Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (29 page)

Of thirty-two candidates sent through the strange battery of tests, thirty-one passed. Of those, the names of eighteen finalists were forwarded to a selection committee, which would choose a final six. Four NASA officials and doctors sifted through their files and selected five they considered to be the best of the bunch, but couldn’t decide which of two competing candidates should be the sixth. So they agreed to take them both, for a total of seven.

During the rigorous discussions that led to the selection of those seven, the goal was to choose those with superior flying abilities, but also those with harder-to-measure qualities, strengths of character that could sustain them through the expected media frenzy to come. As the selectors sifted through Shepard’s military dossier, they surely came across a few of his less-than-perfect displays—his near arrest after flat-hatting a Maryland beach and his near court-martial after flat-hatting three hundred sailors. But, in the end, his notoriety as an occasional rule-breaking exhibi
tionist was judged to be a sign of Shepard’s boldness and independence, a virtue stitched into the complexity of his overall character.

Shepard had to wait six painfully long weeks to learn whether or not he had been chosen. When he finally heard back from NASA on April 1, the caller simply said: “We’d like you to join us. Are you still willing to volunteer?” Alone in his office, Shepard let out a whoop and then called Louise. Whe
n he couldn’t reach her, he quit for the day and raced home, amazed that he arrived without mowing down any pedestrians.

That night, he recalled years later, “Louise and I just held each other after I told her—I could see that she was as happy as I was.”

Two nights later Alan and Louise flew to Boston to attend the wedding of his cousin Anne. Alan’s parents and sister met him and Louise at Boston’s Logan Airport. During the hour-long drive north to East Derry, Alan broke the news that he’d been keeping bottled up for days.

He told Bart and Renza that NASA had chosen him to be one of its astronauts. He’d been ordered not to discuss the highly classified selection process, but his name was going to be announced at a press conference the following week, so NASA officials told him to quietly prepare family members for the expected onslaught of media attention.

Renza said she was “delighted,” but Bart looked as though he’d been rapped in the head with a hammer. The colonel quietly scowled and stewed as Alan explained the events of recent weeks. Finally Bart cleared his throat and spoke up. “I’m not sure you’re doing the right thing,” he said. “Are you sure you really want to do this?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Alan said. “What’s the matter?”

Bart explained that Alan’s “career pattern is developing very, very nicely,” and that after serving another few months of administrative duty in Norfolk, Alan could expect another hefty promotion. After that, the Navy would likely give him command of his own fighter squadron, and at that rate he might someday be given command of his own aircraft carrier. “Someday,” Bart concluded, “you may be an admiral.” More to the point, Bart wanted his son to follow the safe route, the stable, sensible, and predictable course of action.

Alan tried to convince his father that he’d already considered
all those things. He knew he’d be derailed from his military career path. Still, this was a chance to fly faster and go farther, to look down on the earth from a satellite’s view, to become a human Sputnik. And that, to him, was far more interesting than wearing an admiral’s stars.

It was late when they got home. The conversation ended and they all went straight to bed. Shepard went to sleep that night feeling as if he was “splitting up the family.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please,” the head of NASA said. “In about sixty seconds we will give you the announcement you have all been waiting for: the names of the seven volunteers who will become the Mercury astronaut team.”

Shepard and the six others stood backstage in a conference room of the Dolley Madison House in Washington, D.C. Hands dug into the pockets of the civilian suits they had been told to wear, they could hear the crowd murmuring and rustling on the other side of the curtains. It was clear they were unaccustomed to “civvies”: two of them wore bow ties, two wore plaid jackets. Just before they were introduced, Shepard told one of his new colleagues, Deke Slayton, he had a splotch of “guck” on his bow tie that looked like “smeared egg.” Slayton would recall thinking Shepard “seemed kind of cold a
nd standoffish,” while another of the bow-tied men, John Glenn, “was trying to be nice to everyone.”

Discreetly the seven men checked each other out, trying not to appear too curious but instantly aware that the man by his side was both a colleague and, in the race that had already begun—the race to be first into space—a competitor.

Each of their names was announced, in alphabetical order:

Malcolm S. Carpenter, a Navy lieutenant who went by his middle name, Scott. Carpenter, a Colorado native, was the handsome one, blond and athletic. His wife, Rene, also
blond, was funny and enthusiastic. He sang songs to her while playing guitar. They had four kids, but the relationship would not survive. Of the seven, he had the least amount of experience as a test pilot—and one day that would show.

Leroy G. Cooper Jr., an Air Force captain known as Gordo. Cooper’s slow Oklahoma twang sometimes betrayed him; people assumed the rail-thin pilot was less sharp than he really was. In fact, he was a decorated combat pilot with a degree in aeronautical engineering. He had a subtle wit and hoped to have some “real good fun” as an astronaut. He and his wife, Trudy, h
ad two daughters—and a deeply troubled marriage.

John H. Glenn Jr., a colonel and the lone Marine of the group. Glenn, a freckled plumber’s son from Ohio, was at thirty-seven the oldest and probably the most accomplished overall. He had flown fifty-nine combat missions in World War II and over a hundred in Korea. He and his wife, Annie, had a son and a daughter. He liked to sing at parties and played the trumpet for his wife. He believed deeply in God—and in himself.

Virgil I. Grissom, an Air Force captain known as Gus. Grissom, at thirty-two, was the youngest; at five foot seven, he was also the shortest. A reporter once called him “a little bear of a man.” He loved to hunt and fish—and fly. He had flown more than a hundred combat missions over Korea, more total combat missions than any of the other seven except Glenn, and was a test pilot instructor at Edwards. He and his wife, Betty, had two sons.

Walter M. Schirra Jr., a Navy lieutenant commander they called Wally. Schirra was the smart-ass of the group. The New Jersey native’s father had been a stunt pilot and his mother sometimes performed as a wing walker, walking out on the biplane’s lower wing above air shows. Like Shepard, he had attended the Naval Academy. Unlike Shepard, he had flo
wn ninety combat missions over Korea. With his wife, Josephine—the daughter of a top Navy admiral—he had a son and daughter.

Alan B. Shepard Jr., who had more experience as a test pilot than the others but was alone in having zero combat experience. Although NASA gave extra consideration to candidates with combat duty, Shepard’s test piloting more than made up for his lack of war making. Still, that glaring gap in his resume would nag at him. He wore a dark suit, white shirt, and narrow tie, slightly loosened. He, along with Slayton and Schirra, fired up a cigarette as soon as the seven were allowed to cross the creaky wood floor and sit at two long tables to await questions.

Donald K. Slayton, an Air Force captain known as Deke. Slayton had as much test pilot experience as Shepard, but he’d flown combat missions in World War II. He had big ears and a ruggedly handsome face. He was shy and taciturn, the no-bullshit one of the group. He’d grown up on a Wisconsin farm and would remember the press conference as “the worst stress test I’ve ever been through.”

The seven men ranged between the ages of thirty-two and thirty-seven, between five foot seven and five foot eleven, between 150 and 180 pounds. Each had a father who had served in the military, although most were also influenced by strong maternal role models. They all had test piloting experience, and all but Shepard had engaged in aerial dogfights against Japanese and/or Korean pilots. All seven were married, with two or three children. The psychiatrists and psychologists noted a few common traits: shades of obsessive-compulsive behavior, an inclination toward action and away fro
m introspection, an off-the-charts exhibition of self-reliance. Together, they were about to soar irretrievably away from their military peers to create their own seven-man fraternity—and a whole new brand of cold war celebrity.

“The nation’s Mercury astronauts,” the NASA man said after announcing the seven astronauts’ names. Those who weren’t already standing rose to their feet in ovation. After the applause died down, the NASA guy said, “Take your pictures as you will, gentlemen,” and the crowd surged forward, elbowing and nudging each other for position. Shepard muttered to Schirra, “I can’t believe this. These people are nuts.”

For nearly two hours the reporters grilled them. Each man would lean forward on an elbow and speak into the microphone placed before him. The first question out of the box was among the least expected. What did their “good lady” think? As if that
had ever been a real consideration,
Slayton thought, and his response was just as brusque: “What I do is pretty much my business, profession-wise.” Shepard told the questioner, “I have no problems at home.”

With that, as with most of the day’s questions, the most eloquent of them all was Glenn. In response to the “good lady” question, he said, “I don’t think any of us could really go on with something like this if we didn’t have pretty good backing at home.”

Shepard, his close-cropped hair accentuating his widow’s peak, handled most of his responses seriously but briefly. He came across sounding professional and self-assured, well spoken if not very affable. A couple of the others, particularly Grissom and Cooper, fared worse. Cooper, the Oklahoman, confessed in a quiet twang that he felt at a “disadvantage to have to speak loud.” And when Grissom was asked about the worst and most stressful part of the candidate selection program, he told reporters, “This is the worst, here.”

Glenn, meanwhile, got the highest marks and the biggest laugh of the day when he responded to a question about which of the medical tests he liked least. “They went into every opening on the human body just as far as they could go,” he said, alluding to the “steel eel.” “Which one do you think you would enjoy the
least?” Shepard had to admit Glenn handled that one “pretty well,” and must have realized at that moment that he needed to start working on his media relations if he wanted to compete with the likes of the garrulous Glenn.

Cooper, probably the most gung-ho pilot of the group, sat wondering where all the questions about flying and space had gone. Then one of the reporters tossed off another unexpected— and, to them, irrelevant—query: What was their “sustaining faith”? Cooper felt as if Glenn “had been waiting for the religion question all along.” The others were amazed at Glenn’s unscripted reply. Whereas the rest offered no more than a dozen or so words about their faith, Glenn spoke with unabashed sincerity and eloquence about heaven, family, and teaching Sunday school, more than four hundred words on d
estiny, the Wright brothers, and “a power greater than any of us.” “We are placed here with certain talents and capabilities,” Glenn said. “It is up to each of us to use those talents and capabilities as best you can.” Slayton said later that John Glenn “ate this stuff up.” “We all looked at him, then at each other,” Deke said.

Grissom’s response to the religion question made a few of the others cringe. “I am not real active in church, as Mr. Glenn is,” Gus said. And Shepard’s response wasn’t much more profound. In military style, he stuck to the facts: “I am not a member of any church. I attend the Christian Science Church regularly.”

Later, they’d all realize that the competition among the seven of them—Schirra called it “the seven-sided coin of competition”—began with that afternoon’s Q-and-A. And Glenn, with his eloquence and his responses that were ten times longer and more detailed than those of the other six, had taken an early lead. Glenn would say many years later that his exposure to the media prior to that press conference—interviews he faced after a record-breaking supersonic cross-country flight in 1957 and, subsequent to that, a guest appearance on the
Name That Tune
TV show—had given him the confidence
to have “a little more to say”
than the others. But he also realized that his loquaciousness had cost him points among his new peers.