John Glenn Goes Back at 77

The Plumber's Son Wants In

John Herschel Glenn Junior was born on July 18th, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio. He grew up in the small town of New Concord, where his father ran a plumbing business. He went to college right there in town, at Muskingum.

He married his childhood sweetheart, Annie Castor. They stayed married for more than seventy years.

Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and Glenn wanted in. In March 1942, he entered the Naval Aviation Cadet Program. He earned his wings, and in 1943 he was commissioned an officer in the United States Marine Corps.

They sent him to the Pacific in the F4U Corsair, a big, powerful fighter with wings bent like a gull's. With Marine Fighter Squadron 155, he attacked enemy positions in the Marshall Islands. By the end of the war, he had flown fifty-nine combat missions.

For most men, that's a career. For Glenn, it was the warm-up.

MiG Mad Marine

After the war, Glenn stayed in the Corps. Then came Korea. This time he flew jets with Marine Fighter Squadron 311, sixty-three missions, many of them low-level attacks on enemy positions. More than once he came home with his plane full of holes from ground fire.

One of the pilots in that squadron had a famous name. Ted Williams, the Boston Red Sox slugger, was a Marine aviator too. On some of those missions, Ted Williams flew as John Glenn's wingman.

But Glenn wanted to fight enemy jets in the air. So he went on an exchange tour with the Air Force and flew the F-86 Sabre, the best American fighter of the war. He had a name painted on its side. MiG Mad Marine.

Then, in the last nine days of fighting before the armistice, he shot down three Soviet-built MiG fighters near the Yalu River.

Across two wars, Glenn flew one hundred forty-nine combat missions. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross six times.

He'd proved he could fight. Next, he set out to prove something about speed.

Faster Than a Bullet

After Korea, Glenn went to test pilot school at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River, Maryland.

In 1957, he came up with an idea. He'd fly the new Vought Crusader jet coast to coast, faster than sound. They called it Project Bullet, because the jet would average more than the speed of a bullet from a forty-five caliber pistol.

On July 16th, 1957, Major John Glenn took off from Los Alamitos, California. He refueled in the air three times. He landed at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn three hours, twenty-three minutes and eight point four seconds later.

It was the first supersonic flight across the United States. It had a serious purpose: it proved the jet's engine could run at full power for a long stretch without coming apart.

But it did something else, too. It put Glenn's name and face in the newspapers. And just then, NASA was about to go looking for astronauts.

Three Times Around

In April 1959, NASA introduced its first seven astronauts, the Mercury Seven. John Glenn was one of them. He was the oldest of the group, and probably the best at talking to reporters.

But he wasn't first to fly. Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom both made short up-and-down flights in 1961. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had already put a man in orbit. America was behind.

On February 20th, 1962, Glenn climbed into a tiny capsule he had named Friendship 7, on top of an Atlas rocket. As it lifted off, fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter sent him on his way. "Godspeed, John Glenn."

Within minutes he was in orbit. "Zero G, and I feel fine."

He circled the Earth three times. Sunsets and sunrises came and went in minutes. Outside his window, tiny glowing specks floated past. He called them fireflies.

Then a small thruster that kept the capsule pointed the right way acted up. So Glenn took over and flew the spacecraft by hand. A test pilot, doing what test pilots do.

But the real scare came from the ground. A signal suggested the capsule's heat shield might be loose. If it was, Glenn would burn up on the way home. Mission control told him to keep his retro-rocket pack strapped on during reentry, hoping it would hold the shield in place.

Coming down, Glenn watched chunks of burning material fly past his window. He didn't know if it was the retro pack or the heat shield.

It was the retro pack. The heat shield was fine.

After nearly five hours, Friendship 7 splashed down in the Atlantic, and the Navy destroyer USS Noa picked him up. I'll admit, as a Navy man, I like that detail. The Marines' most famous pilot came home on a Navy ship.

There was a ticker-tape parade in New York. Overnight, the quiet Marine from New Concord was the most famous man in America.

And he would not fly in space again for thirty-six years.

A Word From the White House

Glenn wanted to fly again. But NASA kept assigning the missions to other men.

It was years before Glenn found out why. President Kennedy had let NASA know he would just as soon Glenn not be assigned to another flight.

Why would a president ground his own hero? Glenn wondered whether Kennedy was worried about the political fallout of losing a national hero. But he said he never knew for sure.

In January 1964, Glenn resigned from NASA. He ran for the Senate that year, but a bad fall injured his inner ear and forced him out of the race. On January 1st, 1965, he retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel, after twenty-three years in uniform, and went into business.

He ran for the Senate again in 1970 and lost in the primary. He kept at it. In 1974, the people of Ohio elected him to the United States Senate, and they kept him there for twenty-four years. He worked to keep nuclear weapons from spreading. He even ran for president in 1984.

All that time, he never stopped wanting to go back to space. The question was how a senator in his seventies could talk his way onto a rocket.

One More Ride

In the 1990s, Senator Glenn noticed that a lot of what happens to astronauts in space looks like what happens to people as they get older. Bones lose density. Muscles weaken. Balance gets shaky. Sleep gets harder.

So he made a pitch to NASA. Why not send an older person to space and study what happens? And he knew a volunteer.

He didn't ask once. He read the medical research and kept making his case for a couple of years. He had to pass the same kind of physical exams as any other astronaut.

In early 1998, NASA said yes. Glenn trained for months alongside a crew mostly young enough to be his kids or grandkids. He learned the shuttle's systems, got back in shape, and practiced emergency escape drills. Every sailor knows drills. You run them again and again, so your hands know what to do before your head catches up. Glenn ran them at seventy-seven.

Which brings us back to that launch pad.

October 29th, 1998. Kennedy Space Center. President Bill Clinton is there to watch, the first president ever to see a shuttle launch in person.

The clock runs down. Over the radio, Scott Carpenter is on the line again, and he says it one more time. "Godspeed, John Glenn."

At nineteen minutes past two in the afternoon, Eastern time, Discovery lifts off.

Thirty-six years later, John Glenn is flying again.

From orbit, the seventy-seven-year-old said the same words he'd said at forty. "Zero G, and I feel fine."

For nine days, he was a scientist and a test subject at the same time. Doctors studied his balance, his immune system, his bones and muscles, and his sleep. Discovery circled the Earth one hundred thirty-four times, about three point six million miles, and landed safely back at Kennedy on November 7th.

At seventy-seven, Glenn was the oldest person ever to fly in space at the time, a record he held for more than two decades. Back home in Ohio, he kept helping young people get into public service. NASA renamed its research center in Cleveland for him. He died in 2016, at ninety-five, and he's buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

As a Navy veteran, I'm obligated by tradition to give a Marine a little grief. But every Marine aviator earns Navy wings of gold, and John Glenn wore his as well as anybody ever has. Semper Fi, Colonel.

Way up there, a grandfather from New Concord is circling the same blue planet he first circled at forty, one more time.

Tomorrow: a radio play on a Sunday night, and a panic that may not have happened the way you heard. The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. Subscribe so you're here for the next one. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.