John Glenn
John Glenn was a national icon who personified the American dream, and led an extraordinary and extraordinarily full life: a US Marine; World War II piston-engine fighter pilot; Korean War jet engine fighter pilot; recipient of seventeen Air Medals, six Distinguished Flying Crosses, a Congressional Space Medal of Honor, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom; daredevil test pilot; space-traveling NASA astronaut and the first American to orbit the planet; millionaire businessman; United States Senator; and then, aged 77, a space-traveling NASA astronaut once again.
Well into his eighties, John Glenn still flew his own twin-engined airplane, drove a snazzy convertible, and speed-walked for miles around his neighborhood nearly every day.
Born in Ohio in 1921, he was raised in a bucolic setting he compared to a Norman Rockwell painting. Adventurous from an early age, Glenn had a fascination with flying. When he went up on his first plane ride in an open cockpit biplane at age 8, he was hooked.
After graduating college, he was commissioned in the United States Marine Corps in 1943. Trained as a fighter pilot, he went to war, and gained a reputation for skill and fearlessness, flying the obsolescent F4F Wildcat at first, and then the F4U Corsair.
In the Korean War, Glenn flew close ground support missions and was nicknamed “Old Magnet Ass” because of the amount of anti-aircraft fire he frequently took while flying low to attack enemy positions, once returning in a plane riddled with more than 250 holes.
He then trained to fly the new F-86 Saber jet fighter, and in the waning days of the war, shot down three MiGs – the final air victories of the Korean War.
After the Korean War, Glenn spent most of the 1950s as a test pilot, in which career he set speed records while risking his life and nearly dying on more than one occasion. He then tried out for the space program, joined the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1959, and passed the rigorous testing to emerge as one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts.
He thought he would become the first American in space, but that honor went to Alan Shepherd instead. However, he did become the first American to orbit earth, flying in the Friendship 7, watched by thousands in central Florida as his Atlas rocket took off, and by millions on black and white TV sets. Early in the flight, the automatic control system failed, and Glenn had to fly manually. It was a matter of life, but he coolly took the controls, completed three orbits around the planet at speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, calmly steered through reentry, and came back to earth a national hero and an instant celebrity.
He got a New York City ticker-tape parade, spoke to a joint session of Congress, and met the President. He did not get what he wanted most, however: another launch. By then, he was over 40 years old and as such deemed too long in the tooth. Moreover, President John F. Kennedy was reluctant to risk the life of a national hero who might have a future in politics.
Retiring from NASA, Glenn returned to Ohio and made a failed bid for the US Senate in the 1960s. After that fizzled, he got a job with RC Cola where he rose to vice president, and investing in hotels near the new Disney theme park in Orlando, became a millionaire by the early 1970s.
He tried again for the US Senate but lost the primary. He tried again in 1974, and third time was the charm: he won the Democrat primary, went on to win the general election, and was comfortably reelected by Ohio voters in 1980, 1986, and 1992, serving in the Senate for 24 years, until retiring from politics in 1998.
That same year, he got another gig as an astronaut. 36 years after his first and only orbital flight, the astronaut whom NASA had deemed too old to get another launch when he was in his 40s, returned to space as a crew member of the space shuttle Discovery when he was 77, as the oldest astronaut in history and oldest human to venture into space. It was a well-earned victory lap, and a fitting reward for a man who had dutifully served his country for six decades, from the Pacific in the Second World War, to “MiG Alley” in the Korean War, to the blackness of space, and the halls of Congress.
As he later described his thoughts shortly before returning to space: “It was hard to imagine that virtually the entire history of space travel had occurred between my first ride and my second. Somebody had pointed out that more time had passed between Friendship 7 and this Discovery mission than had passed between Lindbergh’s solo trans-Atlantic flight and Friendship 7. It didn’t seem that long to me, but that is the way lives pass when you look back at them: in the blink of an eye.”
John Glenn died on December 8, 2016, aged 95. His final resting place in Arlington National Cemetery is in Section 35, grave 1543.