Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Page 3

  And yet, while he rarely spoke of them to his peers, Shepard loved and doted on his wife and two daughters. Few colleagues knew that Shepard also informally adopted a niece (the daughter of his wife’s dead sister) and treated her like one of his own. But his strong if imperfect fifty-three-year marriage quietly survived while so many other astronauts’ marriages crumbled around him.

  One family friend said Louise grounded her husband: “She was the rock.” Astronaut Wally Schirra agreed: “She’d bring Al down to earth a lot.”

  In the end, she was probably the only one who really knew him.

  One of the Mercury Seven astronauts once told Life magazine, “You might think you’d get to know someone well after working so closely with him for two years. Well, it’s not that way with Shepard. He’s always holding something back.”

  For all his vexing complexity, however, Shepard was exactly the kind of man NASA wanted. At the height of the cold war, the space agency sought nothing less than “real men . . . perfect physical and emotional and aesthetic specimens.”

  In Alan Shepard, NASA got all that and more. A guy who’d fought an evil empire in World War II, landed planes on aircraft carriers during storms and at night, bailed out of test jets ten miles above the earth, downed cocktails or swatted golf balls with celebrities, water-skied barefoot, raced Corvettes, slept with beautiful women, and become a millionaire—all the things boys and teens want to do when they become men.

  Shepard was a man’s man, and others strived to be like him, even if they didn’t necessarily like him or considered him an “asshole” or a “son of a bitch,” as many did. If Shepard’s character was a study in paradox, that’s possibly because, as a boy, he was pulled in two directions by parents with opposing but oddly complementary temperaments.

  Both parents came from old-guard New Hampshire stock, with impressive lineages to the seminal Colonial days. But when Alan was born, on November 18, 1923, in an upstairs room at 64 East Derry Road—with its ornate molding, glass doorknobs, and gas lamps in each room—he was immediately positioned between two loving but dissimilar parents, one of them grim and duty-bound, the other boisterous and spirited.

  East Derry, forty miles northwest of Boston in the southeastern tip of New Hampshire, was a town where everybody knew everyone. Family roots ran deep in such towns, but the Shepard family’s roots were among the deepest.

  One side of the family sailed from England in the 1690s, their carpentry and blacksmithing tools in tow, then trekked inland from the coast to the folds and foothills along the Merrimac River. Later they helped draft the Declaration of Independence and fought in the Revolutionary War. Ancestors on the other side of Shepard’s family transited with the 102 passengers of the Mayflower, then helped govern the Plymouth Colony.

  Along with Scotch-Irish settlers seeking religious freedom, Shepard’s English ancestors carved rural hillsides into potato and dairy farms, which later birthed linen, hat, and shoe factories in a triad of manufacturing towns—Derry, East Derry, and Londonderry.

  The landscape of Shepard’s youth was a succulent Americana playground of barnyards and swimming holes, apple orchards and blueberry fields, stone walls framing fields of wildflowers and shadowy forests of white pine carpeted by fern and moss. The unpredictable New Hampshire weather could be both fierce and lovely in a day. Winter brought biting winds and mounds of snow that arrived early and stayed late. Summers were brief, hot, and humid, followed by crisp and spectacularly colorful falls.

  That landscape was sensually depicted in the poems of Robert Frost, who in 1900 bought a farm not far from the Shepards. “To a large extent, the terrain of my poetry is the Derry landscape,” Frost once said. “There was something about the experience at Derry which stayed in my mind, and was tapped for poetry in the years that came after.”

  The people also made a profound impression: seriously religious, ultraconservative, and snobbishly wary of newcomers. Frost once cashed a check at the Derry National Bank—owned by Shepard’s grandfather—and forgot to sign his middle name on the check. The teller sniffed, “Since it doesn’t cost you anything, we would like your full name.”

  Frost often felt like an interloper among haughty, superior people. After being rebuffed by the Derry school board for a teaching job, he found work at the prestigious Pinkerton Academy, where Shepard’s grandfather was a trustee. Among his students was Shepard’s father, Bart, a man steeped in that hard-edged New England culture.

  Throughout his life Alan would rankle friends with the imperious and crusty attitude he inherited from the tight-knit, fiercely loyal, and wealthy Shepard clan.

  In town, the Shepards wore the nicer clothes, drove the newer cars; they kept a vacation house on a nearby lake. A hue of wealth tainted the other kids’ perceptions of Alan, and many peers assumed he lived a coddled life of privilege. He did, in fact, absorb a sense of entitlement and the self-assuredness that privilege engendered. But Alan—and his sister, Polly, who was two years younger—were far from pampered rich kids. Their father valued work and made sure each child performed their share of domestic chores.

  Each morning, for example, Alan grabbed a flag from the front hall closet, poked the rod into the front lawn, waited for his father to come out, and then stood back to salute. After cleaning his room, he might lug one of the last, half-melted, sawdust-coated blocks of ice from the icehouse in the woods and put it in the ice chest. Then he’d deliver newspapers to half the homes in town. On Saturday nights he’d sit in the foyer buffing and polishing every last shoe in the house, lining them up to gleam on the stairs.

  Bart Shepard was a stern and serious disciplinarian, and Alan inherited a stoicism and toughness of character from him— traits that Bart had inherited from his own prosperous and industrious father.

  Alan’s grandfather Frederick “Fritz” Shepard was one of the most powerful local businessmen of his day. He owned Derry National Bank and Derry Electric Light Company, ran a stage-coach service and an electric rail line, and built the town library. Fritz Shepard was also a prominent Republican, East Derry’s town treasurer, and a colonel in the National Guard. He served as aide-de-camp at the historic month-long Russo-Japanese Peace Conference, organized by President Theodore Roosevelt in Portsmouth in 1905 (which ended the war between Russia and Japan and earned Roosevelt the Nobel peace prize). Until the crash of 1929, Fritz Shepard was a very wealthy man.

  He and his wife, Nanzie, fairly lorded above the town in their enormous house on a high knoll off East Derry Road, a Victorian mansion with a tennis-court-sized ballroom where the Shepards entertained such dignitaries as President Howard Taft.

  Though Fritz’s Derry empire was battered by the Depression, causing him to lose the bank and the rail line, he subsequently threw his energies into making his own line of sodas, tonics, and ginger ale, which allowed him and Nanzie to keep in their employ the African-American couple who served for decades as their maid and butler.

  While Fritz tended to his business enterprises, his wife governed the family as its rock-steady matriarch. Nanzie Shepard’s lineage was also seriously old guard, and she became an important influence on her grandchildren—especially Alan.

  Short, redheaded Nanzie was an equally important social and political figure in East Derry. She led the New Hampshire Daughters of the Revolution, became the first female president of the Republican Club of New Hampshire, and as one of New Hampshire’s presidential electors cast her vote for the Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

  She and Fritz had high expectations for their sons, imbuing in them an ethic of success and the expectation that they would get a good education and make their mark in the world. Two of their sons, Henry and Frederick junior, went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, en route to careers as successful businessmen in Massachusetts.

  But Alan’s father, Bart, chose a different course. He joined the National Guard in 1915 and then shipped off to France with an infantry division of the American Expeditionary Force in World Wa
r I. When he returned home in 1918, he joined the Army Reserves and began working as an assistant cashier at his father’s bank, Derry National. Bart took his military service quite seriously and eventually rose to the rank of colonel, which was how Alan and his sister, Polly, addressed him—that or “sir.” Bart was enormously proud of his military rank and leaped at any chance to wear his uniform.

  When he wasn’t in uniform, Bart wore a suit and tie—even on weekends. He kept his thin mustache neatly trimmed and never smoked or drank. Most workdays he ate a thirty-cent cheese sandwich at a downtown Greek lunch counter, and once in a while he splurged on pie. His lone hobby was music—across six decades, he played the organ at nearly every 10 A.M. Sunday service at the First Parish Church, the oldest church in town.

  Bart lost his bank job when Derry National followed five thousand others into oblivion after the 1929 crash. When his father then started a family insurance company, Bart took a job and worked there the rest of his life. Bart had the same large eyes as his son, but they appeared more sad than eager on his long face, above a pinched, down turned mouth.

  One day Alan would appreciate how his own character was shaped by his father’s work ethic, the consistency and simplicity of his demeanor. But those realizations were many years off. As an energetic child, Alan often looked at his father and asked: Why? It just wasn’t Alan’s idea of a life. Bart had none of the qualities Alan admired as a child: bravery, a sense of adventure, a determination to be the best. Instead, his father seemed happy doing his plodding darnedest in a town Alan considered “a small pond.”

  Alan and his father were hardly chums. Not in the way Alan was close with his mother and his grandmother, Nanzie. Alan and Bart shared few common interests and spent little one-on-one time together, except for tuning the church organ together once a month. It nagged at Alan that his father simply wasn’t . . . fun. “He appreciated a chuckle once in a while,” Alan once said. “But I can’t say he had a playful side.”

  The sense of playfulness that became one of Alan’s more notable attributes derived instead from his mother, Renza. As powerfully as Bart’s side of the family had influenced Alan, his emotional temperament was shaped more by his spirited mother.

  Renza Emerson’s family owned Derry’s largest shoe factory and had built a home beside Fritz and Nanzie Shepard’s mansion. Bart and Renza barely knew each other as children; he was a decade older and had gone off to war. When Bart returned from war, he noticed that the girl next door had grown into an energetic young beauty who seemed to have qualities that he did not—a sense of fun, a sense of humor. Bart fell in love and, at age thirty, proposed to his twenty-year-old neighbor. The local paper gushed at the engagement of “two popular and prominent young society people.” After a honeymoon drive through Vermont and Montreal, dancing at Lake Placid and Niagara Falls, the couple built a two-story Colonial on a plot of land smack between their parents’ houses.

  To maintain the fine balance of their opposites-attract marriage, it made perfect sense to live with each other’s families, like parentheses, on either side. While Bart’s side of the family hammered in the value of seriousness and determination, Renza taught her children the value of a good time. Renza, nearly the polar opposite of Bart Shepard, cherished fun and laughs and was, in short, the radiant and playful luminescence of Alan’s boyhood.

  An example of her high energy and lust for life was her choice of religion. In a sharp counterpoint to the Shepard family’s Protestantism, Renza was a Christian Scientist. While Bart attended church as a matter of duty, Renza attended the local Christian Science church for its preaching on positive thinking, its unshakable insistence that happiness is the lone antidote to illness.

  The Christian Science Church was founded in 1879, twenty-five miles north in Bow, New Hampshire. Controversial from the start, the church lured many independent-minded New Englanders with its commonsense doctrines. Renza approved of the fact that the religion had been founded by a strong-willed woman, Mary Baker Eddy, who believed in self-reliance and self-healing.

  Like her husband, Renza eschewed smoking and drinking, but then again, she didn’t need stimulants. She loved the outdoors and throughout her life remained spry and active. She gardened avidly during the spring and summer and in winter joined her children for toboggan rides down steep backyard hills. She had a plain face, but it was made attractive by her natural ebullience. “A people person,” Alan called her. “Just a happy, loving individual.”

  Renza taught her children that it was up to them—not God, not fate—to make things happen in life. Alan admired and emulated his mother’s assertiveness, much more so than his father’s stoic passivity. While Polly was Bart’s little girl, Alan was his mother’s boy. Whereas he called his father “Colonel” or “sir,” his mother was always “Mum” or “Mumma.” And in time he came to exhibit plenty of what one cousin referred to as Renza’s invigorating and infectious “pizzazz.”

  The amalgam of influences inherited from his parents would serve Shepard perfectly through his career. His determination, smarts, and skill, combined with an upbeat and positive attitude, would carry him first into the elite upper ranks of the Navy and then to NASA .

  But to Shepard’s peers, the somewhat contradictory mix of qualities could be jarring.

  Fellow astronaut John Glenn called Shepard “an enigma . . . One side of him was cool, competent, and utterly dedicated, the other ready to cut up, joke, and have fun.”

  From a young age, Shepard struck most people as something of a mystery. He made friends easily enough and could be gregarious. Starting up conversations with strangers came naturally. Classmates felt special when he spoke to them, as though they’d been chosen. But then a week would go by and they’d see him at school or in town, and he’d walk right past, his eyes straight ahead, as if they’d never met—and they’d realize they weren’t his friend after all. Friends were people Shepard needed for fun or adventure. But for the most part he could take or leave them and quite often preferred to be alone, biking, skiing, or hiking through town, swimming, sailing, or skating on a backwoods pond. He had a deep capacity for solitude and a self-propelled energy that, whether alone or with buddies, kept him constantly busy—sometimes industriously, sometimes mischievously.

  If a few boys wanted to tag along after school, that was fine. He didn’t entirely exclude people; it’s just that he didn’t need the company of others the way most people do. “If he wanted to talk to you, then you’d have a conversation,” one friend recalled. “Alan was really kind of a loner,” said his childhood friend Harold Moynihan.

  To most of his peers, Shepard seemed to exist in a world separate from theirs. He could be a clown, could be friendly when he wanted to, but he didn’t hang around after school for clubs and sports. He could be a flirt, but he wasn’t known to have girlfriends. Classmates were intrigued by him, but he was not one of the “in” crowd. It was obvious in the way he carried himself, though, that Shepard didn’t seem to care if he was “in.” Instead of the downcast eyes and timid gait of a shy, self-conscious loner, Shepard strutted around confidently, with his head back, chin up, and eyes wide.

  That quality of self-confident aloofness would follow him through life. Few people would ever consider themselves true friends. “You only got so close to Alan and then he shut you out,” said Dee O’Hara, the astronauts’ nurse.

  Another lifelong quality, which began in childhood, was Shepard’s taste for physical challenges. Because he was small for his age, he shied away from team sports, but he excelled at solo sports. He learned to sail, swim, canoe, and ice-skate on Beaver Lake, down the hill behind his house. When the lake froze over in winter, cars with spiked tires raced in ovals around it, and Shepard sometimes skied behind a car, towed by a rope tied to the bumper, once reaching sixty-eight miles an hour. When it snowed, he and his friends built ski jumps on a steep hill behind his house and measured their distances, striving to beat each other. Shepard’s personal best was thirty-five feet.<
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  Shepard’s favorite form of entertainment, though, was spending time beneath his grandparents’ mansion next door, in a basement full of his dead grandfather’s tools and machines— a dank hideout that hosted Shepard’s most glorious childhood moments.

  His grandfather Fritz had been a tinkerer, drawn to the technology of his day: radios, electric-powered tools, a wind-up phonograph. When he died, those techno-toys collected dust until Alan discovered them—along with Fritz’s workshop, racks of tools, a treadle-powered band saw, and a cider press—in the stone-walled, dirt-floored basement. As Willy Loman says in Death of a Salesman: “A man who can’t handle tools is not a man.” And in that regard, Shepard—like many of the engineers, pilots, and astronauts who became his colleagues—was all man. With his school friends or all alone, Shepard spent many lost hours in that basement, dismantling and rebuilding small engines or sawing and shaving wood scraps into model boats that he’d launch into naval skirmishes on Beaver Lake.

  Fritz and Nanzie’s basement was also the sanctum sanctorum where Shepard hatched naughty schemes. From an early age Shepard was attracted to the type of fun that had a whiff of danger or mischief about it. In that basement, for example, he learned to transform apples into alcohol.

  He and some friends would collect apples from the small orchard out back—only those that had fallen, because they were more ripe—push the apples through a hand-cranked apple grinder, then dump the mashed apples into a press, beneath which they’d collect the strained juice in ceramic jugs and wooden caskets. Shepard would let the jugs and caskets sit a few weeks in a corner of the basement, fermenting. When the cider ripened and turned boozy but not yet vinegary, he’d invite a few classmates down into the basement and they’d all get loopy drinking his hard, slightly alcoholic cider.

  In his pursuit of devil making, Shepard sought the thrill of attracting attention, but he worked hard to minimize any chance of implication. His hard cider parties, for example, were relatively safe affairs because Grandma Nanzie was hard of hearing.