Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (6 page)

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 lur
e 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 look
ing 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.

The lessons were informal—more like free rides with a few pointers thrown in—but Park recalled that when he began letting Shepard take the control sticks, in no time Shepard had a feel for keeping the plane level. There is no comparable earthbound exercise—except maybe sailing—that can prepare someone for flying, and many students learn the hard way that they have no aptitude for flight. Some get airsick, their bodies unable to reconcile the imprecise relationship with gravity. Others find the lack of visual cues—ground, walls, ceilings, and such—so disconcerting as to induc
e vertigo. And many can’t wrap their head around the counter intuitiveness of flight, how it’s safer to fly fast and high than slow and low, how the best way to save an out-of-control plane is to point the nose straight toward the ground. Instructors tell their students right from the start to distrust their earthly instincts, to resist common sense. Flying, as one 1930s pilot-writer noted, “has no similes in our life on the ground.”

But Shepard seemed to have no difficulties in learning how to fly an airplane like an airplane, not like a car or a horse or a bike or a sailboat. Maybe all the model airplanes of his youth embedded in his brain some intuitive sense of the characterist
ics of a wing. Or maybe his sailing talents afforded him some extra knowledge of the wind. Whatever it was, Carl Park noticed from the start that Shepard was “a natural.”

In time Shepard was working so hard around the airport to pay for his next ride that Park expanded his duties from just cleaning the planes to helping the mechanics change spark plugs and repair fuel lines. Shepard considered himself the airfield’s “fix-it kid.” Park even let Shepard taxi planes from one part of the field to another.

The leap from passenger to pilot is an immensely empowering one. Most adults can recall receiving their driver’s license and feeling the newfound freedom of driving wherever you want, whenever you want. In a plane, the freedom is many times more profound than in a car. There is no road, no speed limit, no barriers, no earthly restrictions . . . it is the freedom of the birds.

Shepard was enthralled, swooping down over his town in the passenger seat of a single-propeller, high-winged Voyager or Reliant, the predominant private planes of the day. When Park let him take the controls and Shepard held that stick, he knew he was hooked. Shepard loved to be in control—of people, of situations, of himself. But in a plane, he was in control of everything: of up and down, of the entire world beneath him. One twitch of the control stick, and the whole world tilted. A slight, slow pull on the stick and the world disappeared, unveiling nothing but sky and space and clouds—nothi
ng and yet everything.

New Hampshire produced a few home-brewed aviators of note in those early decades of human flight. Manchester Airport had been christened in 1927, with its first landing and takeoff by Robert S. Fogg, who that summer delivered mail twice daily to Vermont towns marooned by a massive flood. By 1940, just two years after Shepard’s first lessons, the airport would be renamed Grenier Airport, in honor of a daring Army Air Corps pilot from Manchester, Jean Grenier, who was killed in 1934 while scouting a dangerous new airmail route across the Rocky Mountains of
Utah. New Hampshire also produced a daredevil named Carmeno Onofrio, who once landed his J-3 Cub, outfitted with skis instead of wheels, fourteen times in one day on the snow-covered peak of 6,288-foot Mount Washington, known for clocking two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds.

But even more profound feats would soon be performed by the men who’d replace Lindbergh as Shepard’s driving inspiration: the aviators of World War II.

On September 1, 1939, as Shepard began his last year of high school, German soldiers—having already occupied Czechoslovakia—marched into Poland. Hitler had already allied himself with Italy and the Soviet Union, which would become his partners in the Nazi dictator’s subsequent trouncing of the better part of Europe.

At the Shepard household, Alan’s father began discussing some options for college the following year. Alan had managed to find his place at Pinkerton and had studied hard, and by his senior year he ranked eighth in his class of fifty-five, with all A’s or B’s except for a C in French. With the escalation of war in Europe, Bart strongly suggested that his son consider the Army’s military academy at West Point. It was free, and it would perpetuate a proud heritage of Shepards in the Army. Besides, with the growing likelihood that America would someday join the fighting overseas, Alan
might have the chance to do what many Shepards had done before him—to serve his country on the battlefield.

Bart was the type of guy that newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle would call, admiringly, a grunt. He believed in the ethos of the dogface soldier, which he’d been in World War I. But to Alan, the Army life seemed dirty and degrading. Alan loved his father and respected his simple New Hampshire lifestyle, but he had no interest in the Army soldier’s life. Alan knew all too well that the United States would likely soon join the war
. He saw it at Manchester Airport, whose runways were becoming busy with military cargo planes. Indeed, before long, the Army would take over Manchester Airport, nudging aside Alan’s instructor friend Carl Park as it turned the place into a sprawling military air base.

In the coming conflict the Army would be no place for an aspiring pilot. Thanks to a $2 billion infusion from President Roosevelt, the Navy was buying thousands of planes and training pilots for previously unthinkable feats. They had been welding flight decks atop ships, and Navy pilots were taking off from and landing on these wildly dangerous makeshift landing strips. In the mid-1930s the Navy began building a new generation of aircraft carriers, an entirely new type of ship whose sole purpose was to serve as a floating runway for pilots crazy enough to attempt such risky landing
s. The Navy was becoming
the
place to fly.

One Sunday in late 1939, Alan’s uncle Fritz came to visit and—picking up on the disagreement between Bart and Alan over West Point—suggested Alan consider the U.S. Naval Academy. Alan immediately saw the perfection of his uncle’s suggestion. In the Navy he could indulge both his love of the water and, more importantly, his love of the air.

The decision to allow his son to pursue the Navy instead of the Army must have weighed heavily on Bart. Yet at some point he realized: Maybe he would not have a colonel for a son, and a long-established tradition of Shepard men as Army officers would cease, but then again, maybe he would someday have an admiral for a son.

In 1940 Alan notched the second-highest score in New Hampshire on the Naval Academy’s preliminary exam. But because he had skipped
two
elementary-school grades, the family learned that, at sixteen, Alan was too young for the academy. Rather than alter their course, they sent Alan for a year to Admiral Farragut Academy, a military prep school in New Jersey. Bart wasn’t taking any chances. He wrote to Farragut’s superintendent: “Appreciate you putting more pressure on him to study.”

After a year at Farragut, Shepard was ordered to report to Annapolis.

When he arrived there, on June 19, 1941, he was again among the smallest in the class. And at seventeen he was again one of the youngest. Though he had been something of a self-sufficient loner in East Derry, he had also been surrounded by family and friends and was never truly alone. Now, as he found himself suddenly thrown in among bigger and older young men, Shepard embarked on a difficult transformation from gangly teen to naval officer—a transformation that, from the start, he seemed almost intent on sabotaging.