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

by Neal Thompson

  Cooper recalled that Shepard also experienced “his share of close calls.” But in time Shepard came to realize that, despite his intent “not to use my position as an astronaut” to win favor with businessmen, that was easier said than done. “I tried to separate the two,” he told one reporter. “But to say that I do not use my [astronaut] position in business is really fallacious, because it’s not black and white.”

  The solution—selling beer, oil, and buildings in the Lone Star State—seemed the perfect challenge for a hyperactive test pilot/astronaut. But Shepard would learn a few hard lessons in a world that Texas newspaper columnist Molly Ivins once described as the “land of wretched excess,” a land of whiskey and women-loving “sumbitches” where doing “bidness” often involved taking kickbacks or stealing public funds, a land of cattle rustlers, pornographers, racist Bible-thumpers, and sexist good ol’ boys—and that’s just among the politicians. “For virtue,” Ivins once suggested, “try Minnesota.”

  Every five years, Howard Benedict—the Associated Press reporter who had been at the Cape with Shepard in the early days—would come to Houston to interview Shepard for another of his Freedom 7 anniversary stories. One year Benedict met Shepard at his office in Deer Park, a rough Houston suburb surrounded by factories and oil refineries. In a rented pickup truck, Benedict followed the directions Shepard had given him to Win-ward Beverage Co., the beer distributorship Shepard had bought with an old Navy buddy. After a few beers in the English-style pub Shepard had built beside the warehouse, he grabbed the keys to one of his delivery trucks and gave Benedict a tour of his new world. Suburban Houston was full of grungy little bars where oilmen and ranchers drank the local brews: Lonestar and Rattlesnake. Shepard called it “Rattlesnake country,” the bars full of posters with a half-nude woman petting a snake, saying, “I love my Rattlesnake.” (Shepard’s beer was Coors.) His partner, a handsome Navy test pilot named Duke Windsor whom Shepard had befriended at Patuxent River, had been married to a Coors heiress. Duke’s wife died in the mid-1970s, but he stayed in touch with the Coors family, and he and Shepard flew to Denver one year to meet with Bill Coors, whose father, Adolph, had founded the massive Colorado-based brewery.

  Coors had been trying to break into new markets and agreed to let Shepard and Windsor open the first Coors distributorship in southeast Texas. But it was no easy task to introduce a beer made in the snowy Rocky Mountains to dusty “Rattlesnake country.” Shepard marketed his brew by paying regular visits to the gritty oilman bars. That afternoon he gave Benedict a glimpse of his beer-selling skills.

  He blew through the barroom doors—“Hey, fellas!”—and everyone recognized the famous astronaut. He bought the house a round of Coors, chatted up the bartender, and then strutted out—“See you fellas next time!”—with Benedict traipsing after him, taking notes. “He was quite a salesman,” Benedict recalled.

  Before Benedict left that day, Shepard tossed a six-pack of Coors into the passenger seat of his pickup. “Now all you need is a rifle,” he said. “Then you’ll be a real Texan.” But selling Coors was just the beginning of Shepard’s life as a moneymaking Texan. At the time he told friends, “The business world has smiled upon us.”

  Despite once buying a piece of a Los Angeles brokerage firm, Shepard was “never really a fan” of the stock market. He just didn’t trust it—“I can’t figure the psychology of it and I never found a relative as a broker whom I trusted,” he once said. What he trusted were solid, tangible investments, like beer, land, and buildings. Solid also described his partner Jack “Moose” Coogan, a bear of a man who had played pro football for the Los Angeles Rams and helped introduce Shepard to the sometimes shady and illegal workings of the Texas real estate development world.

  Moose Coogan and a colleague, Roland Walters, had honed a specialty: building shopping centers, particularly those with a Kmart department store attached. Shepard became partner and chairman of a Coogan and Walters subsidiary called Marathon Construction, which bought parcels of land in Texas, Oregon, Kansas, and Nebraska as future Kmart sites. His first successful development was a Kmart shopping center in Oregon, but it was also his first Kmart mistake, albeit a minor one.

  Shepard offered to appear at the ribbon cutting, but the new store’s manager got “a little overzealous” and ran his picture in newspaper ads. The following day’s newspapers accused Shepard of using his ex-astronaut status to promote the store. Astronauts hawking products was nothing new; Wally Schirra, who caught a severe cold on his Apollo 7 flight, became a spokesman for Actifed cold medicine. But Shepard didn’t need the attention, and after that he made sure his name was never publicly associated with his Kmarts. He also had the overzealous store manager “moved to another area.”

  The deal with the Detroit-based Kresge Company (which put the K in Kmart), was that Shepard’s firm would buy the land, develop the store, and then enter into a long-term lease with the Kresge Company. Shepard called it “a relatively good investment” and would go on to develop fifteen Kmarts during his decade with the firm. His real estate successes would lead to membership on corporate boards of directors and a seat on Houston’s Port Commission. Such positions, and the income from his distributorship and Marathon Construction, were enough to support the mansion in River Oaks and the lakefront cottage near Austin with a ski condo in Breckenridge, Colorado. “I like being my own boss. I enjoy being in business for myself,” he once said. “The pay is a lot better than going to the moon, I can tell you that.”

  In the late 1970s Shepard began thinking bigger than Kmart. He and Jack Coogan partnered with ex-Houston mayor Louie Welch and began buying some lowland property south of NASA (now named Johnson Space Center), with plans to create a huge housing development with a waterfront marina and golf course. The name would be Shepard’s Landing.

  The idea seemed solid: buy up many acres of scrubland, subdivide it into lots, sell the lots off at a reasonable price—say, $4,000 to $5,000 an acre—then bring a builder in to construct the houses, the golf course, the clubhouse, and the marina. Some of it worked out as planned, and houses began rising along the streets of Shepard’s Landing, golf- and space-themed streets that Shepard had named himself: Admiral Road, Fra Mauro Drive, Masters Drive, Pebble Beach Road. Some buyers were sold on the idea of having astronauts like Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard as neighbors; Deke and Bobbie Slayton built a home on Masters Drive, while Alan and Louise began building a huge new home beside the undulating golf course, near the banks of the murky San Jacinto River.

  There was just one problem: No one on Shepard’s team got permission to develop land that had essentially been designated a swamp. When Shepard and his partners sought approval for the subdivision in 1978, the Montgomery County commissioners said no. The land was too low, too close to the San Jacinto River, and too likely to flood, they said. Two years later Shepard’s team went ahead with the project anyway.

  Shepard began trying to lure old Navy and NASA friends into the project. He asked his old Navy boss and flying mentor, Doc Abbot, to run the marina, but Abbot declined. Then Shepard asked former NASA flight director Chris Kraft if he wanted to buy into the project. Kraft agreed to put $10,000 down on a condominium, but when he stopped by the work site one day to check on the progress, he didn’t like what he saw— shoddy, sloppy construction—and asked for his money back. A while later Kraft saw Shepard at a space shuttle launch at Mission Control and, referring to the real estate firm hired to develop the land, warned, “Al, I don’t trust this guy and I think he’s going to get you in trouble.”

  Other unsuspecting buyers had no idea they were building dream homes on swampland—until they sought building permits from the county and in some cases, were told they’d have to build homes twenty-one feet off the ground to be above the flood-prone zone. Others on slightly higher ground got permission to build homes but then watched as rainstorms filled the neighborhood with ponds that lured poisonous water snakes.

  Finally the complaints of more than a dozen
property owners reached the county attorney’s office, which brought charges of false real estate filings against Shepard, Coogan, and Welch. The misdemeanor charges carried a ninety-day jail sentence. Coogan blamed the real estate firm they’d hired to develop the property—the one Chris Kraft had warned Shepard about—and told Houston’s newspapers that he’d invested $200,000 “and I haven’t seen a dollar of profit yet.” Ex-mayor Welch said he didn’t expect a profit “until I’m pushing up daisies.” Shepard refused to talk to the papers, and with good reason.

  A Polish immigrant named Steve Szladewski paid $4,000 for an acre of Shepard’s Landing, thrilled to have Alan Shepard as a neighbor. Instead he “got taken.” “They promise to fix the roads. They say they build a nice entrance to [the] subdivision, something beautiful,” Szladewski said. “We have nothing.” Szladewski was among those who were not allowed to build houses because county engineers found that their land was, essentially, part of the riverbed. Even Shepard’s own house beside the San Jacinto River was flattened by Hurricane Alicia in 1983.

  In the end, Shepard and his partners agreed to fix some of the problems and return some of the money, and the charges were dropped. After that, Shepard sold his 25 percent stake and put as much distance as possible between himself and Shepard’s Landing. “He was lucky he didn’t go to jail,” Kraft said.

  Despite his brush with the law, Shepard’s otherwise successful business career opened wide the doors to Houston’s high society, an oil-rich club of kings and queens, barons and dukes, ex-presidents, movie stars, golf pros, and other celebrities. In her “Big City Beat” column, the Houston Chronicle’s society columnist regularly mentioned where and with whom Alan and Louise had dined, and began referring to his house—as she did with many of her wealthy Houstonian pals—as a “swankienda.”

  When Frank Sinatra came to town for a performance, he’d set up a bar in his dressing room and invite Alan and Louise back for drinks. Alan and Louise attended galas with former Texas governors, dined with Donald Trump, and played golf with the king of Morocco, as columnist Maxine Messinger breathlessly told readers. Sometimes Shepard was spotted at a star-studded dinner at Tony’s, a famous Houston restaurant. Other times it was a cheeseburger with famed heart surgeon Denton Cooley at the lunch counter of Avalon Drugstore, a messy-but-chic old pharmacy and convenience store on the edge of Shepard’s River Oaks neighborhood, where Shepard kept a running tab.

  Alan and Louise befriended Joan Schnitzer and her sister, the civic patroness Bernice Weingartner, both heiresses to a family of real estate and department store developers. Schnitzer’s ex-husband, Kenneth, one of Houston’s biggest developers (later convicted of bank fraud stemming from the 1980s savings and loan debacle), had owned Houston’s old Cork Club nightclub and got to know many of the stars who performed there. After their divorce, Joan Schnitzer stayed close with many of her husband’s celebrity friends, and Alan and Louise mingled at many a Schnitzer shindig with the likes of Jack Lemmon, Judy Garland, Shirley MacLaine, and Mitzi Gaynor.

  But Shepard didn’t want to become a flabby society poof. He had his other reputation to consider—that of a rambunctious, large-living test pilot—and he worked hard to stay young-looking, fit, and adventurous. On weekends he water-skied at his lake house, carving sharp turns on his single slalom ski, skiing barefoot, or flying off jumps on his wide jumping skis. He drove a maroon Corvette that, he once bragged, “goes at least 143 miles per hour on Texas highways.” He sailed a yacht and flew his own airplane. Shepard also took up boat racing and once collided with another boat at the Thunderbolt World Championship races at Clear Lake, near NASA. Shepard was knocked from his boat, which was flying at sixty miles an hour, and received some relatively minor cuts on his arm. But in an interview afterward he made a point of telling the reporter, “I was leading the race at the time of the accident.”

  His favorite hobby, though—besides making money—was still a good round of golf, which took him to some of the more beautiful corners of America.

  It sometimes irked Shepard to realize, as he once put it, that he was “a hell of a lot more famous for being the guy who hit the golf ball on the moon than the first guy in space.” Still, that lunar golf shot earned him many friends in the celebrity-filled world of golf. In addition to his Texas business domain, Shepard showered much of his post-astronaut attention on the game of golf.

  Shepard hadn’t gotten serious about golf until he was in his forties, living in Houston and working (more or less part time) as head of the astronaut office. His astronaut fame exposed him to such golf greats as Masters winner Jackie Burke, who founded the Champions Club at Houston and would give Shepard pointers. But Shepard never quite found his swing and constantly struggled with his game.

  To Shepard’s disgust, Sports Illustrated would one day list him among the hundred worst athletes of the century. The reason: Although his golf shot on the moon had made him one of the world’s famous golfers, he was a fairly mediocre duffer. A Florida newspaper also put him on its worst-athletes list, ranking him forty-fifth out of fifty, right before Sallie Blue, a racehorse that lost seventy straight races.

  Still, Shepard was invited each year to the Bing Crosby Pro-Am, one of his favorite events of the year and a chance to have a cocktail with Frank Sinatra, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Palmer, and Jack Nicklaus.

  But, despite many pointers from the world’s best golfers, Shepard never got better. He was especially erratic off the first tee, where crowds of twenty thousand made him more nervous than any jet or rocket ever had. “Having been a test pilot,” he said at one tournament, “I’ve metabolized a lot of adrenaline in my life. But on that first tee, on that first day, the old heart is really pumping.” Bob Murphy, a West Coast sports announcer who often met and played with Shepard at the Crosby Pro-Am at Pebble Beach (later named the AT&T Pro-Am), said Shepard took his golf seriously, “but his ability didn’t always match his competitiveness.”

  Shepard’s famous love of golf also subjected him to questions over the years about the frivolity of golfing on his costly, taxpayerfunded moon mission. Sometimes he’d argue there was scientific and educational value to the golf shot, which showed how objects travel in one-sixth gravity. Other times he’d joke that his golf balls—whose weight reportedly added $11,000 in fuel costs—were “chicken feed” compared to the bowling ball, dumbbells, and billiard table Ed Mitchell had smuggled aboard Apollo 14.

  “Hit it like you did on the moon, Al!” someone in the gallery would yell at almost every tournament in which he played. Such heckling bugged him almost as much as the nagging question raised at most of his golf outings: What brand of golf ball did he hit on the moon? At one tournament in Houston he told hecklers, “I won’t say. But one thing I will say is that the ball went a lot farther on the moon than it did today.”

  Shepard didn’t mind retelling the story of how he noticed that his friend Bob Hope carried a golf club with him wherever he went, even during a mid-1960s tour at the Cape, and how the comedian’s love of golf had inspired him to find a way to bring a golf club to the moon. But as for the moon balls, he forever insisted that the name printed on those balls would “remain the world’s best kept secret.”

  “I’ve never told anybody. I’ve never told my wife,” he once said, and even sued a ball manufacturer that had claimed to have made the balls he used on the moon.

  (Shepard’s moon balls were, in fact, driving range balls made by Spalding.)

  And yet despite the heckling—about his mediocre abilities, about the ball manufacturer—Shepard’s loyalty to the game of golf, his love of a sport at which he never quite excelled, was always tied to a fierce pride in having golfed on the moon. One night, after the welcome party that kicked off the Crosby Pro-Am at Pebble Beach, Shepard and his friend Bob Murphy, the sports announcer, walked out of the clubhouse into the crisp, clear night and stood looking up at a full moon. Murphy had to ask the question many had asked before: “What do you think about when you look up there?”


  “You know, Murph,” Shepard finally said, “I wonder where my golf ball is.”

  21

  “I saw a different Alan Shepard, completely different”

  The idea started when Rolling Stone magazine assigned Tom Wolfe to cover astronaut Gene Cernan’s Apollo 17 flight, the last launch to the moon.

  Until that time—late 1972—Wolfe had paid little attention to astronauts or space. But as he immersed himself in the assignment, he quickly became fascinated with “the psychology of the test pilot . . . and the question of what bravery is.” The result was a four-part series of stories for Rolling Stone, which Wolfe then planned to expand into a book. He thought it would take a few months. But at the time NASA was just beginning to declassify many of its previously off-limits internal documents, such as postflight briefings. Wolfe was able to gain access to information that no previous writer had gotten near. And he became both mired in and awed by what he learned.

  Wolfe initially planned to tell a book-length story of the entire space race, but he realized after writing hundreds of pages that he would instead focus only on the remarkable early years of the program, particularly the story of the Mercury Seven.

  In 1979 The Right Stuff was published to rave reviews, selling millions on its way to becoming Wolfe’s most successful book. The Right Stuff (which became a movie four years later) reminded the world of the exploits of seven exceptional men who volunteered to ride rockets into the sky. The book—and the 1983 film of the same name—resurrected all the glory and drama of the cold war era of the astronaut and reintroduced America to the astronauts’ antagonist, Chuck Yeager, whom Wolfe portrayed as the overlooked hero. Far more than a story of the space race, The Right Stuff was viewed by many as the first book to deeply explore the rich brotherhood of the jet jockey and the only-in-America culture of the celebrity astronaut.