(2 of 3)
But America's man also saw space for the first time, for himself and for the waiting world. After the first light of dawn, he later wrote, "I was checking the instrument panel, and when I looked back out the window, I thought for a minute that I must have tumbled upside down and was looking up at a new field of stars. Then I looked again. There, spread out as far as I could see, were literally thousands of tiny, luminous objects that glowed in the black sky like fireflies. I was riding slowly through them, and the sensation was like walking backward through a pasture where someone has waved a wand and made all the fireflies stop right there where they were and glow steadily."
Sailing over the Indian Ocean, he reported on nightfall, "As the sun goes down, it's very white, brilliant light, and as it goes below the horizon, you get a very bright orange color. Down close to the surface, it pales out into sort of a blue, a darker blue, and then off into black."
And the earth reported back. In Australia, the citizens of Perth had prepared a greeting that would also serve to test his night vision. Porch lights beamed. People spread sheets on their lawns to reflect the light. Taxi drivers flicked their headlights. Glenn radioed astronaut Gordon Cooper at the tracking station in Muchea, asking what the flicking lights were. When told, he said, "Thank everyone for turning them on, will you?" It was always about people. The feat was important, but never as important as the sense of the person who accomplished the feat.
In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe portrays Glenn as weird for his normality, but most American heroes are weirdly normal. Glenn's physical appearance, then more than now, was strangely hard: Homo americanus stripped down, tight, hairless, a model of the species built for testing. Biographers stressed his down-homeness at a time before the late 1960s when down-homeness was not criminalized. He came from Presbyterian New Concord, Ohio; his dad ran a Chevrolet dealership; he attended Muskingum College, where he got B's and was substitute center of the football team. He played the trumpet too loudly in the town band; he saluted the flag and married Annie, the dentist's daughter and his sweetheart since the days they first met in a playpen; he did not swear.
But a flake was rising somewhere in that noble mix. In 1957 there was John Glenn on television, teamed with Eddie Hodges, the 10-year-old star of The Music Man, winning $12,500 on Name That Tune. (One tune he named was Far Away Places.) Earlier that year, there was Glenn sitting in an F8U Crusader jet, flying from Los Angeles to New York City and setting a cross-country speed record of 3 hr. 23 min. To this day he drives only convertibles. The American hero blares his trumpet and flies at speeds that can tear his head from his shoulders. At 77, he hankers for space.