Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (4 page)

But Alan’s father, Bart, chose a different course. He joined the National Guard in 1915 and then shipped off to France with an infantry division of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. When he returned home in 1918, he joined the Army Reserves and began working as an assistant cashier at his father’s bank, Derry National. Bart took his military service quite seriously and eventually rose to the rank of colonel, which was how Alan and his sister, Polly, addressed him—that or “sir.” Bart was enormously proud of his military rank and leaped at any chance to wear his uniform.

When he wasn’t in uniform, Bart wore a suit and tie—even on weekends. He kept his thin mustache neatly trimmed and never smoked or drank. Most workdays he ate a thirty-cent cheese sandwich at a downtown Greek lunch counter, and once in a while he splurged on pie. His lone hobby was music—across six decades, he played the organ at nearly every 10 A.M. Sunday service at the First Parish Church, the oldest church in town.

Bart lost his bank job when Derry National followed five thousand others into oblivion after the 1929 crash. When his father then started a family insurance company, Ba
rt took a job and worked there the rest of his life. Bart had the same large eyes as his son, but they appeared more sad than eager on his long face, above a pinched, down turned mouth.

One day Alan would appreciate how his own character was shaped by his father’s work ethic, the consistency and simplicity of his demeanor. But those realizations were many years off. As an energetic child, Alan often looked at his father and asked:
Why?
It just wasn’t Alan’s idea of a life. Bart had none of the qualities Alan admired as a child: bravery, a sense of adventure, a determination to be the best. Instead, his father seemed happy doing his plodding darnedest in a town Alan considered “a small pond.”

Alan and his father were hardly chums. Not in the way Alan was close with his mother and his grandmother, Nanzie. Alan and Bart shared few common interests and spent little one-on-one time together, except for tuning the church organ together once a month. It nagged at Alan that his father simply wasn’t . . . fun. “He appreciated a chuckle once in a while,” Alan once said. “But I can’t say he had a playful side.”

The sense of playfulness that became one of Alan’s more notable attributes derived instead from his mother, Renza. As powerfully as Bart’s side of the family had influenced Alan, his emotional temperament was shaped more by his spirited mother.

Renza Emerson’s family owned Derry’s largest shoe factory and had built a home beside Fritz and Nanzie Shepard’s mansion. Bart and Renza barely knew each other as children; he was a decade older and had gone off to war. When Bart returned from war, he noticed that the girl next door had grown into an energetic young beauty who seemed to have qualities that he did not—a sense of fun, a sense of humor. Bart fell in love and, at age thirty, proposed to his twenty-year-old neighbor. The local paper gushed at the engagement of “two popular and prominent young society people.” After a honeymoon dri
ve through Vermont and Montreal, dancing at Lake Placid and Niagara Falls, the coupl
e built a two-story Colonial on a plot of land smack between their parents’ houses.

To maintain the fine balance of their opposites-attract marriage, it made perfect sense to live with each other’s families, like parentheses, on either side. While Bart’s side of the family hammered in the value of seriousness and determination, Renza taught her children the value of a good time. Renza, nearly the polar opposite of Bart Shepard, cherished fun and laughs and was, in short, the radiant and playful luminescence of Alan’s boyhood.

An example of her high energy and lust for life was her choice of religion. In a sharp counterpoint to the Shepard family’s Protestantism, Renza was a Christian Scientist. While Bart attended church as a matter of duty, Renza attended the local Christian Science church for its preaching on positive thinking, its unshakable insistence that happiness is the lone antidote to illness.

The Christian Science Church was founded in 1879, twenty-five miles north in Bow, New Hampshire. Controversial from the start, the church lured many independent-minded New Englanders with its commonsense doctrines. Renza approved of the fact that the religion had been founded by a strong-willed woman, Mary Baker Eddy, who believed in self-reliance and self-healing.

Like her husband, Renza eschewed smoking and drinking, but then again, she didn’t need stimulants. She loved the outdoors and throughout her life remained spry and active. She gardened avidly during the spring and summer and in winter joined her children for toboggan rides down steep backyard hills. She had a plain face, but it was made attractive by her natural ebullience. “A people person,” Alan called her. “Just a happy, loving individual.”

Renza taught her children that it was up to them—not God, not fate—to make things happen in life. Alan admired and emulated his mother’s assertiveness, much more so than his father’s stoic passivity. While Polly was Bart’s little girl, Alan was his
mother’s boy. Whereas he called his father “Colonel” or “sir,” his mother was always “Mum” or “Mumma.” And in time he came to exhibit plenty of what one cousin referred to as Renza’s invigorating and infectious “pizzazz.”

The amalgam of influences inherited from his parents would serve Shepard perfectly through his career. His determination, smarts, and skill, combined with an upbeat and positive attitude, would carry him first into the elite upper ranks of the Navy and then to NASA .

But to Shepard’s peers, the somewhat contradictory mix of qualities could be jarring.

Fellow astronaut John Glenn called Shepard “an enigma . . . One side of him was cool, competent, and utterly dedicated, the other ready to cut up, joke, and have fun.”

From a young age, Shepard struck most people as something of a mystery. He made friends easily enough and could be gregarious. Starting up conversations with strangers came naturally. Classmates felt special when he spoke to them, as though they’d been chosen. But then a week would go by and they’d see him at school or in town, and he’d walk right past, his eyes straight ahead, as if they’d never met—and they’d realize they weren’t his friend after all. Friends were people Shepard needed for fun or adventure. But for the most part he could take or leave them and quite often preferr
ed to be alone, biking, skiing, or hiking through town, swimming, sailing, or skating on a backwoods pond. He had a deep capacity for solitude and a self-propelled energy that, whether alone or with buddies, kept him constantly busy—sometimes industriously, sometimes mischievously.

If a few boys wanted to tag along after school, that was fine. He didn’t entirely exclude people; it’s just that he didn’t need the company of others the way most people do. “If he wanted to talk to you, then you’d have a conversation,” one friend recalled.
“Alan was really kind of a loner,” said his childhood friend Harold Moynihan.

To most of his peers, Shepard seemed to exist in a world separate from theirs. He could be a clown, could be friendly when he wanted to, but he didn’t hang around after school for clubs and sports. He could be a flirt, but he wasn’t known to have girlfriends. Classmates were intrigued by him, but he was not one of the “in” crowd. It was obvious in the way he carried himself, though, that Shepard didn’t seem to care if he was “in.” Instead of the downcast eyes and timid gait of a shy, self-conscious loner, Shepard strutted around confidently, with his head back, chin up, and eyes wide.

That quality of self-confident aloofness would follow him through life. Few people would ever consider themselves true friends. “You only got so close to Alan and then he shut you out,” said Dee O’Hara, the astronauts’ nurse.

Another lifelong quality, which began in childhood, was Shepard’s taste for physical challenges. Because he was small for his age, he shied away from team sports, but he excelled at solo sports. He learned to sail, swim, canoe, and ice-skate on Beaver Lake, down the hill behind his house. When the lake froze over in winter, cars with spiked tires raced in ovals around it, and Shepard sometimes skied behind a car, towed by a rope tied to the bumper, once reaching sixty-eight miles an hour. When it snowed, he and his friends built ski jumps on a steep hill behind his house and
measured their distances, striving to beat each other. Shepard’s personal best was thirty-five feet.

Shepard’s favorite form of entertainment, though, was spending time beneath his grandparents’ mansion next door, in a basement full of his dead grandfather’s tools and machines— a dank hideout that hosted Shepard’s most glorious childhood moments.

His grandfather Fritz had been a tinkerer, drawn to the technology of his day: radios, electric-powered t
ools, a wind-up phonograph. When he died, those techno-toys collected dust until Alan discovered them—along with Fritz’s workshop, racks of tools, a treadle-powered band saw, and a cider press—in the stone-walled, dirt-floored basement. As Willy Loman says in
Death of a Salesman:
“A man who can’t handle tools is not a man.” And in that regard, Shepard—like many of the engineers, pilots, and astronauts who became his colleagues—was all man. With his school friends or all alone, Shepard spent many lost hours in that basement, dismantling and rebuilding small engines or sawing and shaving wood s
craps into model boats that he’d launch into naval skirmishes on Beaver Lake.

Fritz and Nanzie’s basement was also the sanctum sanctorum where Shepard hatched naughty schemes. From an early age Shepard was attracted to the type of fun that had a whiff of danger or mischief about it. In that basement, for example, he learned to transform apples into alcohol.

He and some friends would collect apples from the small orchard out back—only those that had fallen, because they were more ripe—push the apples through a hand-cranked apple grinder, then dump the mashed apples into a press, beneath which they’d collect the strained juice in ceramic jugs and wooden caskets. Shepard would let the jugs and caskets sit a few weeks in a corner of the basement, fermenting. When the cider ripened and turned boozy but not yet vinegary, he’d invite a few classmates down into the basement and they’d all get loopy drinking his hard, slightly alcoholic cider.

In his pursuit of devil making, Shepard sought the thrill of attracting attention, but he worked hard to minimize any chance of implication. His hard cider parties, for example, were relatively safe affairs because Grandma Nanzie was hard of hearing.

He didn’t shoplift or get into fights or openly defy his parents or do drugs. But he did fall in love with the buzz that came from a perfectly executed, low-risk, high-impact prank. Later, as a Navy pilot, he became infamous for his high-speed de
vilry, such as ripping terrifyingly low across a crowded Maryland beach in a jet or flying beneath a bridge. As an astronaut, he raised such stunts to an art form as he and his colleagues regularly taunted news reporters, innkeepers, politicians—and each other. They put rotten fish in each other’s cars and sabotaged the engines, always striving for the perfect “gotcha.”

Shepard’s love of a good prank created many tensions between him and his stern father. One Christmas he gave a cigar to Bart’s older brother, Fritz. After dinner, Uncle Fritz lit the stogie only to have it poof in his face. While Shepard was happily amused by the gag, his cousins were shocked. Not until Fritz broke into a grin did they laugh, too, though a bit nervously. Bart, sitting at the head of the table, didn’t even crack a smile.

Within an otherwise serious clan, Shepard’s mold-breaking pranks stood out, as did his total lack of fear and his indifference to reprisal—as one cousin observed, Shepard was “not awed by authority.” Renza often struggled to keep her son focused, and she once acknowledged how difficult it was to “keep a teenager with boundless energy out of mischief” and to channel “Alan’s great vitality” toward productive ventures.

Fortunately for both Shepard and his mother, his elementary-school teacher, Berta Wiggins, saw something special in his kinetic young personality, and she worked to convert his scattered, unfocused energy into a sharp beam of brilliance.