Chapter One
All-American Boy

You want to go up, Bud?” Herschel Glenn asked his eight-year-old son. He pointed to a small plane parked out on a grassy field. Its pilot leaned casually against a wing, waiting for passengers.

Young John—his father called him Bud—couldn’t believe his luck. He was going to get a chance to fly! In 1929, an airplane was still a strange and marvelous sight. Just two years earlier, fellow Ohio native Charles Lindbergh had thrilled the world by making the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. He came back to brass bands and ticker tape parades, an instant hero. Soon afterwards John had spotted a silver plane far overhead, winging its way through the soft summer sky, and imagined it was Lindbergh. That plane was the most beautiful thing John had ever seen.

The one he was about to ride in now was a biplane. It had two wings, one stacked on top of the other, and two cockpits. The pilot helped John and his father into the rear seat. Then he climbed into the front and started the engine. The plane started off, bumping over the ground. It picked up speed—and rose into the air.

So this was flying! John peered over the edge of the plane and saw the Ohio countryside spread out beneath him. White farmhouses, red barns, and tiny black-and-white cows dotted the patchwork fields. The wind whistling past his head filled him with energy and excitement. He wanted to stay up in the sky forever! But after just a few more loops, the ride was over.

For John, that first flight was the beginning of a lifelong dream. He knew then that he would do anything to become a pilot. He would just have to wait for the right opportunity to come along.

John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born on July 18, 1921. His hometown of New Concord, Ohio, was a small place with only a thousand people and no traffic lights. Its busy downtown boasted a firehouse, a bank, two Presbyterian churches, six grocery stores, two ice cream parlors, two hardware stores, and a number of other businesses. John’s father Herschel owned a plumbing business on Main Street, where his mother Clara helped out. When little Bud was a toddler, he would sit on the floor of the store and play by the hour with the copper plumbing pipes. To take a nap, he curled up in a porcelain tub.

Once a month Bud’s parents got together with four other couples for a potluck supper. When he was two or three, they put him into a playpen with a dark-haired little girl just a year older. Her name was Annie Castor, and the two children became good friends. At age five, Bud welcomed a little girl into his own family, an adopted daughter the Glenns named Jean.

Later Glenn would remember his childhood as just about perfect. New Concord was heaven for a small boy, with woods to explore and creeks to fish in. With the rest of his friends, red-haired, freckle-faced Bud went ice-skating in the winter and on Sunday school picnics and hayrides in the summer.

Every patriotic holiday, the town would get together to celebrate America. On the Fourth of July, there would be ice cream and lemonade, firecrackers and Roman candles lighting up the evening sky. On Armistice Day, veterans of the First World War and the Spanish American War and even a few old soldiers from the Civil War paraded down Main Street, cheered on by spectators waving American flags.

One Memorial Day, families visited the cemetery as usual to honor servicemen who had died for their country. Raising his trumpet to his lips, Herschel Glenn began to play “Taps,” the traditional military call that signals the end of the day and the end of life. John stood with his own trumpet in the nearby woods, hidden among the trees. As each musical phrase rang into the still air, he echoed it. Back and forth the trumpets sounded, until the last note died away. The ceremony was so moving that John felt chills down his spine.

In 1929 a shadow fell across America, stretching from New York to California and over the little town of New Concord. The shadow was called the Great Depression. That fall, the stock market plummeted, and the country was swept by financial panic. Banks went broke. People lost their jobs and their savings. Many didn’t have the money to buy food, clothes, or cars—or to get their plumbing repaired. Most of Herschel Glenn’s customers couldn’t pay him in cash. Sometimes they sent him a cut of beef or a few hams instead.

One night Bud overheard his mother and father talking in whispers. They might lose the house, his father said. If the Glenns couldn’t make their monthly loan payments, the bank would take the house back.

Lose their house? Bud felt a jolt of fear. He knew that lots of folks were becoming homeless during the Depression. He decided he would do anything he could to make sure his family kept a roof over their heads.

That meant he had to do a job he hated—gardening. The Glenns had three garden plots, and John cleared, hoed, and planted them all. In summer and fall, he picked peas, beans, tomatoes, and corn. Clara Glenn would put the fruits and vegetables up in glass jars for the winter. One year they had a bumper crop of rhubarb. Bud washed and tied it up, put it on his wagon, and hawked it around town. One bundle sold for just a few pennies. Soon, Glenn remembered, “you could smell rhubarb pie baking all over town.”

Sometimes Bud went rabbit hunting with his father and uncle. Like most boys living in rural areas, he had learned to use a shotgun early. Fresh rabbit stew was delicious.

Gardening and selling vegetables was a good way to earn money, but Bud looked for better and faster ways. Washing cars seemed like another surefire moneymaking scheme. Bud took out an ad in a local newspaper. It read: “Kars Cleaned Kwickly, Kompletely— 50 cents.” He saved all the money he earned for a bicycle. When he finally had sixteen dollars, he bought a secondhand bike with a wire basket on the handlebars. Soon young John Glenn was New Concord’s number one paperboy.

The Glenn family finances began to improve when the new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, helped get the unemployed back to work. The Federal Works Progress Administration set up a program to install a new water system in New Concord. Because he was a plumber, Herschel Glenn was made a foreman on the project. Roosevelt’s program to electrify rural America also helped Glenn’s business. Once farmers had electricity, they could pump water into their houses and barns.

Yes, the Great Depression was hard. But it also brought out the can-do spirit in everyone, even the kids. Since there was no Boy Scout troop in town, Bud and his friends decided to form their own club, which they named the Ohio Rangers. They found an old Boy Scout handbook and practiced their camping skills. Their first campsite was a circle of pup tents with a flagpole in the center. Bud and his friends slept there nearly every night the summer he was twelve, roasting hot dogs on sticks and eating baked beans in cans. Then one night, the campsite was drowned out in a raging thunderstorm.

So the Rangers built a log cabin instead. On their own, the boys chopped down small trees, cut them into logs, and notched them at the edges. Then they fitted the logs one on top of each other and packed the cracks with mud. A roof of pine branches kept out the rain and snow. The cabin was so small that only two boys could sleep in it at once—but it was a real log cabin nonetheless. It was quite an achievement for a bunch of twelve-year-olds.

When Glenn became a teenager, his love of camping gave way to a love of cars. By now his father had a second job as a Chevrolet dealer. John would spend hours working on a used car engine, taking it apart and putting it back together. His “tinkering became an education,” he remembered.

When John was fifteen, he got his first driver’s license. The next year, his father gave him his very own car, an old Chevrolet roadster with no top. John painted it bright red. He couldn’t wait to show it to Annie, the childhood playmate who had become his girlfriend. They nicknamed it the “Cruiser.” John wasn’t always content to use his shiny red car just for transportation. Once after a rainstorm, he drove the Cruiser onto the high school football field and spun “doughnuts” on the squishy ground, the mud flying up over the wheels. He managed to damage the old car badly and had to spend the next few weeks fixing it up again.

Another one of John’s favorite daredevil tricks was to “shoot” the old B&O railroad bridge. Even though it was a one-lane bridge, John would rev the engine and fly across it. Once he almost smashed into a car coming from the other direction—and never tried the stunt again.

John flew through high school, too. Always curious and super-competitive, he was an A student, president of the junior class, an actor in the school play, and a letterman in football, basketball, and tennis. “Whatever he did,” a classmate remembered, “he put his whole self into it.” John even got an A in his Boys’ Home-Making course by baking a delicious chocolate fudge cake.

As junior class president, John got to pick the theme for the annual school banquet. He knew just what theme he wanted: aviation. By 1938, the airplane industry was booming and airplanes were appearing everywhere. A Ford Trimotor plane decorated the cover of the banquet booklet. Glenn and the senior class president proudly called themselves the class “pilots.”

The title was purely wishful thinking, of course. John’s dream of flying was alive, but it still seemed out of reach. The summer after high school he and his father went to Cleveland for the National Air Races. All day John watched daredevil pilots cruise the skies, his mouth open in wonder. There was aerobatic stunt flying, parachute jumping, and sailplane gliding. The high point was a speed race—thirty laps around a ten-mile course—won by the hottest hotshot pilot of them all, Roscoe Turner. When John spied Turner in his goggles and dashing leather flight suit, he was inspired all over again. But flying lessons were really expensive. He could not imagine ever being able to pay for them.

After high school, John enrolled at nearby Muskingum College. Annie Castor was already there, studying in the music department. Annie was a smart, outgoing girl with dark brown eyes and a brilliant smile. She also had a very bad stutter. But John had known Annie so long he barely noticed the way she talked. The stutter was just a part of her.

John and Annie already knew they wanted to get married some day. Sometimes they were so impatient that they dreamed of running away to Kentucky for a quick wedding ceremony. But they knew they had to get their college degrees first. It sure seemed a long time to wait.

The world had changed by the time John and Annie entered Muskingum. Far away in Europe, a war was raging. German chancellor Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party had stormed across the continent, intent on world domination. German soldiers marched into Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, then through Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France. By fall 1940, only Britain was standing firm against the German peril. High in the skies over the British Channel, British pilots in their Spitfires were waging a heroic fight against German ME-109s.

The United States had not yet entered the war. But President Roosevelt was lending Britain whatever aid he could, short of actually sending ground troops. The U.S. military, though, was already gearing up for possible combat.

John was paying close attention to events overseas, never thinking that they might have anything to do with him—yet. Then, in January 1941, he spotted a notice on the college physics department bulletin board. The Civilian Pilot Training Program was looking for qualified students. Those accepted would learn how to fly an airplane—for free!

This was the answer to John Glenn’s prayers.