John Glenn

John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born on July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, the son of John Herschel Glenn Sr., a plumber, and Clara Sproat Glenn, a teacher ^[1]. The family soon settled in the nearby town of New Concord, where Glenn grew up during the Depression years. He washed cars and sold rhubarb to earn money, played trumpet in the town band, and starred in three sports at New Concord High School ^[2].

His fascination with flight began early. His father took him up in an open-cockpit biplane when he was eight years old, an experience Glenn later described as decisive in shaping his ambitions ^[1]. He enrolled at Muskingum College in New Concord to study chemistry and, while still a student, earned a private pilot's license through a Civilian Pilot Training Program course in 1941 ^[2].

The attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 changed his plans. Glenn left college before completing his degree and entered the Naval Aviation Cadet Program in 1942. He accepted a commission in the United States Marine Corps the following year, beginning a military flying career that would span more than two decades ^[1].

During the Second World War, Glenn flew 59 combat missions in the Pacific, piloting F4U Corsair fighter-bombers in strikes against Japanese positions in the Marshall Islands ^[3]. He remained in the Marine Corps after the war, and when fighting broke out in Korea he flew two combat tours. In Korea he completed 63 missions with a Marine squadron and another 27 as an exchange pilot with the Air Force, flying the F-86 Sabre jet. In the final days of the war he shot down three MiG-15 fighters along the Yalu River ^[3].

His wingman on several Korean missions was the baseball star Ted Williams, then serving as a Marine reservist, and the two remained friends for decades afterward ^[2]. Glenn's combat record earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross multiple times along with numerous Air Medals ^[3].

After Korea, Glenn trained as a test pilot at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River, Maryland. In July 1957 he flew a Vought F8U Crusader from Los Angeles to New York in 3 hours and 23 minutes, the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speed. The record attempt, called Project Bullet, brought him national attention for the first time and a ticker-tape reception in his hometown ^[1].

In April 1959 the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration introduced its first astronaut class, the Mercury Seven, and Glenn was among them ^[4]. At 37 he was the oldest of the group, chosen from an initial pool of more than 500 military test pilots after grueling physical and psychological screening. Anyone asking who was John Glenn in the early 1960s would have heard a ready answer: the freckled Marine with the small-town manner who seemed to embody the astronaut ideal ^[4].

The Soviet Union had already sent Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov into orbit, while the first two American flights, by Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom in 1961, were brief suborbital hops. The pressure on Glenn's mission was enormous. After repeated weather and hardware delays, he lifted off from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas rocket on February 20, 1962, in a capsule he had named Friendship 7 ^[4].

Glenn circled the Earth three times in 4 hours and 55 minutes. The flight was not without drama: a faulty sensor suggested his heat shield might be loose, so controllers had him keep the retrorocket pack attached during reentry as a precaution. He splashed down safely in the Atlantic near Grand Turk Island ^[4]. The response at home was jubilant. An estimated four million people turned out for his ticker-tape parade in New York City, and he addressed a joint meeting of Congress ^[5]. Among the most cited John Glenn facts is that President Kennedy, wary of risking a national hero, quietly kept him off further flight assignments, a restriction Glenn only learned about years later ^[1].

Glenn resigned from NASA in 1964 and retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in 1965. His first two attempts at politics faltered: an injury from a bathroom fall forced him out of the 1964 Ohio Senate race, and he lost a close Democratic primary in 1970 to Howard Metzenbaum ^[5]. In between, he worked as an executive for Royal Crown Cola and served on corporate boards.

In 1974 he won the Senate seat decisively, aided by a memorable primary debate moment in which he answered Metzenbaum's jab that he had never held a job by invoking the sacrifices of service members. Ohio voters returned him to the Senate in 1980, 1986, and 1992, making him the first Ohioan elected to four consecutive Senate terms ^[5].

In Washington, Glenn concentrated on government operations and defense. He was the principal author of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978, which tightened controls on the export of nuclear technology, and he chaired the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs from 1987 to 1995 ^[6]. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 but withdrew after weak early primary showings left his campaign deep in debt. His reputation weathered a difficult stretch in the early 1990s when he was named in the Keating Five ethics inquiry over meetings with regulators on behalf of savings-and-loan executive Charles Keating; the Senate Ethics Committee concluded he had exercised poor judgment but cleared him of wrongdoing ^[5].

Glenn's marriage was one of the most enduring in American public life. He wed Anna Margaret Castor, known as Annie, in April 1943. The two had grown up together in New Concord, where their parents were friends, and had known each other since early childhood ^[2]. They had two children, John David and Carolyn Ann, and remained married for 73 years until his death.

Annie Glenn struggled for much of her life with a severe stutter, and her husband's steady public support, along with her own later success in therapy, made the couple advocates for people with communication disorders ^[2]. Friends and colleagues consistently described Glenn as unpretentious, disciplined, and rooted in the Presbyterian faith of his upbringing.

Away from politics and flying, Glenn kept piloting his own twin-engine Beechcraft Baron well into his nineties, giving up the controls only in 2011 ^[1]. He co-founded what became the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University, where he and Annie taught and mentored students after his retirement from the Senate ^[6].

Glenn announced in 1997 that he would not seek a fifth Senate term. Before leaving office he lobbied NASA to let him fly again, arguing that studying an older person in orbit could yield useful data on the parallels between spaceflight effects and aging. NASA agreed, and on October 29, 1998, Glenn launched aboard the shuttle Discovery on mission STS-95 as a payload specialist ^[7]. At 77 he became the oldest person to fly in space, a distinction he held for more than two decades. The nine-day mission carried out dozens of experiments, and Glenn served as a subject for studies on sleep, balance, and bone and muscle response ^[7].

The flight capped a run of honors that continued through his final years. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012, and Congress awarded the Mercury astronauts the Congressional Gold Medal ^[6]. Ohio renamed the Columbus international airport for him in 2016.

Glenn died on December 8, 2016, at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center's James Cancer Hospital in Columbus, after several days of hospitalization. He was 95, the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven ^[8]. Following memorial services in Columbus, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in April 2017. Annie Glenn survived him until 2020, when she died at 100 ^[8].

Any full John Glenn biography has to reckon with how completely he fused two American archetypes: the fighter pilot and the citizen legislator. His orbit aboard Friendship 7 arrived at a moment when the United States badly needed proof that it could match Soviet achievements in space, and the flight became a shared national memory in a way few technical feats ever have ^[4]. The capsule itself is displayed at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington ^[4].

John Glenn achievements span an unusual range: three aerial victories in Korea, a supersonic transcontinental record, the first American orbital flight, four Senate terms, landmark non-proliferation law, and a shuttle mission flown at an age when most contemporaries had long retired ^[6]. Schools, a NASA research center in Cleveland (renamed the John H. Glenn Research Center in 1999), the Columbus airport, and Ohio State's public affairs college all carry his name ^[6].

Historians of the space program often note that Glenn's plainspoken decency did as much for NASA's public standing as his piloting did for its flight record. Tom Wolfe's 1979 book The Right Stuff, and the 1983 film adapted from it, fixed his image for later generations as the earnest moralist among the hard-living test pilots ^[9]. Nearly a decade after his death, his life remains a standard reference point for public service in the United States, cited by presidents of both parties as an example of what sustained, unglamorous commitment to country can look like ^[8].