Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Read Free Page B

flight, then retire together to the same room, sleeping just a few feet apart.
    Just before they closed the hatch Glenn reached in one last time and shook Shepard’s gloved hand. Shepard was suddenly moved by how gracious Glenn had been. He thanked his colleague and then jerked a thumbs-up.
    “See you soon,” he said, his voice muffled inside his helmet.
    “Happy landings, Commander,” Glenn responded as the crew standing behind him shouted good luck and goodbye.
    Technicians closed and bolted the hatch, and Shepard was alone. Monitors showed that his heartbeat quickened a bit as they shut him inside, and Shepard thought,
Okay, buster. You volunteered for this thing. Now don’t screw up.
    It was dawn. He’d been awake five hours, and the rising sun began to shine through the periscope screen two feet from his face. He started going through his checklist—a newspaper the next day would accidentally print that Shepard was reviewing his “chick list.” Then he started through all the procedures he and Glenn had practiced for months. As he did this, he began to think about where he was and where the others were.
    I’m going to be the first,
he thought. Glenn was on the outside of the capsule, helping disconnect hoses and cables. The other astronauts were performing various backup duties. Shepard’s rocket would soon leave them all behind in its fiery dust, rising higher and farther and faster than any of them—than any American—had ever been.
    There would be many battles in the years to come: personal, professional, financial, physical, marital, legal. But in the battle to be first, which was the biggest prize of the astronaut game, it appeared Shepard was about to win. The boy who had been smaller, weaker, and slower than the others had forced himself to become better than the rest and had become the man, the flyboy, he’d always wanted to be.
    Years later, when asked about his greatest accomplishment, Shepard would say that being chosen to be the first American in space was the highlight of his career, of his life. A close second was reaching the moon in 1971, but that was more personal. He’d fought back from severe illness to get there, and spoke less about the moon’s effect on his life. But ten years earlier, being picked above the other six—that had
defined
him.
    It was never the fifteen-minute flight itself that symbolized his life. He’d had more thrilling adventures as a test pilot and fighter jock. Landing wounded jets on storm-tossed aircraft carriers and working the dangerous kinks out of the nation’s newest, fastest aircraft—some of those moments had given him more of a heart-thumping rush than riding on a rocket. But being chosen, being first, winning—that was the thing.
    Because for Shepard, life was one big competition. And as he sat that morning locked inside his capsule, at the tip of an eighty-three-foot bullet, with America’s most sophisticated machinery hissing and humming all around him, he knew he had won.
    Just before they pulled away the gantry, leaving him atop his rocket alone, he saw a face in the screen of the periscope. Thefish-eye screen made the face appear round and distorted, but it looked “close and friendly.”
    It was John Glenn.
    Grinning.

    Shepard was thirty-seven the day he became the first American in space; thirty-seven years later, I was working as a reporter at the
Baltimore Sun
and received a call from an editor telling me that Alan Shepard had died and asking me to contribute a few paragraphs to his obituary.
    A quick Internet search that day told me that, except for a thin 1962 young-adult book, no biography existed on America’s first astronaut. When I decided to make up for that omission, I quickly discovered why no one had ventured to write about Shepard.
    Alan Shepard felt no compunction to explain to the world, to anyone, who he was and where he’d been. He hoarded his privacy, to the point of turning down many lucrative endorsement offers. In