The Wingmen, page 18
“I was careful about my image while an astronaut because there were people who were against the manned space program,” Glenn later admitted. “And I didn’t want to do anything to tarnish my image and hurt the program.”
Despite the excitement, the manned space program had become rife with setbacks.
Six weeks after showcasing the first astronauts for the world, NASA launched a Jupiter rocket three hundred miles into the atmosphere. But no human was aboard. A rhesus monkey named Able and a squirrel monkey named Baker were strapped inside the nose of the rocket. The “monkey business” and “top banana” headlines wrote themselves. Other early rockets such as McDonnell’s “Little Joe” series either failed in tests or were severely limited in capability. The more sophisticated rockets also went through a series of failures in the program’s first eighteen months.
By 1960 NASA’s missteps, funded by the American taxpayer, had become a political hot potato in a presidential election year. Science advisors to the national Democratic Party called Project Mercury “costly . . . highly publicized . . . risky.” After hearings in the United States House of Representatives, Newsweek reported that the Mercury Program’s budget had nearly doubled from $200 million to $350 million. In the spring, NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan told a Senate Space Committee that the United States would need to spend as much as $15 billion over the decade to compete with the Soviets.
Meanwhile, the men competing for the first assignment aboard the seemingly overpriced, ineffective projectiles underwent extensive training. At NASA headquarters in Hampton, Virginia, as well as the Navy’s Aviation Medical Acceleration Laboratory in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, Glenn and the others trained for zero gravity and G-forces while becoming experts in astronomy, astrophysics, ballistics, fuels, geography, guidance systems, and meteorology.
“If we didn’t know what to expect, we might be like the Ubangis in Africa, suspicious of everything and afraid of every leaf that stirs,” Glenn said in late 1959. “When you’re educated, you’re no longer afraid. In this field, there are only a handful who understand, and they are not fearful.”
The astronauts were dubbed “The Mercury Seven,” but at various points in NASA’s earliest years they were hardly a cohesive team. Glenn, and to a lesser extent Navy aviator Scott Carpenter, emerged as the self-righteous, unabashedly moral faction of the group. Physical, emotional, and mental acuity were critical to the choosing of America’s first star voyagers, but so too was selecting men of character . . . faithful, Christian, family men of character.
Beginning in May 1959 much of the training phase for Project Mercury migrated to a Florida Air Force facility known as the Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex. At Cocoa Beach and other spots along the strip the celebrity astronauts found plenty of leisure time in their off hours. At dirt cheap prices local dealerships offered them Chevrolet and Ford sports cars, which some raced well above the speed limit. Well-wishers offered them free drinks. And according to author Tom Wolfe’s celebrated book The Right Stuff, women in the region offered sex, then bragged about how many astronauts they had slept with.
With Carpenter, viewed as his “sidekick,” Glenn urged the rest of the Mercury Seven to stay out of trouble. He playfully put up a sign on one of their office walls that read, “I cut out smoking. I cut out drinking. I cut out women. Now I cut out paper dolls,” a contemporary joke about being locked up in an insane asylum.
The situation eventually came to a head, pitting Glenn against fellow astronaut Alan Shepard. A highly decorated Navy aviator who had served in the Pacific during World War II, Shepard was passionate about the Mercury program, but perceived by the press as “regal, cold, on edge.” Behind closed doors, he also reportedly had an “understanding” with his wife regarding his extracurricular activities.
During the astronauts’ tour of an aeronautics facility in Southern California, Shepard took a detour to Tijuana, Mexico. While he was there, a reporter and photographer caught him with a woman that was not his wife. Told about the situation by a NASA spokesman, Glenn personally phoned the newspaper.
“I talked to both the reporter and to the photographer and later the publisher or the night editor,” he said. “I talked about the Russians, ‘godless Communists,’ how ‘you gotta let us get back in the race.’ I pulled out all the stops.... The story did not appear in the papers. But it well could have if I hadn’t talked to them.”
Shepard, whom John Glenn viewed as “an enigma,” may well have reminded him of another moody, headstrong pilot capable of damaging his reputation with impulsive behavior: Ted Williams.
After the incident in Tijuana, Glenn confronted the group about the issue.
“As time went by,” Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff, “the Glenn position became: Look, whether we like it or not, we’re public figures. Whether we deserve it or not, people look up to us . . . We’ve got to be above even the appearance of doing wrong.”
At thirty-eight, Glenn was at minimum two years older than the other Mercury astronauts. And of the seven, he was the only Marine: three were Navy, three Air Force. Before developing a kinship with Carpenter, he started the program as an outsider.
The image that Glenn seemed to be crafting also complicated his relationship with the others. Glenn did not crave the spotlight, but he didn’t shun it either. He seemed to actually enjoy talking with the press. An early profile on the astronauts named him “most articulate of the group.” Often his remarks centered on his faith and religion, which did not necessarily endear him to the others. Neither did the exaggerated public perception that he never smoked, drank, or swore. He was also the only member of the group not to take advantage of the local dealers’ generous sports car prices. He remained perfectly content to drive a far less sporty NSU Prinz. Wolfe went so far as to call Glenn “the flying monk, or whatever the Presbyterian version of a monk was. A saint maybe; or an ascetic; or maybe just the village scone crusher.”
Glenn’s training regimen only added to a holier-than-thou aura. In the early days of the Mercury program, the astronauts were stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia. They had been advised to stay in shape, but it was not enforced, and most of them hated exercise. Glenn had chosen not to uproot Annie, David, and Lyn from their home on North Harrison Street in Arlington, Virginia, and instead lived alone inside the base’s Bachelor Officer Quarters. In a display considered showy by his fellow astronauts, Glenn jogged miles around the base every morning.
With NASA’s move to Florida, he, and sometimes son David, jogged the beaches in another transparent exhibition of his dedication to the program. Life magazine reported that Glenn’s commitment to diet and exercise took him “from a somewhat paunchy 195-pounder to a trim, muscular 165 pounds.”
Division between Glenn, and to a much lesser extent, Carpenter, and the rest of the group peaked as the program advanced closer to manned space launches. Each wanted to be the first to go to space. In the press, Glenn became the odds-on favorite to win the job. But a secret “peer vote” taken among the astronauts ended his chances.
Without selecting themselves, each was asked to rank their preference for the first ride. Not long after the votes were tallied Administrator Glennan informed the group that Shepard would make the first trip. Glenn believed that it was merely a popularity contest, which he lost largely by admonishing the others “to keep their pants zipped and their wicks dry.” He expressed his anger in a letter to the head of NASA’s Space Task Group—after all, the letters he wrote asking to serve in Korea had worked—but nothing came of it. Upon his return to Arlington, Glenn moped around the house for weeks. Tom Miller, his friend, fellow Marine pilot, and now his next-door neighbor, confronted Glenn, saying “You’re making everybody miserable because your damn pride is so high.”
“We’re just afraid,” Glenn had said at the start of the Mercury training, “that all America is interested in is firsts. That’s the way Americans work and that’s the way they play. They want to be ‘first’ in sales, ‘first’ in the major leagues, ‘first’ in every endeavor.”
Hampered all year by the pinched nerve in his neck, Ted Williams slogged through a miserable baseball season in 1959. Five weeks into his return to the starting lineup he was hitting .173 with just two home runs and had already been benched by Red Sox manager Pinky Higgins.
“I know a lot of people are saying the old guy is washed up, but it just isn’t true,” he insisted in late June.
By season’s end, Williams gave little indication otherwise. In 103 games, he had hit just ten home runs and batted .254, nearly a full one hundred points below his career average. Still, he signed a contract the following January to return for one more year.
Opening Day for the Red Sox was at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his final year as commander in chief, threw out the game’s ceremonial first pitch. In the top of the second inning, Williams walked to the plate for his first at-bat of the season. Seated next to his boss, Vice President Richard M. Nixon told Eisenhower, “Ted Williams is coming up this inning and it will probably be his last season. I’d like to see him get off to a good start. Let’s root for him to get a home run.” On cue, Williams smashed a Camilo Pascual pitch so high and so far over the 31-foot-tall, 420-foot deep center field wall that it was called “one of the longest home runs ever witnessed in Washington.”
Nixon—one week after an unopposed victory in the Illinois Republican presidential primary—was so impressed that he wrote Williams a letter that evening.
“While both the President and I were rooting for the Washington Senators today, I can assure you that no one could have gotten a bigger charge out of your tape measure homer than we did,” the letter read. “After all, we ‘old men’ (in our forties that is) have to stand together.”
At forty-seven, the vice president was hardly an old man, especially among his colleagues: the United States Senate over which he presided included seven members at least seventy-five years old. At forty-one, however, Ted Williams was the oldest player in Major League Baseball. And in the chilly East Coast April weather he struggled to play consecutive games without a day off. On the afternoon following his Opening Day home run in Washington, Williams smashed another. The blast down the right field line, fittingly at Yankee Stadium, was the 494th of his career, and with it he surpassed Lou Gehrig for fourth on the all-time list. But while rounding second base, he pulled the calf muscle in his left leg, relegating him to pinch-hitting duties for the next several weeks.
Back in D.C. for a series in late April, Williams remained on the bench for the duration of a Saturday afternoon victory over the Senators. The Red Sox’ third win in four days made for a cheerful scene beneath Griffith Stadium, perfect for Williams to introduce an old friend to his teammates.
John Glenn, up from Hampton, Virginia, that weekend to visit his wife and children in Arlington, was noticeably thinner than Williams remembered.
“He looked like he had malnutrition, but he must have been running those five miles every day,” he said. “He didn’t do all that running in Korea.”
Williams proudly paraded his slender friend around the clubhouse, telling teammates and sportswriters, “I don’t know what they’re going to have this man do, but if it can be done he’ll do it.”
“John came in the clubhouse after the game,” recalled Red Sox utility infielder Don Gile. “The Washington clubhouse was set up in cubicles. I was in the same one that Ted was in. Ted told us that [he and] Glenn had flown together, and Glenn was telling us about his current space training. We were all looking at each other like, ‘What is he talking about?’”
Glenn even came with an enticing invitation for his friend.
“He was going through the space program, the weightless chambers, the centrifuges, and all the rest, and I was still in baseball,” Williams said nearly forty years later. “He said ‘I wanna take you down there and maybe show you what we’re doing.’ Well I never did get a chance to go down there.”
The nagging injury that prevented John Glenn from actually seeing his friend swing the bat during that visit to Griffith Stadium took weeks to improve. Williams remained unable to do anything more than pinch-hit. And once his calf did heal—in the middle of a ten-game Boston losing streak—he caught a virus and laryngitis, which kept him bedridden in hotels during a lengthy road trip. Pressed for comment, team trainer Jack Fadden added insult to injury, saying “at his age you more or less have to figure that he will be subject to frequent injury or illness if he tries to play regularly.”
Finally, by early June he had returned to the starting lineup, just in time to catch fire by hitting twelve home runs over the next month. And on a cool night at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, Williams smacked a high, outside slider from rookie right-hander Wynn Hawkins over the left-center field wall. With the home run Williams joined Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, and Mel Ott as the only members of the exclusive “500 Home Run Club.”
Talking to the press the next afternoon, Williams announced that season would be his last.
“My mind is made up in regards to next year,” he said. “And you know what it is. The only reason I’m playing this year is because I wanted to vindicate myself and I also wanted those 500 home runs.”
A handful of times since his recall to the Marine Corps in 1952 Williams had declared that season to mark the end of his playing career. Despite five months at war in Korea, severe viruses and injuries, and several ugly feuds with both fans and the press, he had always changed his mind. But this time, he meant it. Late in the season, the Red Sox even confirmed Williams’s retirement plans with a public statement from team owner Tom Yawkey.
Content to close out his career at Fenway Park with a mid-week series against Baltimore, rather than during a season-ending weekend series in New York, Williams played his last game on a rainy late September day. After a walk his first time up, he just missed home runs in the third and fifth innings.
“I hit two balls that I think some days would have gone out for sure, but this day they didn’t, caught ’em up against the fence,” he recalled. “But the last time up, I got the count 2−0 on [Jack] Fisher. And I missed a ball, I don’t know yet how I missed that ball, and I know he thought he threw it by me. . . . I could just sense he said, ‘Gee, give me that ball, throw another one by him.’ And I could just see all of that developing in his own mind.
“And sure enough he come back with the same pitch and I hit it good and it went for a home run, which is kind of a storybook finish.”
While Williams rounded the bases for the final time, appreciative, wistful Boston fans chanted his name. After touching home plate, he trotted back to the dugout. Teammates urged him to acknowledge the crowd.
“I had a really warm feeling,” he said later, “but it just wouldn’t have been me.”
Williams stayed true to his word about retirement that winter, although he did return to the Red Sox as a spring training instructor. That March in Arizona, he mentored his assumed replacement in left field, a twenty-one-year-old rookie from Long Island, New York, named Carl Yastrzemski. But on Opening Day 1961 Williams was in Fort Myers, Florida, not Fenway Park, for Boston’s afternoon tilt with the Kansas City A’s. In December he had signed a five-year deal worth six figures annually to endorse and field test sporting equipment for Sears, Roebuck and Co. He also promoted Sears, Roebuck−sponsored events such as a spring Ted Williams Florida Fishing Tournament, which awarded $29,000 in cash and merchandise. At each of the event’s eighteen promotional stops across the state, reporters and fans of all ages still crowded around the retired star.
“I felt all through spring training, that I had made the right decision. I had reached the end of the line and knew it,” he said while the Red Sox lost their first game to Kansas City. “Still, not being there on opening day hit me more than I thought it would.”
Williams’s business deal fit conveniently with his personal life. Sears, Roebuck’s national headquarters were in Chicago, also home to Williams’s new love interest, Lee Howard. Tall, blond, and a fashion model, Howard had changed her last name from Houda while pursuing a movie career years earlier. She lived in the Riverside suburbs with her parents and two teenage children. Williams had met the thirty-four-year-old divorcee in Florida during the winter of 1959. He even phoned Howard from the Red Sox clubhouse right after his career-punctuating home run. A year later, they were married by a justice of the peace at the district courthouse in East Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Essentially paid to pursue his hobbies on Sears, Roebuck’s dime, Williams began a life of leisure upon return from his honeymoon in the fall of 1961. Over the next several months, he hunted for deer in Maine, played thirty-six holes at Winged Foot Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, caught a 557-pound bluefin tuna during a tournament in Galilee, Rhode Island, and filmed the twenty-minute instructional “Batting with Ted Williams,” available at all Sears, Roebuck stores. And for a fourth consecutive summer he made occasional cameos at the annual Ted Williams Camp held on 180 rural acres in Lakeville, Massachusetts. In front of locals and campers aged eight to nineteen, Williams regularly put on a show by crushing deflated softballs over the fence.
A year into his tenure with the thriving retail chain, Williams was appointed to Sears, Roebuck’s newly formed advisory committee. A collection of prominent “sportsmen,” the committee included Illinois football hero Buddy Young, Masters and PGA champion Doug Ford, NBA all-star Jack Twyman, and legendary mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary. Twice a year the twelve committee members met in Chicago to make recommendations to Sears, Roebuck board members and manufacturers. As the resident expert for three sports (baseball, hunting, and fishing) Williams was named chairman.
“He tested them too,” Twyman recalled. “He’d make the buyers cry. They’d have some new product and he’d say, ‘This is just a piece of crap.’”
On Tuesday, February 20, 1962, Williams was in Chicago for three days of meetings with Sears, Roebuck executives. But he spent that morning at the home of his in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Houda. Along with millions of Americans watching on television, Williams sat in awe of Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn.
