Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (21 page)

A few weeks later, though, Shepard was returning from a test flight out over the Chesapeake and decided to take a detour up to Ocean City, the bustling beach town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He flew down low and screamed across the beach, blowing the bikini tops off a number of sunbathing women. He was moving too fast for anyone to get his tail number, but a photographer from a Philadelphia newspaper happened to be taking pictures and caught the stunt on film.

Shepard was summoned before Rear Admiral Alfred M. Pride, the no-nonsense commander of Pax River, who chewed Shepard’s ass and then issued a letter of censure, a black mark in his record that would silently follow him the rest of his career.

But apparently Pride’s censure wasn’t severe enough.

Shepard’s favorite jet, the F2H-2 Banshee, had set an altitude record of fifty-two thousand feet in 1949. Shepard was among a select group of Navy pilots trained to fly even higher, and in 1952 he was assigned to an elite group performing altitude tests on the Banshee. One day, a few weeks after Shepard had flat-hatted Ocean City, a project manager at the Naval Aviation Test Ordnance Center on nearby Chincoteague Island in coastal Virginia asked Pax River for a high-flying test pilot. Shepard was sent to help. The mission was to fly above fifty thousand feet—something the Chincoteague pilot
s and planes couldn’t do—and release a missile, to determine the high-altitude effects of missile launches.

Shepard flew from Pax River to Chincoteague that morning, performed the mission perfectly, landed back at Chincoteague for a debriefing with the project manager, and then had lunch with his friends George (an academy classmate) and
Betty Whisler. Shepard returned to the airfield by midafternoon, refueled, and prepared for takeoff.

It was a relatively quiet Saturday afternoon, and a quarter of a mile downrange from the airfield about three hundred enlisted sailors and fifty officers—including Shepard’s friend George—had gathered in rows on the tennis courts for their weekly inspection.

As Shepard took off, he radioed the air traffic control tower, seeking permission to make a “low pass.” His intent was to boast of a successful mission—an aerial chest thumping of sorts—by streaking above the base and putting his jet into a wing-over-wing victory roll. The tower gave him the okay, but they didn’t know his reputation for low passes. “When Al made a low pass, it was really low,” said George Whisler, who was standing at attention on the tennis courts as Shepard took off, U-turned, then pushed his twin-engine Banshee to full bore and swooshed down on top of the naval base.

Shepard ripped the air just 150 feet above the ground. Passing over the tennis courts, the roar of his engines scared the breath out of the hundreds of uniformed men standing at attention below. Thinking a jet was about to crash onto their heads, sailors and officers dove to the ground, and hundreds of white hats were swept into the air by the wake of Shepard’s jet. The commanding officer of the base jumped to his feet and screamed, “Get that pilot’s name. I want to know where he’s from. And then I want him grounded.” George knew instantly it was his friend but kept his mouth shut.

When Shepard landed at Pax River twenty minutes later, he taxied to a stop and saw Admiral Pride waiting for him. He thought:
Hmmm, I must have done a great job on that mission if the admiralis coming out to greet me.
But Pride’s face was locked in a scowl.

Pride was one of the pioneers of naval aviation, having flown off the Navy’s first carrier, the USS Langley, in the 1920s. He was also a serious, strict, and proper New Englander who was much feared by his men. A test pilot once thought his caree
r was over after he bailed out of a damaged jet during a night flight, landed in the water, shed all his clothes, swam to shore, and rang the doorbell of the nearest house—where the naked aviator was greeted by Pride’s flustered wife.

“Were you just over Chincoteague?” Pride asked Shepard.

“Well, yes, sir.”

“Did you make a low pass?”

“Well, I guess I did.”

Pride had had enough. He dismissed Shepard and then summoned his immediate supervisors. Shepard should be court-martialed, he told them. “I want to straighten this kid out,” the crusty old admiral said. “We just can’t have this sort of thing.”

While Shepard’s supervisors pleaded with Pride not to court-martial him, Shepard was grounded and put “in hack” for ten days. Being in hack meant he had to pack a bag, move out of his house, leaving Louise and the girls behind, and live in the bachelors’ quarters. While in hack, he wasn’t allowed anywhere near an airplane.

H. Y. Davidson, Shepard’s old rowing buddy from the academy, saw Shepard drinking alone that night at the officers’ club. When Shepard told him the story of the low pass at Chincoteague, Davidson was surprised his friend was so upbeat after apparently sabotaging his own career. Davidson said to himself:
What a waste of a good career.

When he heard the rest of the story weeks later, Davidson was shocked to learn Shepard hadn’t been shipped off to the supply corps. “A lot of us would have lost our wings for something like that,” Davidson said. “But he had a way of getting away with it.” Once again, Shepard had a couple of guardian angels looking out for him.

With his strong jaw, his dimple-framed smirk, his slicked-back hair, and his lithe body language, Bob Elder looked like a movi
e star playing a fighter jock role. Elder had been born in the wilds of Saskatchewan, Canada, but his family moved to Portland, Oregon, when he was a teen. A longtime love of airplanes led him to enroll in the naval ROTC program at the University of Washington, and he received his aviator’s wings just a few months before Pearl Harbor. Elder was among the first naval aviators to join the dogfighting in the Pacific, where he flew combat missions off aircraft carriers in some of the most crucial battles of the Pacific war, including the Battles of the Coral Sea, Guadalcanal, and,
most notably, Midway. On June 4, 1942, Elder and his SBD Dauntless flew three missions, spent a total of twelve hours and fifteen minutes in the air, and helped sink the Japanese aircraft carrier
Hiryu.
For his destruction of Japanese planes and ships at Midway, Elder earned
two
Navy Crosses and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

After the war, Elder was among the first Navy pilots to fly jets and among the first to land them on aircraft carriers. By the time he and Shepard met in 1950, Elder was known Navy-wide as “sierra hotel,” naval aviator radio-speak for SH—shit hot. (The opposite of shit hot was “delta sierra”—DS, or dumb shit.)

Elder was considered all the more shit hot because he didn’t boast or brag and didn’t talk down to his inferiors. He was approachable and likable. “Bob was very laid-back,” one colleague said. “But he was a great tactician.”

Shepard had adopted Elder as his mentor. Just as he had gravitated toward Doc Abbot and Turner Caldwell, he had a way of befriending the shit hot men around him. He soaked up whatever knowledge of flying they were willing to share. When he wasn’t conversing with them, he was watching, observing, learning.

Elder had taken a shine to Shepard, too. After Shepard’s terrifying low-low pass over Chincoteague, Elder stepped up to argue vigorously in his defense to prevent Admiral Pride from court-martialing Shepard. Shepard’s boss, John Hyland, also joined the emotional debate, but it wasn’t easy. “He [Pride] was furious,” Elder said.

Finally, Elder and Hyland calmed Pride’s anger and convinced him that a court-martial would only cast off one of the Navy’s most promising young aviators. Pride withdrew his court-martial threat and settled for a strong letter of reprimand. He also grounded Shepard for two weeks and warned that if he ever heard of another Alan Shepard stunt, he would kick him out of the Navy with a bad-conduct discharge.

Afterward Hyland had a long talk with Shepard, warning him that he had gotten caught twice and that getting caught a third time would surely end his career for good.

“Now look, Shep, if you want to fly low and do slow rolls at low altitudes, for God’s sake, go out to sea and do it where no one can catch you. But don’t get caught again,” Hyland said. “Now, do you understand that?” Elder gave him a similar lecture.

“He was pretty flamboyant as a young officer. I had to stick my neck out a country mile to get him out of that one,” Elder recalled. “That was a close one on Al’s part. It was a dumb thing to do. He shaved the corners a little closer than most.”

Secretly, though, Elder admired Shepard’s skills—and his exuberance.

“I thought he was a little indulgent,” he said. “I was, too, so I could recognize it.”

A few weeks later, when Shepard was allowed to fly again, he flew back to Chincoteague, where his old boss, Doc Abbot, had recently been assigned. He seemed uncharacteristically subdued, his chin down instead of up as he asked Abbot to borrow his car for a few hours. Though Shepard didn’t explain why he needed it, Abbot handed him the keys. When Shepard returned that afternoon, his chin was back up and he was all smiles. He stood on the tarmac talking happily with Abbot, not quite ready to return to Pax River. There seemed to be something on his mind, but Abbot couldn’t get him to open up.

Then Shepard spotted on the tarmac a twin-engine bomber plane called a JD-1. He’d never flown one, and he asked Abbot for a ride. Abbot took Shepard up and showed him how to fly the thing. Then they landed and swapped seats, and Shepard flew the big bomber perfectly, even better than Abbot. At one point he put the plane into a hard turn, and Abbot noticed that the altimeter didn’t budge—Shepard had just learned to fly the plane, yet he was keeping it absolutely steady. Abbot felt sheepish, but then on the landing, Shepard accidentally braked too hard and the nose slammed down onto the r
unway. Abbot was secretly thrilled to see his friend, for a change, make a mistake.

Afterward Shepard finally explained why he had borrowed the car. He told Abbot how a few weeks earlier, before the Chincoteague flyover incident, he had flown low over the beach at Ocean City and “scared the hell out of a lot of people.” The local sheriff got the number on the plane’s tail—presumably from the photograph in the newspaper—and wanted to bring charges against Shepard. Shepard borrowed Abbot’s car so he could visit the sheriff and talk his way out of an arrest.

“It was a remarkable piece of work,” Abbot recalled. “It surely would have been the end of him.”

Surviving his brush with court-martial had indebted Shepard to his two superiors, John Hyland and especially Bob Elder. But it also endeared him to them. Military men harbored a built-in distrust of their superiors, and that distrust was especially strong among self-reliant aviators. Escaping an admiral’s wrath relatively unscathed only solidified the brotherly bond between Shepard and Bob Elder. Shepard had committed one of the ultimate sins
—three
times—
and had gotten caught twice, but emerged with a smirk and a swagger.

The two men began flying together more often, performing tests with each other, such as the dangerous in-
flight refueling procedure. They once traveled to the Cleveland Air Races to demonstrate in-flight refueling to the crowd, which included Miss America. The next day’s paper pictured Shepard standing on the outside steps of a tanker plane, looking straight down into Miss America’s impressive cleavage.