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

by Neal Thompson

  But some of Shepard’s classmates had to wonder why he was there. For his country? For the war? For the boats? His father? Shepard meandered through his first year at Annapolis and by the start of his sophomore year nine months later was languishing among the bottom-dwellers of his class. Friends and teachers considered him a remarkably smart young man, quick to grasp the most complex of lessons and capable of anything he leaned his head into. At Farragut he had impressed teachers with a 145 score on an IQ test. But through his plebe year at the academy, his head was rarely buried in books. He preferred Esquire magazine’s special “Annapolis Issue,” with sexy photos of Rita Hay-worth, an article on “what young naval officers should know about the art of swinging a cocktail shaker,” and a cartoon of a topless woman in front of a mirror speaking to her friend: “That midshipman I go with adores slim blondes. Loan me your girdle and hand me that peroxide.”

  Shepard kept Esquire in his footlocker atop his airplane magazines, with pictures of Mitsubishi Zeros and Supermarine Spitfires and “The Story of the Flying Tigers: Japs Are Their Specialty.” Instead of his studies, he seemed to work hardest on matters involving women or water.

  Shepard found that his childhood love of aquatic sports— sailing, rowing, swimming—served him well at a waterfront school with an armada of sailboats and rowboats. At Annapolis he quickly became a standout sailor, winning many races and even a regatta series at the hoity-toity Annapolis Yacht Club. He methodically learned to sail every type of boat the school owned—small knockabouts, fourteen-foot dinghies, eighteen-foot sloops, and the spectacular ninety-foot schooner Freedom. Then, at the start of his second year, called “youngster” year, he signed up to race the school’s eight-man sculling boats as part of the crew team. It was a bold move, and more than a few friends scoffed because Shepard would be competing for a spot on the team against rowers six inches taller and thirty pounds heavier. Still, he spent long hours on the rowing machines in the gym, packing on the muscle and increasing his stamina, and eventually made the crew team.

  But in the classroom, he showed no such determination, nor any of the intellectual curiosity that had helped him skip two grades back in East Derry. Midshipmen were graded on a scale of 0 to 4, with grades below 2.5 considered deficient. Many of Shepard’s grades were between 2.5 and 3.1, barely above that line, and sometimes he dropped below it. In Spanish he had received a 2.37 in the spring of his plebe year; foreign-language classes had dogged him since high school, where French was his only sub-85 grade. In the fall of 1942 he earned another deficiency, a 2.44 in his combined English, history, and government class, called EHG.

  In addition to poor grades, Shepard was accumulating conduct demerits for breaking the strict rules of behavior and decorum. By the end of his plebe year he had racked up forty-nine demerits—a large number for a freshman—for infractions such as unshined shoes or being out of uniform. He earned another twenty-two through the fall of 1942, although he managed to talk his way out of many more than that.

  By late 1942 Shepard ranked 676th in his class of 1,000. Academics had usually come easy to him; rarely had Shepard struggled like this. Finally he was called before an academic board to discuss his substandard performance. In a subsequent report the board noted that his poor grades made Shepard eligible for “reassignment.” That is, he could be dropped from the academy and sent to the Navy fleet—to war.

  Shepard knew all too well what that meant. A tuition-free academy education wasn’t a free ride. Graduates had to “pay” for the education with five years of service as a naval officer. If they failed to graduate, they’d repay their debt as an enlisted sailor. He’d become just some swab aboard some ship—an anonymous sailor among hundreds of other sailors. And his dreams of flying would be dashed. That day, though, the academic board decided to give Shepard another chance. He had until the end of the academic year—the spring of 1943—to bring up his grades, improve his behavior, and basically get his shit together.

  If not, he’d be expelled and shipped to the Navy, which at the time was fighting dozens of bloody battles against Japanese-held islands in the South Pacific.

  Surprisingly, even the threat of expulsion didn’t at first impede one of Shepard’s most diligent extracurricular pursuits.

  The historic, cove-front fishing town of Annapolis (also Maryland’s state capital) was known to midshipmen as “Crab-town.” Its women were “crabs” or “crabbies,” and the town was teeming with them. As if making up for lost time, Shepard discovered what he’d been missing in high school. And, he learned in Annapolis, he had a knack for it.

  Because midshipmen weren’t allowed to have cars, the only escape was by foot. Shepard would wait until after lights-out, then sneak out of Bancroft Hall and down to the southern tip of campus. There a bulkhead held back Spa Creek and it was possible to edge carefully around the ten-foot stone wall that encircled the campus. Generations of midshipmen called it going “over the wall.” Doing it once was considered a rite of passage, but Shepard made a habit of it. Afterward he’d sneak back into his room, well past midnight, and slip into bed. One night an upperclassman was waiting for him and tacked another few demerits onto Shepard’s record.

  “He always had some chick he thought was worth the risk,” said upperclassman Dick Sewall, who wrote up a number of Shepard’s so-called frap sheets; in midshipman-speak, someone busted going over the wall was “frapped” or “fried.” Sewall admitted, though, that he often fell for Shepard’s diplomatic pleas for leniency and, as one of Shepard’s patron saints, ripped up a few of Shepard’s frap sheets.

  Midway through sophomore year, a year’s worth of push-ups and early-morning exercises, which were everyday chores of academy life, had helped fill out Shepard’s wiry frame. He was still slender and would remain so his whole life. But with a bit of extra muscle, he now carried himself not as a boy but as a full chested, strong-armed man.

  That physical maturity, combined with a precocious self-confidence, contributed to a reputation with women that absolutely amazed his classmates. And Shepard learned how to position himself in all the right social situations: He religiously volunteered to serve on the committees that organized the academy’s dances and hops.

  Shepard never missed a school dance and, on weekends and nights off, attended dances or parties in town as well. If he didn’t already have a “crab”—also called a “drag”—by his side, he would by night’s end. He seemed so at ease around women, able to walk right up to a young lady and almost disarm them with a social grace that made him seem older than his nineteen years. Classmate Bob Kirk said Shepard had “a facility for creating the impression of instant friendship.” Shepard once boasted to friends of a girl he met during a weekend trip back home and how he infuriated his father by leaving two sets of muddy footprints in Bart’s car—on the ceiling. Kirk said Shepard “appreciated the better things in life” and was “almost as facile (with) the young ladies as he was managing to evade the duty officer’s search for would-be jitterbuggers.”

  Shepard’s roommate, Bob Williams, “was in awe of him . . . he processed a lot of women.” But during the Christmas holidays of 1942, during a brief trip to the nation’s heartland, Shepard would meet the woman who eclipsed any of Annapolis’ crabbies.

  Due to wartime travel restrictions, Alan’s sister, Polly, couldn’t make it home to New Hampshire for Christmas break that year, so Alan decided to visit her at Principia College, a college for Christian Scientists outside St. Louis, where she was a freshman. He planned to spend the first half of his Christmas break with Polly, then travel back to East Derry. Hopping a Navy cargo plane, he arrived in St. Louis on a Friday night in time for dinner. After dinner, he and Polly walked to Principia’s field house, which blinked and glittered with decorations for the annual Christmas dance, with streamers of blue and gold (also the Naval Academy’s school colors) hanging from basketball hoops, twinkling lights on a potted pine tree.

  Within minutes of entering the room he spotted Louise Brew
er, standing with friends across the gym floor. The routine had become second nature for him: quickly sweep the room, find the prettiest girl, make a beeline. But rarely had the prettiest girl looked like this. “Who’s that girl over there?” he asked Polly, who told him not to waste his time chasing Louise Brewer, who was beautiful, popular—and had a steady boyfriend. But Alan, looking fit and slim in his dark blue uniform, feeling confident and strong from his early-morning exercises, persisted. Boyfriend or not, he wanted to meet the girl with the narrow waist, long brown hair, and wonderful, radiant face.

  At a glance, it’d be hard to call Alan the handsomest in the room; he had a long face, and everything on it was just a bit too pronounced—the eyes, the ears, and the enormous smile, framed by dimples, with his teeth slightly askew. But he had developed a grace, a way of carrying himself, chin up and out, that caught people’s eye.

  Louise’s boyfriend, it turned out, had traveled home for the holidays, so she sat talking with Alan most of the night. Alan told her about life at Annapolis, his childhood in the snowy New England hills, his plans to someday fly airplanes. Louise spoke of her own childhood as a “VIP kid” at Longwood Gardens—a sprawling estate southeast of Philadelphia, owned by chemical baron Pierre S. DuPont, where her father ran the maintenance department. She had a great laugh and was full of confidence and poise. They danced nearly every dance, and met again two days later at a Sunday night Tea Sing at the chapel, where they stood side by side singing carols.

  Louise Brewer could easily have been mistaken for Rita Hayworth’s younger sister. She had luxurious hair, perfect teeth, and a long, sensuous neck. She was virginal and sexy at the same time. And there was something else—something ethereal about her composure that, Alan would learn, made many men worship her from afar.

  Alan joined the club of worshipers, and on Monday’s train ride toward Boston he kept thinking of Louise’s green eyes and elegant smile. She wasn’t like the others he’d dated. She seemed so much more sophisticated than the crabs back at Annapolis.

  His parents picked him up in Boston, and he told them all about Louise Brewer on the car ride north. As soon as he got home, he sat at the desk in his room to write a letter in which he boldly invited her to his Ring Dance in June, a highlight of Naval Academy life. That note would be the first in an effusive, sometimes emotional exchange of letters that would continue between Alan and Louise for the next two years.

  Louise was born, like Alan, in the upstairs bedroom of her parents’ house. Her parents, like Renza Shepard, were devoted Christian Scientists who served as “readers” conducting Sunday services at the church in nearby Wilmington, Delaware.

  Louise’s parents, Russell (called Phil) and Julia, were known as “pensioners” on the DuPont family’s Longwood estate. Pensioners tended the estate’s sprawl of farms and fountains, gardens and greenhouses. In return they received free housing and many other kindnesses from Pierre and Alice DuPont.

  With profits from his family’s growing chemical empire, Pierre S. DuPont bought the undulating farmland in 1906 and transformed it into a tribute to nature and beauty. Modeled after French and Italian gardens he had visited, the estate featured water gardens, reflecting pools, a conservatory, and numerous hydraulic-powered fountains, which Phil Brewer helped design and build. In the conservatory, a colorful, sometimes drunken group of master gardeners from England and Ireland grew oranges, pineapples, espaliered nectarines, cantaloupes, and, in a special greenhouse, orchids.

  Longwood’s hierarchy resembled that of a coal mining town or, in some eyes, a plantation—a self-sustaining community with its own dairy farm and schools, where workers’ families lived entirely beholden to their benefactor, DuPont. But the Brewers had it better than most. As superintendent of maintenance, Phil Brewer was one of five department heads—essentially vice presidents—and grew to become one of DuPont’s closest advisers, as much a friend as an employee. The Brewers lived in the largest of the pensioners’ houses, a large stone manse called the Anvil, which was built especially for them on a secluded corner of the estate. Hundreds of other pensioners, meanwhile, lived down on Red Lion Row, a lane of duplexes built for workers’ families.

  Louise and her sister, Adele, enjoyed a sometimes magical childhood, witnesses on the fringe of a modern mini Versailles. As daughters of a department head—or “VIP girls”—they received special attentions, such as the dresses Mrs. DuPont bought them in Europe. Louise and Adele attended lavish balls in the glass-encased conservatory, where twelve hundred guests watched ballet and fireworks. At one such party, John Philip Sousa’s band performed; at another, nymphs danced in the water garden.

  For Louise, it was a conflicted life—she was both the hired help and the inner circle. She mixed with other pensioners’ children during the day and at night she mingled with dignitaries or royalty at DuPont dinner parties and concerts. A highlight of the year was the Christmas party. Families lined up in the conservatory to receive their annual gift from the DuPonts; the kids usually received one piece of clothing and one toy. But the Brewers didn’t have to line up; they were seated in the balcony of the conservatory when the other families arrived. Each year they received gifts of fine china.

  Phil Brewer was a severe, dough-faced man who worked obsessively long hours on Longwood’s fountains, leaving the girls mostly in the care of their mother, who dressed her two daughters in identical outfits.

  Louise struggled to accommodate what she called her “tomboy streak” and once complained of the difficulties in “being a girl and knowing you can’t do all the things boys do.” Longwood beckoned like a sprawling playground, with fruit orchards, farm animals, ponds, and fountains. Her sister, Adele, befriended the other Longwood kids (and once created a stir when she became involved with one of the farmhands), but Louise often stuck to herself and, in the other kids’ eyes, was cold and standoffish. In fact, some people at first thought she was a DuPont, so sophisticated and superior.

  When she arrived at Principia, her chilly demeanor earned her the nicknames “Frosty” and, after the refrigerator brand, “Miss Westinghouse.” But there was one classmate who didn’t mind—Louise’s boyfriend, George Dietz.

  A boy whom Alan Shepard now considered his rival.

  For Alan, the holiday glow of his meeting with Louise dimmed suddenly, awfully. On Sunday, just two days after Christmas, the Shepards received terrible news from Bart’s brother, Fritz.

  Alan’s cousin Eric had been killed in a plane crash during Marine Air Corps training. It was ruled an accident, although some family members whispered that he may have been hot dogging, taking chances in a machine he wasn’t yet ready to tame.

  Eric was twenty-four and had been eager to join the war. After graduating from the University of Maine, he had joined the Marine Corps and signed up for flight training. He wanted to help other Marine pilots strafe and bomb Japanese ships in the Pacific islands, where the Marines were beginning to turn the tide of the war. Eric had been more than Alan’s favorite cousin; he was Alan’s hero. They’d been good friends despite a five-year age difference. Alan’s spunk seemed the perfect complement to Eric’s quiet serenity. Except for his grandfather, Alan had never lost someone so close to him—a rare thing in a family half consisting of Christian Scientists, whose preference for prayer over medicine could sometimes lead to early, unexpected death.

  Eric’s death struck Alan a severe blow. He knew war was a dangerous and deadly game, and he knew to expect the mounting casualties to begin hitting closer to home. But not this close, and not in this way. If an enemy attack had taken his cousin’s life, it might have somehow been easier—he’d have someone to blame. A training accident, though, seemed all the more senseless and wasteful. Alan was deeply troubled and confused by Eric’s death. He sent a telegraph to Annapolis asking for permission to extend his holiday leave and attend his cousin’s funeral. Eric was buried in Massachusetts the day after New Year’s, and Alan wept openly at the service. Then he endured a miserable train ride
back to Annapolis.

  Until that time, Alan’s year and a half at the U.S. Naval Academy had been unimpressive; he’d even been threatened with expulsion. His most notable achievements were sailing up and down the Severn River in the academy’s boats and getting lucky with lovely Annapolis crabbies. But when he returned to Annapolis in January of 1943—whether it was the inspiration of his lost cousin or the promising relationship with beautiful Louise Brewer—a transformation began to churn, one that would culminate in a crucial turnaround. Alan started the spring semester with a new intensity and a gritty sense of determination. He locked in tight on two goals. First, he wanted to salvage his shabby academic record—mainly to graduate and become what his cousin Eric now could not: a military aviator. Eric’s death reminded him that he was there to become a flyer.

  The other goal was Louise. His desire for her wouldn’t stop him from dating other women—one of them quite seriously—but he knew that ultimately he wanted Louise Brewer, and Alan would spend the next few years in a relentless pursuit of both goals.

  “I hope I can really accomplish something at Annapolis that will make you proud of me,” Alan wrote to his father in early 1943.

  One of the first signs of Shepard’s new sense of determination was his improving performance and rising status on the crew team. Despite an aversion to team sports, Shepard craved the knife-edged precision of rowing the sixty-foot, eight-man rowing shells. He considered the sport “an exacting one” and told a local newspaper reporter at the time that the best aspect of the sport was how “it builds your arms and chest muscles to prime shape.”