Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (9 page)

Phil Brewer was a severe, dough-faced man who worked obsessively long hours on Longwood’s fountains, leaving the girls mostly in the care of their mother, who dressed her two daughters in identical outfits.

Louise struggled to accommodate what she called her “tomboy streak” and once complained of the difficulties in “being a girl and knowing you can’t do all the things boys do.” Longwood beckoned like a sprawling playground, with fruit orchards, farm animals, ponds, and fountains. Her sister, Adele, befriended the other Longwood kids (and once created a stir when she became involved with one of the farmhands), but Louise often stuck to herself and, in the other kids’ eyes, was cold and standoffish. In fact, some people at first thought she
was
a DuPont, so sophisticated and superior.

When she arrived at Principia, her chilly
demeanor earned her the nicknames “Frosty” and, after the refrigerator brand, “Miss Westinghouse.” But there was one classmate who didn’t mind—Louise’s boyfriend, George Dietz.

A boy whom Alan Shepard now considered his rival.

For Alan, the holiday glow of his meeting with Louise dimmed suddenly, awfully. On Sunday, just two days after Christmas, the Shepards received terrible news from Bart’s brother, Fritz.

Alan’s cousin Eric had been killed in a plane crash during Marine Air Corps training. It was ruled an accident, although some family members whispered that he may have been hot dogging, taking chances in a machine he wasn’t yet ready to tame.

Eric was twenty-four and had been eager to join the war. After graduating from the University of Maine, he had joined the Marine Corps and signed up for flight training. He wanted to help other Marine pilots strafe and bomb Japanese ships in the Pacific islands, where the Marines were beginning to turn the tide of the war. Eric had been more than Alan’s favorite cousin; he was Alan’s hero. They’d been good friends despite a five-year age difference. Alan’s spunk seemed the perfect complement to Eric’s quiet serenity. Except for his grandfather, Alan had never lost someone so close to him—a
rare thing in a family half consisting of Christian Scientists, whose preference for prayer over medicine could sometimes lead to early, unexpected death.

Eric’s death struck Alan a severe blow. He knew war was a dangerous and deadly game, and he knew to expect the mounting casualties to begin hitting closer to home. But not this close, and not in this way. If an enemy attack had taken his cousin’s life, it might have somehow been easier—he’d have someone to blame. A training accident, though, seemed all the more senseless and wasteful. Alan was deeply troubled and confused by Eric’s death. He sent a telegraph to Annapolis asking for permission to extend his holiday leave and attend his cousin’
s funeral. Eric was buried in Massachusetts the day after New Year’s, and Alan wept openly at the service. Then he endured a miserable train ride back to Annapolis.

Until that time, Alan’s year and a half at the U.S. Naval Academy had been unimpressive; he’d even been threatened with expulsion. His most notable achievements were sailing up and down the Severn River in the academy’s boats and getting lucky with lovely Annapolis crabbies. But when he returned to Annapolis in January of 1943—whether it was the inspiration of his lost cousin or the promising relationship with beautiful Louise Brewer—a transformation began to churn, one that would culminate in a crucial turnaround. Alan started the spring semester with a new intensity and a grit
ty sense of determination. He locked in tight on two goals. First, he wanted to salvage his shabby academic record—mainly to graduate and become what his cousin Eric now could not: a military aviator. Eric’s death reminded him that he was there to become a flyer.

The other goal was Louise. His desire for her wouldn’t stop him from dating other women—one of them quite seriously—but he knew that ultimately he wanted Louise Brewer, and Alan would spend the next few years in a relentless pursuit of both goals.

“I hope I can really accomplish something at Annapolis that will make you proud of me,” Alan wrote to his father in early 1943.

One of the first signs of Shepard’s new sense of determination was his improving performance and rising status on the crew team. Despite an aversion to team sports, Shepard craved the knife-edged precision of rowing the sixty-foot, eight-man rowing shells. He considered the sport “an exacting one” and told a local newspaper reporter at the time that the best aspect of the sport was how “it builds your arms and chest muscles to prime shape.”

But, as the shortest member of the team, a full three to four inches shorter than the others, Shepard spent his first two seasons on the freshman or junior varsity squads. He didn’t yet have the strength or arm reach to make varsity. Earning a varsity letter in at least one sport was an important feat in the competitive world of the academy. Plus it was required for attendance at the senior-year Letterman’s Ball.

In the spring of 1943 Shepard began lifting more weights, rowing harder in practice, doing more push-ups—intent on getting his varsity letter and inviting Louise to the ball.

The team practiced, sometimes at dawn or in the afternoons after classes, under the guidance of coach Buck Walsh, a Naval Academy graduate and an Olympic gold medalist in 1920. After a half-mile walk to the boathouse, they’d climb into their boats as Walsh’s deep voice boomed through an amplified megaphone, yelling, “Pull! Pull! Pull!” When all eight men were rowing in sync, gliding across the orangey surface at sunrise, it felt as if they were actually flying above the glassy water. Rowers called such moments of synchronized rowing being “on the bubble,” and at the end of pr
actice Walsh would bark, “Let ’er run,” and they’d lift their oars and coast to an exhausted stop.

Shepard began to impress Walsh with his strength and determination. What he lacked in size he compensated for with strength and quickness, and Walsh developed a special affection for the short, hardworking young man he called “Shep.” Roommate Bob Williams, who rowed on the varsity squad, said Shepard initially “had no business in the varsity shell” but proved himself with “the fastest reflexes of anyone I’ve ever known.”

Once Shepard was hospitalized a few days due to a bout of the mumps. But he wasn’t about to let an annoying childhood disease slow his fight for varsity. At 2 A.M. one morning, a nurse entered Shepard’s room to check on him. She found him on the floor, and it looked as if he was having some kind of attack
. Her shrieks filled the academy’s hospital ward until she realized what he was doing: push-ups.

“I thought it was ridiculous for him to go out for crew because he was so small,” said classmate J. T. Cockrill. “He really seemed to have more drive than normal guys.”

During his rigorous efforts to make the varsity squad, Shepard also started to display more openly his ego and his aggressive competitiveness. A race against Columbia University was once canceled at the last minute due to high winds that had turned the Hudson River choppy. But the two teams continued to row for practice. Shepard’s boat—with just six of the eight men rowing—pulled alongside the Columbia boat, then passed it, and Shepard taunted the other team. “Look,” he said, pointing at the other rowers and laughing. “We’re rowing with six and we’re leaving them behind.” Dur
ing some races he tried to psych out opponents with a Bugs Bunny impression:
Nyah . . . what’s
up, doc?

“He was like a racehorse,” said teammate H. Y. Davidson. “He had that instinct to be out in front all the time.”

The academy’s accelerated three-year schedule meant that in the spring of 1943 Shepard was both a junior and a sophomore; the next school year would be his last, which didn’t give him a whole lot of time to achieve the goals he’d set.

At the end of the current school year—during a series of events known as June Week, which culminated with the senior class graduation—Shepard’s class would receive their senior year rings and attend their Ring Dance, after which Shepard’s class would officially become seniors. Shepard wanted Louise Brewer to be the one to share the symbolic moment with him, and in letters to her he repeated his invitation.

Louise initially declined the invitation,
but Shepard persisted. He sent a Valentine’s Day card, which she said was “mighty cute.” Louise, in turn, began signing her return letters affectionately, “Weezo” or “Weezer” and “as ever, Louise.”

A week before the dance, Louise finally accepted. She arrived in Annapolis early in the week, and the weather was beautiful. After dropping her bags at a downtown boardinghouse that catered to visiting girlfriends, she and Alan walked around the yard, past the statues, the crypt of John Paul Jones, the graveyard of naval heroes. Later Alan took her sailing on the Severn River, and they snuggled—him shirtless and her in white shorts and her hair tied up—in the back of the yawl as he steered.

Alan seemed intent on proving that the Christmas Dance at Principia six months earlier had been no small encounter. He was charming, funny, and attentive, and he introduced her to all of his friends. Alan had, typically, volunteered for the Ring Dance decorating committee, and a yearbook photographer caught Alan and Louise together: she standing on a crate, in saddle shoes and a knee-length white skirt, he handing her a Chinese lantern, wearing a tight T-shirt and looking up at her with a grin.

That night when Alan escorted Louise into the beautifully decorated ballroom, all heads turned. She was stunning in a floor-length sleeveless white gown. “Spectacularly beautiful,” they said. “A real knockout.” Few who were there would forget the sight of her, or of Alan, in his dress blue jacket, white pants, and white shoes, radiating pride.

A Navy band played moody ballads in the background, and World War II seemed far away. After a turkey dinner, Alan and Louise walked through a giant replica of a ring, dipped his own class ring into a basin containing waters from the seven seas, and kissed.

The next day he rode with her on the train to Baltimore. She hailed a taxi to take her home to Longwood, an hour north. Their goodbye was so fast she felt the need to w
rite him as soon as she got home. “I wish there were some way I could tell you what a really wonderful time I had,” Louise wrote on June 14, 1943, on red stationery.

Thanks seems like such an inadequate word sometimes. Oh,
I was sure I’d have a good time. But the whole weekend—
rather, week—surpassed any expectation. Thanks to you. I
suppose no fellow likes to be called sweet, so I won’t call you
that, but that doesn’t alter the fact that you were terribly
sweet to me. You know, you really don’t have to worry about
me coming down again, for if the “invite” is still good, I’ll be
down with bells on. Figuratively speaking, of course. It would
be a little noisy the other way.
Love, Louise

On the heels of his giddy, romantic week with Louise, Shepard climbed up the gangplank of an aging World War I battleship, the USS
Arkansas.
For the next three weeks he’d sleep fitfully in a festeringly hot bunk, eating lousy food, with no land or women in sight and always a chore to do—his first bitter taste of the real U.S. Navy.