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

by Neal Thompson

  The lessons were informal—more like free rides with a few pointers thrown in—but Park recalled that when he began letting Shepard take the control sticks, in no time Shepard had a feel for keeping the plane level. There is no comparable earthbound exercise—except maybe sailing—that can prepare someone for flying, and many students learn the hard way that they have no aptitude for flight. Some get airsick, their bodies unable to reconcile the imprecise relationship with gravity. Others find the lack of visual cues—ground, walls, ceilings, and such—so disconcerting as to induce vertigo. And many can’t wrap their head around the counter intuitiveness of flight, how it’s safer to fly fast and high than slow and low, how the best way to save an out-of-control plane is to point the nose straight toward the ground. Instructors tell their students right from the start to distrust their earthly instincts, to resist common sense. Flying, as one 1930s pilot-writer noted, “has no similes in our life on the ground.”

  But Shepard seemed to have no difficulties in learning how to fly an airplane like an airplane, not like a car or a horse or a bike or a sailboat. Maybe all the model airplanes of his youth embedded in his brain some intuitive sense of the characteristics of a wing. Or maybe his sailing talents afforded him some extra knowledge of the wind. Whatever it was, Carl Park noticed from the start that Shepard was “a natural.”

  In time Shepard was working so hard around the airport to pay for his next ride that Park expanded his duties from just cleaning the planes to helping the mechanics change spark plugs and repair fuel lines. Shepard considered himself the airfield’s “fix-it kid.” Park even let Shepard taxi planes from one part of the field to another.

  The leap from passenger to pilot is an immensely empowering one. Most adults can recall receiving their driver’s license and feeling the newfound freedom of driving wherever you want, whenever you want. In a plane, the freedom is many times more profound than in a car. There is no road, no speed limit, no barriers, no earthly restrictions . . . it is the freedom of the birds.

  Shepard was enthralled, swooping down over his town in the passenger seat of a single-propeller, high-winged Voyager or Reliant, the predominant private planes of the day. When Park let him take the controls and Shepard held that stick, he knew he was hooked. Shepard loved to be in control—of people, of situations, of himself. But in a plane, he was in control of everything: of up and down, of the entire world beneath him. One twitch of the control stick, and the whole world tilted. A slight, slow pull on the stick and the world disappeared, unveiling nothing but sky and space and clouds—nothing and yet everything.

  New Hampshire produced a few home-brewed aviators of note in those early decades of human flight. Manchester Airport had been christened in 1927, with its first landing and takeoff by Robert S. Fogg, who that summer delivered mail twice daily to Vermont towns marooned by a massive flood. By 1940, just two years after Shepard’s first lessons, the airport would be renamed Grenier Airport, in honor of a daring Army Air Corps pilot from Manchester, Jean Grenier, who was killed in 1934 while scouting a dangerous new airmail route across the Rocky Mountains of Utah. New Hampshire also produced a daredevil named Carmeno Onofrio, who once landed his J-3 Cub, outfitted with skis instead of wheels, fourteen times in one day on the snow-covered peak of 6,288-foot Mount Washington, known for clocking two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds.

  But even more profound feats would soon be performed by the men who’d replace Lindbergh as Shepard’s driving inspiration: the aviators of World War II.

  On September 1, 1939, as Shepard began his last year of high school, German soldiers—having already occupied Czechoslovakia—marched into Poland. Hitler had already allied himself with Italy and the Soviet Union, which would become his partners in the Nazi dictator’s subsequent trouncing of the better part of Europe.

  At the Shepard household, Alan’s father began discussing some options for college the following year. Alan had managed to find his place at Pinkerton and had studied hard, and by his senior year he ranked eighth in his class of fifty-five, with all A’s or B’s except for a C in French. With the escalation of war in Europe, Bart strongly suggested that his son consider the Army’s military academy at West Point. It was free, and it would perpetuate a proud heritage of Shepards in the Army. Besides, with the growing likelihood that America would someday join the fighting overseas, Alan might have the chance to do what many Shepards had done before him—to serve his country on the battlefield.

  Bart was the type of guy that newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle would call, admiringly, a grunt. He believed in the ethos of the dogface soldier, which he’d been in World War I. But to Alan, the Army life seemed dirty and degrading. Alan loved his father and respected his simple New Hampshire lifestyle, but he had no interest in the Army soldier’s life. Alan knew all too well that the United States would likely soon join the war. He saw it at Manchester Airport, whose runways were becoming busy with military cargo planes. Indeed, before long, the Army would take over Manchester Airport, nudging aside Alan’s instructor friend Carl Park as it turned the place into a sprawling military air base.

  In the coming conflict the Army would be no place for an aspiring pilot. Thanks to a $2 billion infusion from President Roosevelt, the Navy was buying thousands of planes and training pilots for previously unthinkable feats. They had been welding flight decks atop ships, and Navy pilots were taking off from and landing on these wildly dangerous makeshift landing strips. In the mid-1930s the Navy began building a new generation of aircraft carriers, an entirely new type of ship whose sole purpose was to serve as a floating runway for pilots crazy enough to attempt such risky landings. The Navy was becoming the place to fly.

  One Sunday in late 1939, Alan’s uncle Fritz came to visit and—picking up on the disagreement between Bart and Alan over West Point—suggested Alan consider the U.S. Naval Academy. Alan immediately saw the perfection of his uncle’s suggestion. In the Navy he could indulge both his love of the water and, more importantly, his love of the air.

  The decision to allow his son to pursue the Navy instead of the Army must have weighed heavily on Bart. Yet at some point he realized: Maybe he would not have a colonel for a son, and a long-established tradition of Shepard men as Army officers would cease, but then again, maybe he would someday have an admiral for a son.

  In 1940 Alan notched the second-highest score in New Hampshire on the Naval Academy’s preliminary exam. But because he had skipped two elementary-school grades, the family learned that, at sixteen, Alan was too young for the academy. Rather than alter their course, they sent Alan for a year to Admiral Farragut Academy, a military prep school in New Jersey. Bart wasn’t taking any chances. He wrote to Farragut’s superintendent: “Appreciate you putting more pressure on him to study.”

  After a year at Farragut, Shepard was ordered to report to Annapolis.

  When he arrived there, on June 19, 1941, he was again among the smallest in the class. And at seventeen he was again one of the youngest. Though he had been something of a self-sufficient loner in East Derry, he had also been surrounded by family and friends and was never truly alone. Now, as he found himself suddenly thrown in among bigger and older young men, Shepard embarked on a difficult transformation from gangly teen to naval officer—a transformation that, from the start, he seemed almost intent on sabotaging.

  2

  “I think I love you”

  Teams of uniformed, rock-faced upperclassmen ushered Shepard into his new world, a regimented and hierarchical military domain for which he was ill-prepared.

  The U.S. Navy had first attempted to create a training academy in 1842 aboard a Brooklyn-based training ship, the American Brig Somers. But during the inaugural cruise a student and two enlisted sailors rebelled against their strict captain, were found guilty of mutiny, and were hanged. The Navy decided to replace its floating school with a land-based one, which it built beside the remote fishing village of Annapolis, Maryland, where students—called midshipmen—would be taught far from th
e distractions of city life.

  From the start, in 1845, the U.S. Naval Academy was an institution where no rebellion or insubordination would be tolerated. Its founders never again resorted to hanging, but the plan—“to develop midshipmen morally, mentally, and physically,” the founders said—was, bluntly put, to create hardened officers by first breaking their will.

  The Naval Academy’s spectacular, ivy-covered gray granite buildings, most of them built in the sturdy but elegant French Renaissance style, occupied a picturesque stretch of waterfront along the Severn River, which flowed into nearby Chesapeake Bay. Separated from Annapolis by a ten-foot stone wall, the grounds were known as the Yard. The academy looked like a pastoral Ivy League college campus except for the occasional military cannon or war hero’s statue. Beneath a copper-domed chapel lay the body of John Paul Jones, and midshipmen quickly learned the words to an irreverent song about how Jones “lies around all day, body pickled in alcohol.”

  More than three thousand midshipmen lived in one of the world’s largest dormitories—Bancroft Hall, known as “Mother B.” When Shepard arrived, construction crews were adding yet another wing to the imposing granite building, which would soon house five miles of hallways and nearly two thousand rooms—so big that Bancroft Hall would eventually earn its own zip code.

  In a tradition of antagonistic first-day routines honed across the school’s first century, upperclassmen subjected the incoming class to a torrent of insults, screams, put-downs, and various other forms of physical and emotional abuse. For starters, freshmen are known as “plebes.” The term comes from the Roman word pleb, which means “crude, low, vulgar.”

  In Shepard’s first hours as a plebe, upperclassmen marched him through dank basement hallways from one orientation checkpoint to another. After an exhaustive physical exam, Shepard was told to strip off his coat and tie and was issued a stack of new uniforms—the clothes he’d wear each day until Christmas. They taught him how to salute, then screamed in his face when he did it wrong. After hustling him into a barber’s chair, his hair was unceremoniously shaved down to a stubble. Shepard was then taught how to adopt the subservient posture of the plebe—back straight, chin down, and “eyes in the boat,” meaning that plebes were to keep their eyes straight ahead, never making eye contact with upperclassmen.

  Finally, after a long day of insults and indoctrination, Shepard stood in his white pajamalike plebe uniform, sweating amid rows of fellow plebes, and raised his right hand, promising to “support and defend the Constitution.”

  Some of the rules weren’t difficult, just annoying. Shepard and his fellow plebes were ordered to call all upperclassmen “mister” or “sir”—and to become their servants. Plebes scrambled each morning to spit-shine their black shoes, to make their beds so a coin could bounce off the taut blanket, and, while getting dressed, to memorize the day’s meals so they could recite a “chow call”—that is, stand in the hall barking out the menu of the day for the benefit of their elders. Just getting to and from class carried its own set of rules: Plebes had to march down the center of the hallway, “square” each corner with perfect right-angle turns, and slam their backs against the wall and salute when upperclassmen approached. Plebes had to always be aware of how many days there were until graduation day; seniors would demand without warning to know the number, and those who failed had to drop and do forty-five push-ups (because they were the Class of ’45).

  There was no escape from the small cruelties of plebe life, not even at mealtime, which plebes dreaded. In the cafeteria, plebes served the upper-class midshipmen first. When they sat down to eat, plebes had to sit only on the front few inches of their chair and eat only one bite at a time, chewing and swallowing it before taking another bite. Every now and then, a senior midshipman might yell, “Fire in the paint locker,” and the plebes would have to dive under the table and cower as upperclassmen dumped water, ketchup, or milk on them to douse the imaginary fire.

  When Shepard was forced to dive under the table, he often tried to smear butter on his protagonists’ shiny-clean shoes, in a typical Shepard prank.

  Plebes learned the hard way that breaking academy rules could hurt worse than all the memorizing and protocol. While most plebes felt some of the hallowed traditions and rules were silly and useless, few were impudent enough to defy them. Shepard was among those who at times resisted.

  One day, a few months into the fall semester, an upperclassman found him yelling out of a second-floor window in Bancroft Hall. Shepard was ordered to shut his mouth and return to his room. He complied, waited until the upperclassman had disappeared down the hall, then went back to the window and began yelling again to his friend. The upperclassman heard him, returned, and punished Shepard with repeated smacks in the ass with a wood-soled shower sandal. Other upperclassmen recalled numerous instances of swatting Shepard in the backside with a broom, making him do push-ups, or forcing him to “shove out,” which required a plebe to sit on an invisible chair, his back against the wall, knees bent, until his thighs screamed.

  Some upperclassmen who took seriously their job of reshaping plebes found it difficult to make much of a dent in Shepard. For one thing, he’d already, in his own way, been shaped—Shepard had withstood plenty of military protocol from his father. Second, Shepard had the temperament of a mule, refusing to tremble and cower like some of the other plebes. “As an Army brat, conforming to academy procedures was natural—at least Alan made it appear so,” his classmate Bob Kirk once remarked.

  What troubled some of the upperclassmen, though, was that he didn’t seem to take any of it too seriously. Friends called him “Shep” or “Schimpf” (a classmate’s young niece’s mispronunciation of “Shep,” which Shepard and his new friends found hilarious). “Full of piss and vinegar” is how Dick Sewall remembers Shepard, who was three years his junior. Shepard was “pretty crafty,” Sewall said, and he often found routes around the academy’s rules. Sometimes Shepard would get caught and punished, but half the time he’d talk his way out of it, and Sewall would agree not to report him. Instead of openly resenting his superiors, Shepard had a way of befriending them, adopting them as his allies and protectors. When they did chew him out, he would just smirk. One classmate called Shepard “ratey,” an academy moniker for someone who acts as if he rated better than the rest. “He was supposed to be subservient to his master and he was not.”

  One annoying duty forced upon plebes was waking thirty minutes before the upperclassmen and walking quietly into the older boys’ rooms to shut windows so that they wouldn’t be too cold when they awoke. One morning Shepard organized a small rebellion—he and a few other plebes stole the left shoe of every upperclassman and hid them in a bathroom. When the firsties learned Shepard was the ringleader, they made him bend over and grab his ankles while they took turns with a broom.

  “But he didn’t get broken by it,” Sewall said. “He was thinking: Next time I just won’t get caught.”

  At the time—the late summer of 1941—the two-year-old war in Europe had crept steadily closer to America’s shores and minds. German submarines, or U-boats, were sinking British ships in the Atlantic Ocean, and the U.S. Navy had begun patrolling through the Atlantic and Caribbean, searching for German subs and escorting convoys of merchant ships and war supplies across to Europe. Day by day, as Hitler’s aggressions stomped further across Europe and then out into the seas, it was becoming obvious that America couldn’t wait on the sidelines much longer. Indeed, the United States’ alignment with and support of England had put it essentially in an undeclared war with Germany. Shepard and his classmates knew it was just a matter of time before their nation headed to battle, and that they’d play a part in the fight.

  Finally, on October 31, 1941, Germany sunk its first U.S. ship—a torpedo that split open a Navy escort ship, the USS Reuben James. More than a hundred men died—“Tell me, what were their names?” Woody Guthrie wrote in a tribute song— marking the first U.S. Navy ship to be sunk in the escalat
ing, expanding war. Meanwhile, Japan had begun snatching pieces of coastal China and numerous volcanic islands across Indochina, leading to increased frictions between Japan and the United States, which responded with an oil embargo that infuriated the oil-hungry Japanese military machine.

  Such escalations soon began to touch Shepard’s life at the Naval Academy. On November 29, as German panzer divisions marched steadily toward Moscow, Shepard and his classmates rode a train to Philadelphia for the annual Army-Navy football game. Before ninety-eight thousand fans, Navy beat Army 14–6, capping a 7–1–1 season under coach “Swede” Larson, a major with the Marines. Right after the game, Larson resigned as coach and rejoined the Marines, proclaiming: “There’s a bigger game, a bigger battle coming up and I’m going to be in it.” A week later, on a lazy Sunday morning, Admiral Husband Kimmel and his fleet of ships at Pearl Harbor were caught completely unprepared for Japan’s surprise attack. At the academy, the superintendent interrupted a tea party with the football team to take a phone call. He returned ashen-faced, closed the doors to the ballroom, and said, “Gentlemen, we are at war.”

  The news immediately charged the atmosphere of the Yard. Officers strapped on pistol holsters, and the ranks of midshipmen buzzed with talk of battle.

  The next day President Roosevelt announced that the “day of infamy” at Pearl Harbor put America undeniably at war with Japan. When America’s declaration of war was announced over the academy’s loudspeakers that afternoon, deafening cheers echoed through the corridors of Bancroft Hall. That was followed by the announcement that the Navy had decided to pull Shepard and his classmates into the imminent conflict by lopping a year off their four-year academic lives. Graduation would be moved up to 1944, and the news further electrified the Yard.

  As one classmate put it: “This was war and we had to hurry out to get at least a small share of it for ourselves.” Many were ecstatic that their warrior days were nigh. Said one to a reporter: “Hey, that’s why we were all there.”