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Professorially absent-minded about most other things, Stapp at work is a man possessed. Hand, mind and eye move with tireless precision. His energy is a constant challenge to subordinates, for he is a man who knows what he wants to do and prefers to do it himself. He may well be the only happy "light" colonel in uniform. "A light colonel," he argues, "can work with his hands. A full colonel gets carried around too much."
No one carries Paul Stapp. Among men who make a business of dealing with danger, he is a legend. Stapp has won a file full of awards and citations, including the Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster and, last month, the Air Force's Cheney Award for valor and self-sacrifice. He has ridden his roaring rocket sleds 29 times, personal proof that man is still master of the machines he builds. That is almost a faith with Stapp. Says he: "Man is capable of self-reproduction and even of occasional genetic improvements. He is capable of self-repair in case of damage to his structural integrity ... He is mortal but not without hope of immortality."
Biology & Hell. What sort of man is willing to risk himself habitually beyond the point of self-repair? John Paul Stapp's extraordinary track to the rocket sled began in 1910 in Bahia, northern Brazil, where his missionary father was president of the American Baptist College. Eldest of four brothers, Paul (as his family preferred to call him) had a strange boyhood. He learned to speak Portuguese long before he was permitted to pick up English; he was seldom allowed to play with other children, and his closest companion was his parents' Negro servant, a pro boxer from Barbados. When his mother tried to strap the unruly youngster into bed for his afternoon nap, he would shout at the top of his voice, and in Portuguese: "Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation!"
But life in Bahia had its compensations. The old castle that housed both the college and the Stapp family was said to be haunted; all night long, strange, squeaky noises sounded overhead. After a while, the nocturnal disturbance was traced to a nearby rum factory: opossums were sipping the mash, getting tanked up and scampering over the college roof. The Rev. Charles Stapp was outraged, but young Paul was entranced. Studying the opossums, he showed the first stirrings of the scientist, kept on studying animals and plants throughout his youth.
His father disapproved of his biological bent, and the mission doctor was warned not to show Paul the medical books he was eager to see. Instead, he was encouraged to read good religious books such as Foxe's Book of Martyrs. "What I read," Stapp remembers now, "frightened the hell out of me. Sometimes I wondered if Methodists ever got to Heaven."
Horace on Half a Dollar. When Paul was 13, the Stapps decided that it was time their oldest boy became an American, and he was enrolled in the San Marcos Baptist Academy in Texas. Young Paul, slight, nearsighted and a bookworm, found San Marcos a school for "displaced hellions." The San Marcos kids lost no time in taking him apart, but he had enough energy left to join the school band and play the bassoon.