Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (19 page)

Shepard was sickened when he heard the news. His plane, his beloved Corsair, had been in that first row, and it was now flying to the bottom of the Atlantic.

While waiting for replacement planes to be delivered, Shepard became intimately reacquainted with the simplistic color schemes of man at sea: the flat, drab, and persistent gray paint of his domestic environs, the muddled blue-gray-green of the ocean, the alternating white and blue of the sky, the unobstructed views of celestial light shows and the moon. His four thousand shipmates—a population greater than the
entire Naval Academy student body, or Shepard’s entire hometown—were squeezed into a compact steel city three football fields long. Days and nights rumbled with the phlegmy churning of the ship’s boilers, the air sweetened by the stench of the Navy’s black fuel oil fumes.

But this was not the USS
Cogswell,
and Shepard was no longer restricted to his ship’s boundaries. This was a ship whose sole purpose was to launch men like Shepard. And when the
FDR
reached the coast of North Africa, the Navy was asked to help search for a downed commercial plane, and Shepard—in his new Corsair—left the
FDR
’s gunmetal gray behind and sped across the Sahara Desert, just fifty feet above the sand.

At the same time, however, continued military spending cuts meant limited dollars for fuel. As the
FDR
toured the Mediterranean Shepard was flying less than he had hoped. He and his squadronmates were sometimes getting just a half dozen hops a month. Even the
FDR
’s skipper, Captain Harry D. Felt, expressed his concern about his pilots’ lack of flying. “If they lay off too long, you’re asking for trouble,” he said.

Abbot finally wielded some of his wily influence in Washington, and managed to obtain extra fuel for his squadron. But some of his men had become a bit rusty.

As part of the
FDR
’s ambassadorial duties, dignitaries were often invited aboard and sometimes treated to an air show. While stationed in the Greek port of Piraeus, Doc Abbot went ashore and visited the Greek royal palace to ask if the king and queen would be interested in touring the
FDR
and watching its aviators perform.

King Paul, Queen Frederika, and a few other Greek officials came aboard, and the
FDR
sailed a few miles out into the Mediterranean and put on a show. Shepard led his division of Corsairs in formation past the ship. Other pilots fired rockets at targets as the hundreds of crew members and visitors on deck watched and cheered.

Then a pilot named Hal Fish approached and aimed his five-inch rockets at the target, a junk ship moored a few hundred yards away from the FDR. When Fish squeezed the trigger, the rocket “pickled”—failed to separate from the wing. It then exploded and ripped the wing off Fish’s plane, which flipped and slammed into the sea.

“He didn’t have a chance,” said Shepard’s squadronmate Dick Hardy.

In such instances, pilots learned that fate, not skill, sometimes determined who lived or died in the still immature world of naval aviation.

Doc Abbot, after several months of flying with Shepard as his wingman, had decided somewhere in the Mediterranean that it was time for a new assignment.

Amid the choreographed ballet of landing on an aircraft carrier, pilots are graded on how quickly they can land, release their tailhook from the arresting wire, and move their plane to the front of the ship. It’s called “time in the gear,” and Abbot had VF-42’s second-lowest time in the gear. Ranked slightly ahead of him was Shepard.

So Abbot decided to give Shepard command of his own section (two planes). Some weeks after that, he gave Shepard command of a full division (four planes). Putting a nugget in charge of a division was an enormous vote of confidence and an endorsement of Shepard’s refined mix of aerial chutzpah and finesse. Division leaders must fly smoothly and gently so that the other three planes can follow. They can’t “horse” erratically. They must also always fly in control, and Abbot—who considered himself a superior pilot—saw shades of himself in Shepard.

As his squadronmates watched Shepard take another step up in the hierarchy, some noticed a change in his personality. He started to become, in one colleague’s words, “bodacious.
” He was already known for a big, self-confident attitude. But that wasn’t uncommon in the Navy. After gaining his own division, though, Shepard’s big personality grew even bigger, and it turned some colleagues off.

“He was a perfectly charming son of a bitch,” said Shepard’s friend Bill Botts, who appreciated his cocksure demeanor even if others didn’t. Everyone who met Alan Shepard over the next fifty years would, almost without fail, describe him as an acquired taste, someone you either liked or didn’t—“like Miami, or olives,” said Botts.

Carrier aviators owed their lives to the enlisted men who operated the launching catapults, maintained their planes, monitored the weather, and stood on the
FDR
’s tail waving paddles as whirring propellers bore down on them. But the aviators and enlisted men rarely mixed. In the hierarchy of a carrier at sea, the aviators were the big dogs, and the ready room was their doghouse, the place they boasted and argued about this plane and that, about speed and ascent and danger and noise. During the many lulls while the
FDR
was steaming from one port to the next, Shepard and the others
made up for a lack of flying by talking about flying. They could sit for hours smoking and drinking coffee in the ready room. Shepard loved to talk about the Corsair, its eccentricities, and its power, and how landing it on a carrier required the skill of an intuitive pilot. He was fiercely proud of his Corsair and annoyingly proud of his ability to fly it better than most.

But his buddies were learning how to take the hotshot down a peg.

Bob Baldwin, who flew one of the AD Skyraiders assigned to the FDR, loved to rile Shepard by bragging that the AD—a workhorse with one of the more powerful engines of the day—was faster than, tougher than, and far superior to Shepard’s Corsair.

Baldwin and his roommate, Warren O’Neil, ribbed Shepard one night at dinner about Shepard’s “inferior airplane.”
During missions, “us AD pilots always have to throttle back and wait for you Corsairs to catch up,” they said. Shepard hated that. One night he’d finally had enough and stood up from the table, pointing a finger at Baldwin and then O’Neil, barking, “Baldwin, with you sucking on one end of this ship and O’Neil blowing on the other, we’d have forty knots of wind across the deck.” The other two just laughed harder, which made Shepard even madder. “He didn’t take any foolishness from anybody,” O’Neil recalled.

Although Shepard was earning a strong reputation as a skilled pilot, a leader, and a teacher, the pace aboard the
FDR
sometimes grated on him. And when things got slow the ship’s captain ordered VF-42’s pilots to perform “collateral duties,” demeaning paperwork tasks. Meanwhile, back home, Navy and Air Force pilots were breaking records, flying jets, and crashing through the sound barrier. Guys like Chuck Yeager were screaming above the salt flats of Muroc Lake in southern California, piloting winged rockets with tough names like XP-80 and X-1. Also, the Navy had rcently created its first squa
dron of jet pilots, who at that very moment were learning to take off and land on the USS
Saipan—
the same aircraft carrier that Shepard had landed on a year earlier to earn his wings.

Furthermore, the Navy had just established the Test Pilot Training Division, a place to train a new generation of pilots who could test the new jets coming off the manufacturers’ assembly lines. The Naval Air Test Center (soon to be named the Naval Test Pilot School) was created at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. That, Shepard decided somewhere in the Mediterranean, was where he wanted to be—flying the fastest, newest, meanest jets in the world. And he told Abbot so every chance he got.

Meanwhile, the scenery—both terrestrial and human— wasn’t bad. The FDR, due to restrictions on fuel, parked itself for extended periods of time in some spectacular foreign ports, off-loading its men into Naples, Tripoli, the Greek isl
ands, and the swanky beach towns of the French Riviera. Many Navy marriages were battered by the liberties taken during the
FDR
’s excessive amounts of shore leave.

Shepard kept Louise in his thoughts. He bought her perfumes in France, leather gloves in Italy, and even a few paintings. He wrote to her often and, when he could, called her and the baby, Laura, at 5 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. Still, when a flyer isn’t flying, the next best thing is often found in foreign ports, in the bars inside those ports—on a bar stool.

As if rediscovering the skills he’d honed dating “crabs” back in Annapolis, Shepard displayed no inhibitions in those ports and their bars. He’d walk right up to a beautiful woman, and if she didn’t speak English, he’d dig up a few words of French or Spanish from high school and the academy. His foreign-language grades had always been poor, but he knew enough to buy a girl a drink. He wasn’t especially handsome, but whatever he had, it worked, and soon Shepard was known as one of the more successful flirts—“a spot we were all trying for,” Baldwin recalled. He and Shepard used to each s
hare time with the same French girl at one of the towns along the Côte d’Azur: “It just depended on who got ashore first.”

Once an older woman made the first move. Shepard and his roommate, Bill Chaires, decided during a weekend of liberty to take a train north from the port city of Cannes to Paris. They checked into the cut-rate Hotel Pennsylvania and then walked down the Champs Elysées, stopping in the lobby bar of a hotel for a beer. While standing at the bar, a waiter approached and handed them a note—an invitation from two ladies in the dining room to come share a drink.

“Why not?” Shepard said.

The two men entered the dining room and saw Eleanor Roosevelt waving at them. The former First Lady was in town for a U.N. General Assembly meeting (where she would give a famous speech called “The Struggles for the Rights of
Man”). After sharing a drink with her, Shepard invited her to come to Cannes and tour the ship named after her deceased husband, the ship she herself had christened in 1945. Mrs. Roosevelt initially accepted, which infuriated Shepard’s unprepared superior officers. But she later called the ship and canceled her visit.

Shepard’s other European barroom encounters were equally impressive. His shipmates would watch in envy and awe as Shepard left bar after bar with women. What happened after that they could only guess. Shepard’s buddies would always assume that the night was not over for Shepard and whichever young woman he befriended. Shepard had a habit of not exactly denying or confirming it. He just let people assume what they would.

“He was sort of proud of his reputation. He just liked girls,” Bob Baldwin, a retired vice admiral, says today. “That was just a compulsion he seemed to have. He didn’t wear it on his sleeve, though. He was content to let it speak for itself.”

The Navy was so impressed with Doc Abbot’s work in the Mediterranean (Hal Fish’s death had been the lone fatality, a rarity for the day) that halfway through the
FDR
’s tour there they snatched him away from his squadron and stuck him in an office at the Pentagon. So that’s where Shepard addressed his letter. Abbot knew what it would say even before he opened it:
Please, help me
get into test pilot school.