Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (57 page)

Through luck, hard work, and arrogant persistence, through timing and shrewd political maneuvering, he had survived, and had now achieved what he called “the most personally satisfying thing I’ve ever done.” As he once put it: “Given a disciplined self, all things are possible.”

Louise knew all this, too. Though she threw up again and again during the long night before her husband’s splashdown, she was elated after watching on TV as Shepard boarded a Navy ship bound for Houston, where he would be safe behind the glass windows of the postflight quarantine room. She was relieved, exhausted, and proud—proud of her “old man Moses . . . because he made his promised land.”

Back at Houston they brought overflowing breakfast trays into the quarantine room, where Shepard and his two crewmates sat reading the newspapers and drinking coffee, still isolated from the rest of the world, still in a world of their own. Shepard had always been a good eater. During his nine days in space he “ate just about everything there was to eat.” He popped open cans of beans, squirted water into bowls of dehydrated soup, peeled the wrappers off granola bars.

In fact, after nine days in space, despite the strenuous and sweaty two-mile round-trip hike to Cone Crater, Shepard returned to earth one pound heavier than when he’d left. Every other astronaut before him had lost weight—sometimes a lot. Jim Lovell, during his terrifying Apollo 13 mission, had lost an amazing fourteen pounds. John Glenn had lost four pounds during his tension-filled, four-hour flight back i
n 1962—a pound an hour. Even Shepard’s crewmate Stu Roosa lost ten pounds over the course of Apollo 14.

The fact that Shepard was, as the
New York Times
put it, “the first man to gain weight while in space” fascinated NASA scientists and made for a curious story in that day’s
Times.
Another headline caught Shepard’s eye that morning, too: “Astronaut Conducts ESP Experiment on Moon Flight.” Shepard had read enough inaccuracies in the press to immediately distrust the story. He shook his head, then looked up from his breakfast. “Hey, Ed. Did you see this? Isn’t it amazing the things that people make up?”

Mitchell had always kept his deeper feelings about space flight to himself. He regarded outer space more philosophically than most of the other astronauts, who were strongly tech-minded. Though he had enviable scientific credentials, Mitchell had always considered the cosmos “something larger than myself . . . something incomprehensibly big.” And in traveling to the moon, he intended not only to collect rocks but also to conduct his own personal experiment that might lend a clue to “the origins of our existence.” Years later, he’d admit that a trip to the moon was more than
a science experiment for him, more than an aeronautic adventure; it was “a mystical experience.” He had no choice but to tell Shepard the truth. “I did it, boss.”

En route to the moon, that night Roosa had seen him with his flashlight, Mitchell had pulled a small pad from his pocket. On the pad were symbols—circles, squares, wavy lines, stars— with a number assigned to each symbol. He concentrated for fifteen seconds on each symbol. Back on earth, at the prescribed time, friends of Mitchell’s tried to telepathically pick up his thoughts and to write down the numbers they “heard.” He did this twice on the way to the moon and twice on the way home, with the earth sliding in and out of his window as the capsule slowly spun like a pig on a s
pit to disperse the sun’s rays.

During those quiet moments, while his two crewmates slept, Mitchell had experienced a feeling of “b
eing swaddled by the cosmos.” Much later he’d elaborate about his feelings of “joy,” energized by the “divine presence” he felt electrifying the universe around him. But at breakfast back on earth that day, Mitchell made no apologies or explanations, and Shepard just stared at him a few moments; he said later that he had had no idea about Mitchell’s experiments, that he was “surprised” and might have even nixed the plan if he’d learned about it in advance. But that morning, still buzzing from a successful mission, Shepard just nodded and smiled a bit, then returned to his newspaper, eggs, and bacon
. Mitchell later compared his ESP tests to Shepard’s golf shot: “He did his thing, I did my thing.”

Once freed from their quarantine, the three astronauts surfed a tidal wave of parades, galas, ceremonies, and television appearances, capped off by the invitation to Nixon’s White House for dinner. Although Shepard was a fairly consistent Republican, he was not a big fan of Nixon, who he felt “didn’t know anything about space,” was far less interested in NASA than his Democratic predecessors, and was guilty of letting Washington’s support for the space program lag.

That night at the White House Nixon kept up the tradition of promoting astronauts. Mitchell became a Navy captain, and Roosa became an Air Force lieutenant colonel. But Navy rules prevented him from promoting Shepard from captain to admiral. In place of a promotion, Nixon commended Shepard—and the “first celestial hole-in-one”—by inducting him into the “distinguished order of lunar duffers,” despite the fact that “Shepard’s first two swings were embarrassing failures.” But Nixon promised to “find a way to make you an admiral eventually.”

A month later he made good on his promise. In late April 1971, from a list of two thousand Navy captains, Nixon approved the promotion of forty-nine of those captains to the exalted rank of rear admiral. Among the names was Shepard
’s, the only astronaut to make admiral and among the few Navy admirals who had never commanded a ship.

Shepard’s father, Bart, was thrilled to learn that his son had reached the pinnacle of the Navy’s hierarchy. From then on, just as his father had insisted on being addressed as “Colonel,” Shepard asked to be called “Admiral,” even by his children.

Shepard’s celebrity also led to an invitation from George H. W. Bush, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to serve as a delegate. The friendship between Shepard and Bush dated back to when they had been neighbors in Houston’s wealthiest suburb. They’d recently met again at a UN meeting in San Francisco, where they talked about how great it would be to take the UN’s Security Council into space and ask each member to point to his country. “He wouldn’t be able to find it because there are no political boundaries,” Shepard told Bush. “As a planet, we are so small and unified.”

Across two months with the UN delegation in New York, Shepard took part in an eight-hour session that led to mainland China being voted into the UN. In the halls and at cocktail parties, he signed autographs and tried to tell UN members “what a fragile, beautiful place” the earth was when viewed from space. “It’s too bad there are so many people on earth who can’t get along,” he said.

When all the accolades and public appearances had settled down—the appearance with Bob Hope before troops in Vietnam, the invitations to prizefights, the Broadway plays, the drunken night in New York with Lauren Bacall, and the overtures from politicians trying to lure him into politics—Alan, Louise, and their daughters traveled to New Hampshire for a much-needed respite. There Alan attended a retirement ceremony for his favorite high school teacher and hosted a fiftieth wedding anniversary for his parents at a nearby country club.

One night during their stay in New Hampshi
re Louise, Renza, and the girls worked in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, while Alan and his father—the admiral and the colonel—sat in the living room sipping snifters of brandy. In the corner stood the pipe organ that Bart still played each day, a reminder of the Saturday afternoons so long ago when Alan trundled along with his father to the church and helped him tune the six hundred pipes of the huge church organ. Over the years Bart had continued running his small-town insurance agency, driving a half mile to work in the same office, lunching at the same restaurant, day after day,
year after year.

His son, meanwhile, sailed aboard Navy ships to all corners of the globe, flew jets at supersonic speeds and superhuman heights, drove Corvettes, rocketed to space, and golfed on the moon—arguably one of the most eloquently traveled men alive.

And yet Alan had developed an admiring respect for his father’s consistently homespun and simplified lifestyle. “My father’s example was he led a good life,” Shepard would one day admit.

That evening after dinner, father and son talked about Shepard’s promotion to admiral, about his plans for the future, and about the moon. At one point Bart turned to his son and said, “Do you remember when you first told us back in 1959 that you were going to become an astronaut?”

“Yes, sir,” Alan said.

“Do you remember what I said?”

“Yes, sir, I certainly do,” Alan said. In fact, Alan would never be able to forget Bart’s admonitions against veering off his Navy career path, and how he’d felt as though he was tearing the family apart with his risky enrollment in NASA. “You were not in favor of it.”

“Well,” Bart said, his voice a little shaky as he raised his glass of brandy in a toast, “I was wrong.”

Fifteen months later, the colonel died at the age of eighty-two.

Part III

AFTER SPACE