers from his space and political careers.
The Making of a Hero
John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born on July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, the only son of a railroad conductor who also owned a plumbing business, and the former Clara Sproat. A few years later, the Glenns moved to New Concord, a small town in southeastern Ohio with a population of little more than 1,000.
“It was small but had a lot of patriotic feeling and parades on all the national holidays,” Mr. Glenn once said. “Wanting to do something for the country was just natural, growing up in a place like New Concord.”
Like most everyone else there, the Glenns lived through the hard times of the Depression, instilling in their son a rigid moral code based on their own God-fearing example and saw him through an apple-pie boyhood. He played trumpet, sang in the church choir, washed cars for pocket money and worked as a lifeguard at a summer camp. In high school (now named for him), he was an honor student and lettered in football, basketball and tennis.
Mr. Glenn with his wife, Anna (he called her Annie), in Concord, Ohio, as he announced his intention to run for the presidency in 1983.© D. Gorton/The New York Times Mr. Glenn with his wife, Anna (he called her Annie), in Concord, Ohio, as he announced his intention to run for the presidency in 1983.
He still had time to court his high school sweetheart, Anna Margaret Castor, the doctor’s daughter. It did not matter that she stammered; she was his girl, and he loved her. They married in April 1943, and he often called her “the real rock of the family.” From the time they came to public attention, and throughout the turbulence of spaceflight and politics, John and Anna Glenn each seemed the other’s center of gravity.
Not until much later did she undergo intensive therapy that virtually cured her stammer, enabling her even to give speeches in public.
Mr. Glenn is survived by his wife; two children, Carolyn Ann Glenn of St. Paul and John David Glenn of Berkeley, Calif.; and two grandsons, Daniel and Zach Glenn.
Mr. Glenn began his journey to fame in World War II. In 1939, he enrolled at Muskingum College in his hometown to study chemistry, but he took flying lessons on the side. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, he signed up for the Naval Aviation cadet program and after pilot training opted to join the Marines. As a fighter pilot, he flew 59 combat missions in the Pacific, earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses and other decorations.
Mr. Glenn saw more action in the Korean War, flying 90 combat missions and winning more medals. He put his life on the line again as a military test pilot in the early days of supersonic flight. In 1957, just months before the Soviet Union launched its first Sputnik satellite, he made the first transcontinental supersonic flight, piloting an F8U-1 Crusader from Los Angeles to New York in the record time of 3 hours 23 minutes 8.4 seconds.
Then, in 1959, newly promoted to lieutenant colonel, he heeded a call for test pilots to apply to be astronauts for the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He and six other pilots were selected in April of that year. (The original Mercury 7 included Mr. Glenn, Mr. Shepard, Mr. Grissom, Walter Schirra, Gordon Cooper, Deke Slayton and Scott Carpenter.)
All seven men were eager, competitive and ambitious, but none more so than Mr. Glenn. Tom Miller, a retired Marine general and close friend since they were rookie pilots in World War II, recalled that Mr. Glenn was so determined to be an astronaut that he applied weight to his head to compress his height down to the 5-foot-11-inch maximum for the first astronauts. “He wasn’t going to miss a trick,” Mr. Miller said. “He’d be sitting down reading with a big bunch of books sitting on his head.”
But his determination did not win him the assignment to be the first American astronaut to fly. He had to wait out the suborbital flights by Mr. Shepard and Mr. Grissom in 1961 before his turn came.
Patience, Then Liftoff
In his 1999 memoir, written with Nick Taylor, he admitted he was sorely disappointed when Mr. Shepard was tapped for the first flight. As the oldest and most articulate of the astronauts, Mr. Glenn had attracted a big share of the publicity. He said that he had “worked and studied hard dedicating myself to the program” and that he thought he had a “good shot” at being first. In a letter to a NASA official, Mr. Glenn wrote, “I thought I might have been penalized for speaking out for what I thought was the good of the program.”
At this time, as Mr. Glenn often recalled, he never anticipated that his orbital flight would be the one that most excited the public, satisfying the nation’s hunger for a hero.
Tom Wolfe wrote of that time in the best-selling 1979 book “The Right Stuff,” a phrase for coolness in the face of danger that has passed into the idiom. He described Mr. Glenn as excessively pious, scolding his fellow astronauts about their after-hours escapades while openly lobbying to be the first of them to fly.
“He looked like a balding and slightly tougher version of the cutest-looking freckle-faced country boy you ever saw,” Mr. Wolfe wrote. “He had a snub nose, light-hazel eyes, reddish-blond hair and a terrific smile.”
Mr. Glenn said he liked the book but not the 1983 movie based on it, in which he was portrayed by Ed Harris. “Most of his account was reasonably factual, although I was neither the pious saint nor the other guys the hellions he made them into,” he told Life magazine in 1998. “Hollywood made a charade out of the story and caricatures out of the people in it.”
The 1962 space mission came after two months of one postponement after another, sometimes for mechanical problems, often for bad weather. Once Mr. Glenn had to wait six hours, fully suited, in the cramped Friendship 7 capsule before officials called off the launch. But he projected confidence. “You fear the least what you know the most about,” he said at the time.
On the 11th scheduled time, all was “go,” and the rocket lifted off from Pad 14 at Cape Canaveral. The flight stopped the nation in its tracks; people watched on black-and-white television, listened on the radio and prayed.
