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

by Neal Thompson

  But this was not the USS Cogswell, and Shepard was no longer restricted to his ship’s boundaries. This was a ship whose sole purpose was to launch men like Shepard. And when the FDR reached the coast of North Africa, the Navy was asked to help search for a downed commercial plane, and Shepard—in his new Corsair—left the FDR’s gunmetal gray behind and sped across the Sahara Desert, just fifty feet above the sand.

  At the same time, however, continued military spending cuts meant limited dollars for fuel. As the FDR toured the Mediterranean Shepard was flying less than he had hoped. He and his squadronmates were sometimes getting just a half dozen hops a month. Even the FDR’s skipper, Captain Harry D. Felt, expressed his concern about his pilots’ lack of flying. “If they lay off too long, you’re asking for trouble,” he said.

  Abbot finally wielded some of his wily influence in Washington, and managed to obtain extra fuel for his squadron. But some of his men had become a bit rusty.

  As part of the FDR’s ambassadorial duties, dignitaries were often invited aboard and sometimes treated to an air show. While stationed in the Greek port of Piraeus, Doc Abbot went ashore and visited the Greek royal palace to ask if the king and queen would be interested in touring the FDR and watching its aviators perform.

  King Paul, Queen Frederika, and a few other Greek officials came aboard, and the FDR sailed a few miles out into the Mediterranean and put on a show. Shepard led his division of Corsairs in formation past the ship. Other pilots fired rockets at targets as the hundreds of crew members and visitors on deck watched and cheered.

  Then a pilot named Hal Fish approached and aimed his five-inch rockets at the target, a junk ship moored a few hundred yards away from the FDR. When Fish squeezed the trigger, the rocket “pickled”—failed to separate from the wing. It then exploded and ripped the wing off Fish’s plane, which flipped and slammed into the sea.

  “He didn’t have a chance,” said Shepard’s squadronmate Dick Hardy.

  In such instances, pilots learned that fate, not skill, sometimes determined who lived or died in the still immature world of naval aviation.

  Doc Abbot, after several months of flying with Shepard as his wingman, had decided somewhere in the Mediterranean that it was time for a new assignment.

  Amid the choreographed ballet of landing on an aircraft carrier, pilots are graded on how quickly they can land, release their tailhook from the arresting wire, and move their plane to the front of the ship. It’s called “time in the gear,” and Abbot had VF-42’s second-lowest time in the gear. Ranked slightly ahead of him was Shepard.

  So Abbot decided to give Shepard command of his own section (two planes). Some weeks after that, he gave Shepard command of a full division (four planes). Putting a nugget in charge of a division was an enormous vote of confidence and an endorsement of Shepard’s refined mix of aerial chutzpah and finesse. Division leaders must fly smoothly and gently so that the other three planes can follow. They can’t “horse” erratically. They must also always fly in control, and Abbot—who considered himself a superior pilot—saw shades of himself in Shepard.

  As his squadronmates watched Shepard take another step up in the hierarchy, some noticed a change in his personality. He started to become, in one colleague’s words, “bodacious.” He was already known for a big, self-confident attitude. But that wasn’t uncommon in the Navy. After gaining his own division, though, Shepard’s big personality grew even bigger, and it turned some colleagues off.

  “He was a perfectly charming son of a bitch,” said Shepard’s friend Bill Botts, who appreciated his cocksure demeanor even if others didn’t. Everyone who met Alan Shepard over the next fifty years would, almost without fail, describe him as an acquired taste, someone you either liked or didn’t—“like Miami, or olives,” said Botts.

  Carrier aviators owed their lives to the enlisted men who operated the launching catapults, maintained their planes, monitored the weather, and stood on the FDR’s tail waving paddles as whirring propellers bore down on them. But the aviators and enlisted men rarely mixed. In the hierarchy of a carrier at sea, the aviators were the big dogs, and the ready room was their doghouse, the place they boasted and argued about this plane and that, about speed and ascent and danger and noise. During the many lulls while the FDR was steaming from one port to the next, Shepard and the others made up for a lack of flying by talking about flying. They could sit for hours smoking and drinking coffee in the ready room. Shepard loved to talk about the Corsair, its eccentricities, and its power, and how landing it on a carrier required the skill of an intuitive pilot. He was fiercely proud of his Corsair and annoyingly proud of his ability to fly it better than most.

  But his buddies were learning how to take the hotshot down a peg.

  Bob Baldwin, who flew one of the AD Skyraiders assigned to the FDR, loved to rile Shepard by bragging that the AD—a workhorse with one of the more powerful engines of the day—was faster than, tougher than, and far superior to Shepard’s Corsair.

  Baldwin and his roommate, Warren O’Neil, ribbed Shepard one night at dinner about Shepard’s “inferior airplane.” During missions, “us AD pilots always have to throttle back and wait for you Corsairs to catch up,” they said. Shepard hated that. One night he’d finally had enough and stood up from the table, pointing a finger at Baldwin and then O’Neil, barking, “Baldwin, with you sucking on one end of this ship and O’Neil blowing on the other, we’d have forty knots of wind across the deck.” The other two just laughed harder, which made Shepard even madder. “He didn’t take any foolishness from anybody,” O’Neil recalled.

  Although Shepard was earning a strong reputation as a skilled pilot, a leader, and a teacher, the pace aboard the FDR sometimes grated on him. And when things got slow the ship’s captain ordered VF-42’s pilots to perform “collateral duties,” demeaning paperwork tasks. Meanwhile, back home, Navy and Air Force pilots were breaking records, flying jets, and crashing through the sound barrier. Guys like Chuck Yeager were screaming above the salt flats of Muroc Lake in southern California, piloting winged rockets with tough names like XP-80 and X-1. Also, the Navy had rcently created its first squadron of jet pilots, who at that very moment were learning to take off and land on the USS Saipan—the same aircraft carrier that Shepard had landed on a year earlier to earn his wings.

  Furthermore, the Navy had just established the Test Pilot Training Division, a place to train a new generation of pilots who could test the new jets coming off the manufacturers’ assembly lines. The Naval Air Test Center (soon to be named the Naval Test Pilot School) was created at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. That, Shepard decided somewhere in the Mediterranean, was where he wanted to be—flying the fastest, newest, meanest jets in the world. And he told Abbot so every chance he got.

  Meanwhile, the scenery—both terrestrial and human— wasn’t bad. The FDR, due to restrictions on fuel, parked itself for extended periods of time in some spectacular foreign ports, off-loading its men into Naples, Tripoli, the Greek islands, and the swanky beach towns of the French Riviera. Many Navy marriages were battered by the liberties taken during the FDR’s excessive amounts of shore leave.

  Shepard kept Louise in his thoughts. He bought her perfumes in France, leather gloves in Italy, and even a few paintings. He wrote to her often and, when he could, called her and the baby, Laura, at 5 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. Still, when a flyer isn’t flying, the next best thing is often found in foreign ports, in the bars inside those ports—on a bar stool.

  As if rediscovering the skills he’d honed dating “crabs” back in Annapolis, Shepard displayed no inhibitions in those ports and their bars. He’d walk right up to a beautiful woman, and if she didn’t speak English, he’d dig up a few words of French or Spanish from high school and the academy. His foreign-language grades had always been poor, but he knew enough to buy a girl a drink. He wasn’t especially handsome, but whatever he had, it worked, and soon Shepard was known as one of the more successful flirts—“a spot
we were all trying for,” Baldwin recalled. He and Shepard used to each share time with the same French girl at one of the towns along the Côte d’Azur: “It just depended on who got ashore first.”

  Once an older woman made the first move. Shepard and his roommate, Bill Chaires, decided during a weekend of liberty to take a train north from the port city of Cannes to Paris. They checked into the cut-rate Hotel Pennsylvania and then walked down the Champs Elysées, stopping in the lobby bar of a hotel for a beer. While standing at the bar, a waiter approached and handed them a note—an invitation from two ladies in the dining room to come share a drink.

  “Why not?” Shepard said.

  The two men entered the dining room and saw Eleanor Roosevelt waving at them. The former First Lady was in town for a U.N. General Assembly meeting (where she would give a famous speech called “The Struggles for the Rights of Man”). After sharing a drink with her, Shepard invited her to come to Cannes and tour the ship named after her deceased husband, the ship she herself had christened in 1945. Mrs. Roosevelt initially accepted, which infuriated Shepard’s unprepared superior officers. But she later called the ship and canceled her visit.

  Shepard’s other European barroom encounters were equally impressive. His shipmates would watch in envy and awe as Shepard left bar after bar with women. What happened after that they could only guess. Shepard’s buddies would always assume that the night was not over for Shepard and whichever young woman he befriended. Shepard had a habit of not exactly denying or confirming it. He just let people assume what they would.

  “He was sort of proud of his reputation. He just liked girls,” Bob Baldwin, a retired vice admiral, says today. “That was just a compulsion he seemed to have. He didn’t wear it on his sleeve, though. He was content to let it speak for itself.”

  The Navy was so impressed with Doc Abbot’s work in the Mediterranean (Hal Fish’s death had been the lone fatality, a rarity for the day) that halfway through the FDR’s tour there they snatched him away from his squadron and stuck him in an office at the Pentagon. So that’s where Shepard addressed his letter. Abbot knew what it would say even before he opened it: Please, help me get into test pilot school.

  Abbot walked a few doors down from his office, entered the office of the admiral overseeing test pilot assignments, and had a word with him about Lieutenant Alan B. Shepard.

  While waiting for a response during the slow-paced Mediterranean afternoons, Shepard would loiter in the ready room, sipping coffee and filling out some overdue paperwork. When he heard voices and spurts of laughter coming from the flight surgeon’s office down the hall, Shepard would smile, put down his papers, and walk over to chat with a decorated World War II hero, the man who would soon change his life.

  Turner Caldwell, commander of Shepard’s air group (known as CAG, for “commander air group”), had become good friends with the FDR’s flight surgeon, who had also been a carrier pilot during World War II. Caldwell often walked down from his office to sit with the doctor and swap stories of flying and fighting. Shepard loved to listen in on these conversations, especially when Caldwell spoke of the bright red Douglas Skystreak he had flown into the history books the previous year.

  Lean, slight, and deceptively fearsome, Caldwell had been a carrier pilot in the South Pacific, commanding one of the Navy’s first night flying squadrons. He once led eleven planes, all dangerously low on fuel, away from battle and to safety when their aircraft carrier was damaged too severely to let them land. After the war, Caldwell was selected to fly the Navy’s first experimental jets, which were then the fastest machines known to humankind. On August 20, 1947, he took off in the nail-polish-red, futuristic-looking Skystreak—he called it the “crimson test tube”—and ripped across a 3 km course at the salt flats of Muroc, California (later named Edwards Air Force Base). Caldwell, his body shaking like a loose piston inside the cockpit, pushed the jet to the brink of the speed of sound—640.663 miles an hour. It was the fastest any human had ever traveled, and Caldwell’s photograph appeared on the front page of newspapers across the country. Five days later, though, the record was broken, and two months after that Chuck Yeager took his X-1 rocket plane to 700 miles an hour, becoming the first to break the sound barrier. But Caldwell’s fame inside the Navy didn’t diminish. He rose to become one of the most respected and influential aviator-mentors.

  Using the slow pace of the FDR cruise to his advantage, Shepard spent every free moment he could at Caldwell’s side, peppering him with questions about night flying, the Douglas Skystreak, and the other jets he had flown. Caldwell, patient and relaxed, spent many an afternoon folded in a seat with Alan Shepard figuratively at his knee. Such informal connections, Shepard found, could mean a lot in the insular naval world.

  After serving as Shepard’s air group commander, Caldwell was promoted to new duties at the Pentagon in early 1949 (ironically, his successor was killed in a Corsair crash immediately after taking off from an aircraft carrier). Shepard, meanwhile, was dispatched to another carrier, the USS Midway, for a few weeks on a cold-weather flying mission. Wearing a thick insulated suit that made movement and flying difficult, Shepard conducted flight experiments intended to pave the way for the Navy’s new specialty “all-weather” squadrons.

  When that brief tour ended, he was scheduled to return to the states for shore duty—most Navy pilots, after their first carrier tour, served some time in an office. Shepard’s peers must have gasped when they heard he was headed not for shore duty but to the place they all wanted to be: the hammered-flat waterfront known as Pax.

  6

  Shepard should be court-martialed

  The United States Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River Naval Air Station—known fleetwide as Pax River, or just Pax—was created to test the new jets the Navy had begun phasing into its fleet of aircraft in 1949. At the time an intense competition for superiority in the air had developed between the Navy and the coltish new Air Force, which was also testing the world’s latest and fastest jets.

  To edge ahead of the Air Force, the Navy had circulated “aviation plan 65” in 1948, which called for the best naval aviators—those displaying “outstanding flying proficiency”—to be pulled from fleet duty and assigned to Pax River.

  Turner Caldwell told his superiors that Alan Shepard was one of the best, and when Caldwell spoke, people listened. Doc Abbot also recommended Shepard, who in mid-1950 was selected from 150 nominees to join two dozen other exemplary flyers in the next class—class number five—at the Navy’s new Test Pilot School. It was more than a sweet assignment for a junior officer, it was unprecedented. At twenty-six, he was—once again— the youngest pilot in his class. But this time his youth was nothing to be sheepish about. It was a badge of honor and his biggest break so far.

  For a first-tour pilot to leapfrog his peers and reach the pinnacle of naval aviation required more than luck and skill. It required the kind of help Shepard got from Doc Abbot and Turner Caldwell. Other aviators grumbled that Shepard wasn’t a better pilot, just better connected. Indeed, Shepard admitted that he “may not have extra talent.” He had learned that an aggressive pursuit of his goals required him to rely heavily on helpers, mentors, and saviors. He would cultivate such men throughout his career. Just like the upperclassmen who “saved his bucket” when he got in trouble at the academy, he gravitated toward such men—because he admired them and because they could help him. And in the near future one such mentor-savior would save Shepard’s career.

  Shepard’s transfer to Pax in the summer of 1950 coincided with the first shots of the Korean War, which would soon pull many of his Navy peers into battle.

  At the end of World War II, the United States had helped cleave Korea in half—an effort to keep the Soviet-backed northern half of the peninsula separate from the U.S.-occupied south. Two separate nations, North and South Korea, were created in 1948, but two years later North Korean troops invaded across the 38th parallel, and the United States—largely due to its commitment
to contain communism—joined the fighting.

  His transfer to Pax River was both a geographic and psychological divergence from the rest of the Navy. For Shepard, this was good and bad, because while he was headed to an aviators’ mecca, some of his Korea-bound peers—such as John Glenn—would soon make names for themselves as heroic combat aviators waging jet-powered aerial battles against Soviet and Korean MiGs. But Shepard’s role as a test pilot was also an integral one in the greater struggle that came to be known as the cold war.

  “Pax River,” on the shores of Chesapeake Bay in southern Maryland was, like Corpus Christi, a sandy, scrubby waterfront community turned vibrant by the influx of Navy hotshots. There wasn’t much of a town—just a grocery store, a florist, a couple of churches, and a grungy roadside watering hole called the Roost, where Shepard “drank cheap booze . . . and almost ended up in jail.” The summers were unbearably hot and muggy. Swarms of fat mosquitoes chased people inside at night.

  As one pilot put it, “There wasn’t much to do in the lowlands of southern Maryland—except fly, and drink. Otherwise, it was a miserable place.”

  But the flying . . . the flying was unlike anything Shepard had dreamed of.

  After an intensive five months of classroom instruction, during which Shepard’s head was crammed with two years’ worth of technical training in trigonometry, physics, aerodynamics, and more, he was selected to continue working at Pax River for another two years. Assigned to the prestigious tactical test division, he began flying more often, at faster speeds, and at higher altitudes than ever. On the FDR he’d sometimes gone several days without a single hop. Now he was sometimes flying five different planes—most of them unproven experimental models— on the same day.