Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Page 4

  He didn’t shoplift or get into fights or openly defy his parents or do drugs. But he did fall in love with the buzz that came from a perfectly executed, low-risk, high-impact prank. Later, as a Navy pilot, he became infamous for his high-speed devilry, such as ripping terrifyingly low across a crowded Maryland beach in a jet or flying beneath a bridge. As an astronaut, he raised such stunts to an art form as he and his colleagues regularly taunted news reporters, innkeepers, politicians—and each other. They put rotten fish in each other’s cars and sabotaged the engines, always striving for the perfect “gotcha.”

  Shepard’s love of a good prank created many tensions between him and his stern father. One Christmas he gave a cigar to Bart’s older brother, Fritz. After dinner, Uncle Fritz lit the stogie only to have it poof in his face. While Shepard was happily amused by the gag, his cousins were shocked. Not until Fritz broke into a grin did they laugh, too, though a bit nervously. Bart, sitting at the head of the table, didn’t even crack a smile.

  Within an otherwise serious clan, Shepard’s mold-breaking pranks stood out, as did his total lack of fear and his indifference to reprisal—as one cousin observed, Shepard was “not awed by authority.” Renza often struggled to keep her son focused, and she once acknowledged how difficult it was to “keep a teenager with boundless energy out of mischief” and to channel “Alan’s great vitality” toward productive ventures.

  Fortunately for both Shepard and his mother, his elementary-school teacher, Berta Wiggins, saw something special in his kinetic young personality, and she worked to convert his scattered, unfocused energy into a sharp beam of brilliance.

  Wiggins was a severe, hard-faced woman with rimless glasses, almost always dressed in black, with her white hair pulled back into a tight bun. Like a benevolent prison warden, Mrs. Wiggins for decades single-handedly ran the Adams School, a white two-story building topped by a bell tower where she taught grades one through six, about twenty students in all, in a large second-floor room without electricity or running water.

  Wiggins expected much from her students. She stalked the aisles with a birch rod, ready to whack any daydreaming slackers into compliance. Days were tightly scheduled, and she moved quickly from lesson to lesson. Thirty minutes allotted to Shakespeare, 15 minutes to a piece by Chopin, an hour to math, and so on. Generations of Derry kids forever shared memories of those agonizing moments standing on a platform at the front of the class, called upon to recite a passage of prose or their multiplication tables or a historic speech word for word.

  Wiggins took a curious and particular interest in Shepard. She perceived in him a promising young mind with a special perception for math, but noted how quickly he became bored and restive. He’d finish lessons before the other kids and sit fiddling at his desk, distracted and fitful, itching to pull his harmonica out of the flip-top desk. So she often assigned him extra work: a paper on James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (on which he got an A), a report on the Middle Ages (B+), a stamp collection.

  When Shepard was eleven, Wiggins asked him to write and bind his own book, and he decided it was time to compose his autobiography. At the time, Alan had become enamored of Charles Lindbergh and kept on his bedside table a copy of Lindbergh’s autobiography, We. In a show of how strong Shepard’s ego had already become by age eleven, the book was titled “Me.”

  Later, as a test pilot and astronaut, Shepard would need to absorb huge amounts of highly technical information, and could often do so without needing to write things down—a capacity he credited to Mrs. Wiggins. “Mrs. Wiggins was tough,” Shepard recalled for a reporter many years later, adding that she had seemed “eight feet tall.”

  Shepard performed so well under Wiggins’ tutelage that by the time he was in fifth grade, she suggested that Shepard skip sixth grade and go right to middle school. Then, after just a year of middle school, his teachers advised that Shepard skip eighth grade, too.

  When Shepard arrived at the ivy-covered, redbrick Pinkerton Academy in the fall of 1936—where his father had sat in Robert Frost’s poetry class and his grandfather, as a school trustee, had signed Frost’s checks—he was only twelve years old, the youngest and smallest kid in the freshman class.

  High school life did not come easy at first. Shepard lagged in both sports and academics his first two years there and struggled to keep up, probably for the first time in his life. Being younger and smaller would become annoying themes of Shepard’s young adulthood, forcing him to work more aggressively to stay ahead. After his freshman year, Shepard tried to pack more muscle onto his wire-thin frame by swimming back and forth across a nearby pond with a rope harness around his shoulders and pulling an empty rowboat.

  A bitter childhood taste of being the underdog, and learning to persevere during such tough times, would serve Shepard well in the coming years—especially during his mid-1960s battle to reach the moon. Dogged determination and a steely, obsessive pursuit of his goals became his most exceptional qualities. In future years he’d not let anything or anyone get in his way. He’d step over people, even friends if he had to. He even had a determined manner of walking—instead of following sidewalks, Shepard usually walked quickly and in a straight line, stepping over shrubs and across lawns to get where he was going.

  But as a boy, the most distinctive sign of that determination was his precocious fascination with—and pursuit of—flying airplanes, an interest that bordered on obsession.

  Even without his historic flight across the Atlantic in 1927, stories of Charles Lindbergh’s aerial daredevilry were enough to thrill a generation of boys like Shepard, who collected airplane magazines and read and reread Lindbergh’s autobiography, We.

  We recounted Lindbergh’s earlier adventures, such as barn-storming from town to town in his open-cockpit biplane, offering $5 sightseeing flights, dropping straw-filled dummies from his plane, or even standing on a wing while a copilot flew.

  Lindbergh (whose grandfather was also a tool-loving tinkerer, an Army colonel, and a town father) wrote with muted beauty of the bird’s-eye perspective: “The fog broke into patches. . . . Numerous shorelines appeared, with trees perfectly outlined against the horizon.” His book sold like few before it; within a month of its release in 1927, two hundred thousand copies had been sold, and for years it remained the nation’s most widely read book.

  Shepard was only three when Lindbergh’s plane was spotted by the crowds outside Paris on May 21, 1927, at the end of his spectacular nonstop journey from New York. Though Shepard was not in the crowd the day Lindbergh and his Spirit of St. Louis swooped low over Elm Street in nearby Manchester at the start of a historic cross-country victory tour, Lindbergh’s celebrity carried over well into Shepard’s teenage years. A Literary Digest survey found in 1938 that eight-year-old girls wanted to grow up to be movie stars while boys wanted to be cowboys, army officers, or aviators. In a way, Shepard wanted to be an amalgam of all three, but it was Lindbergh first and foremost who inspired the dozens of balsa-wood, rubber-band-powered model airplanes dangling from his bedroom ceiling.

  “He was always my hero,” Shepard once said, never dreaming that he’d meet Lindbergh, would stand by his side the morning Apollo 11 launched to the moon. “I was just fascinated by planes. They were going somewhere. They were doing things. They were getting faster every year and they were flying higher every year.”

  Human flight had begun just twenty years before Shepard’s birth, when the Wright brothers first caught air on December 17, 1903. A hundred more flights followed in 1904 as the bicycle makers from Ohio improved their flying machine. A witness to the flight of an aluminum-skinned Wright brothers plane described it as “a locomotive that has left the track, and is climbing up in the air right towards you.” But it wasn’t until Lindbergh’s fame, from the late 1920s into the 1930s, that the flying machine began to more fully capture the imagination of an entire generation of boys. As Lindbergh put it, in the air “man is more than man.”

  Shepard’s youth
coincided with almost daily new feats of aviation, such as “Wrong Way” Corrigan “accidentally” landing in Ireland during his alleged attempt to reach California, and millionaire Howard Hughes circling the globe by airplane in less than four days. Still, by the late 1930s, aviation had barely reached adolescence. Race cars could still travel faster than most planes, which were still dangerous and unreliable. Will Rogers and his friend Wiley Post died in one; Amelia Earhart was lost in hers.

  As Shepard followed the progress and developments of aviation, he gravitated toward boys doing the same, and in time created the Airplane Model Club. Like him, they were boys who read Lindbergh and built model airplanes that dangled in their bedrooms. Shepard was intensely loyal to his fraternity and invited them often into his grandmother’s basement, which became their clubhouse, where his grandfather’s wood shop provided heaps of scrap wood and cool-to-the-touch tools to cut and drill the struts and rudders of their model airplanes. Beneath a hanging bare lightbulb, the boys glued together strips of balsa wood, wrapped them in tissue paper, and painted the fuselages.

  One member of the club, Al Deale, actually owned a boy-sized, homemade glider, which he kept in a dark corner of his father’s barn. Deale resisted frequent pleas from Shepard and other classmates to fly the thing, but Shepard was more persistent than the others. He nagged and nagged until Deale finally relented one Saturday morning.

  Shepard took the glider to a hill behind the Moynihan boys’ house and bolted the two wood-framed, canvas-covered wings to the fuselage, also built of thin wood strips sheathed in off-white canvas. Shepard stepped into the narrow cockpit and pulled straps over his shoulders, so the entire rig hung around him like a crude hang glider. He sprinted down the hill, and just as he jumped a few inches off the ground a zephyr of wind caught one wing and flipped the glider upside down, sending him tumbling into the grass. The lightweight wood cracked and splintered all around him, and the canvas ripped to shreds. Sixty-plus years later, Deale was still a little ticked off at the memory of what remained: “matchsticks.”

  Throughout his life, if Alan Shepard wanted something, he rarely worried about the consequences. Astronaut colleagues would similarly feel stung by Shepard’s me-first attitude, especially his determination to get space flights—at their expense.

  Six months after his glider flight, in early 1938, Shepard entered the lobby of Manchester Municipal Airport for the first time. For his Christmas present the previous year, he had asked for a real airplane ride, and his mother was making good.

  While waiting for the flight, Shepard walked curiously through the cross-shaped Art Deco building with a steel-and-glass control tower that looked like a British telephone booth sticking up above the roof. It had been just ten years since the tiny airport had hosted its first commercial flight. The airport had been built at a time when thousands of runways were being paved into the nation’s farms and fields.

  Until the early 1930s, the majority of planes flying in and out of those airports had carried either mail sacks or military men. Not until the post-Depression years, when manufacturers began adding cushioned seats and carpeting and airlines started serving meals, did the general public begin paying—often exorbitant amounts—to ride a flying bus. By the time Shepard prepared to board his first flight, the airlines had learned a few tricks to attract more customers. They started serving hot meals and had learned that dark carpeting on the floor gave passengers a feeling of strength and security, while light-colored ceilings and walls evoked airiness and freedom.

  The young commercial aviation industry was becoming profitable, too, thanks to a wide-bodied plane with plush seats and plenty of legroom that, after its introduction in 1936, soon became the most impressive airplane of its day. The DC-3 established itself as the first workhorse of passenger aviation. It could carry twenty-eight people, and on long flights the seats folded down into beds. The Douglas Aircraft Company (whose future partner, McDonnell Aircraft, would one day build Shepard’s space capsule) had found just the right balance of interior colors to prevent airsickness. The DC-3 hosted the first cross-country flights, during which chicken Kiev was served on fine china. Flying was still largely an indulgence of the rich, but as Amelia Earhart put it shortly before her disappearance, an “inventor’s dream” had in a few short decades become an “everyday actuality.”

  As he walked up the rear drop-down DC-3 staircase that day, into the cabin, and up the aisle, Shepard must have felt like he was walking through the nave of a holy place. He claimed years later that as the half-full DC-3 became airborne and rose slowly above southern New Hampshire—above the geometry of stone walls and the shimmer of the Merrimack River—he thought dreamily of a poem Mrs. Wiggins had compelled him to memorize: “The Swing,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s account of a boy on a swing who imagines he is flying: Up in the air and over the wall / Till I can see so wide / River and trees and cattle and all / Over the countryside.

  It took less than half an hour to reach Boston, but Shepard’s face never left the square window. It was a crystallizing moment, and years later he’d realize how that short ride confirmed everything he’d previously imagined about flying—the gut-flopping sensation when the wheels left the tarmac, the ecstasy of traveling at such speeds, the giddy half terrors of descending for a landing.

  At Logan Airport the Shepards got right back in line, boarded another plane—another twin-engine, Douglas-built DC-3—and flew home. Two halves of an hour in the sky was a rare and generous adventure for a fourteen-year-old boy in 1938. Lindbergh once described what Shepard must have felt that exhilarating day: that he had tasted “a wine of the gods of which they”—the poor suckers on the ground—“could know nothing.” In a plane, Lindbergh tried to explain, a man “explored the cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child. Adventure lay in each puff of wind.” Shepard had gone someplace that, it’s safe to say, few if any boys in East Derry had gone. From that day forth Shepard simply knew that he wanted to—needed to—fly airplanes.

  As his father drove home that day, Shepard sat quietly in the backseat, ruminating. A few weeks later, while sitting in Nanzie’s kitchen, he told his grandmother about a plan he’d worked out.

  It was twelve miles to Manchester Airport, he had calculated. But the route was hilly—too hilly for his clunky old one-speed bike. If he had one of those new English bikes, the kind with variable gears, he could make the trip easily. Then he could watch as mail planes, military cargo planes, and sleek and silvery DC-3s launched and landed.

  Despite her industrious husband’s heavy losses in the Depression, Nanzie was still a wealthy woman and could have purchased for Alan the fanciest bike in New England. But being a model New Englander who saved pieces of string, paper bags, and cellophane, instead of buying the bike she offered her grandson some chickens. If he wanted a bike, he’d have to work for it, she told him.

  Nanzie fronted Shepard the cash for fourteen Rhode Island Red chickens and a rooster. His father then pitched in and bought chicken feed and a water trough. Shepard dutifully fed and tended the chickens, and by the fall of 1938 he was selling eggs at twenty-nine cents a dozen. Shepard would forever credit Nanzie for the talent he’d one day discover to make a whole lot more money.

  Shepard finally got his bike on February 15, 1939, exactly a year after his round-trip flight to Boston. Heedless of the snow mounds and cold outside, he began riding the bike immediately, bundled in winter clothes and slip-sliding on ice, and in two weeks had already traveled a hundred miles.

  On Sunday, February 19, 1939, he made his first bike trip to Manchester Airport.

  Carl Park had a youthful energy that school and sports couldn’t quite satisfy. He often skipped his classes and caught rides from the barnstormers—World War I–trained flyers who traveled the country in cast-off military planes—who touched down in the fields outside his hometown of Lewiston, Maine. Park was smitten by the derring-do lifestyle of those pilots, who—like Lindbergh—scratched out a living by giving rides, taking aerial
photographs, performing stunts at air shows, and creating a new method of advertising: writing the names of products or businesses in smoke. The lure proved too strong, and Park quit school and began playing drums in a jazz band to earn money for flying lessons. That led to a job with a traveling orchestra; Park gave flying lessons during the day, then flew off to a gig somewhere in New England at night. One of his flying students was a textile worker named Rene Gagnon, who in World War II would be photographed with five other Marines hoisting an American flag atop Iwo Jima.

  Park eventually found a job at Manchester Airport and by the late 1930s was managing the place. He slept there, and at night when he heard a plane approach, he would run upstairs in his underwear to the control tower to switch on the runway lights.

  Small airports like Manchester’s became magnets for flight-smitten boys, aspiring aviation mechanics, and veterans of World War I’s limited air fleets, leather-jacketed men looking for work as instructors. On weekends the hillside along Manchester’s two runways was crowded with local boys and their bicycles, a spell-bound audience for the various take-offs and landings of single-engine Piper Cubs, dual-wing stunt planes, and—the best show in town—the long and bulbous DC-3s.

  After a few weeks on the hillside, Shepard began loitering around the tarmac, which is where Park found him one Saturday. “What do you want, son?” Park asked him.

  Shepard told Park that he didn’t have any money but he wanted to learn how to fly. Park sensed that Shepard was “a good kid,” and fell for his “great big grin.” He offered Shepard a deal: If he wanted to help wipe down the airplanes and keep the hangars clean, Park would give him a couple of flying lessons in lieu of pay.