1

1926

First, inevitably, the idea, the fantasy, the fairy tale. Then, scientific calculation.
—Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

The year of Virgil Ivan Grissom’s birth would be a watershed in the history of rocketry. The future astronaut was born on April 3, 1926. Eighteen days earlier, some eight hundred miles to the northeast at Auburn, Massachusetts, the original American rocket scientist, Robert Hutchings Goddard, had successfully launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket. The brief flight was eventually considered “as significant to history as that of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk” twenty-three years earlier.¹ Grissom’s birth and Goddard’s rocket illustrated how the arc of technological progress had coincided perfectly with the arrival of a generation of men who would become humankind’s first space travelers.

Indeed, the year of one’s birth seems to have played a critical role in determining the pecking order that emerged some thirty years later among the future American astronauts. Birth dates and fate would determine who played what role in the coming Cold War drama that was the race to the moon.

Michael Collins, a member of the first lunar landing crew, noted that he and crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were all born in 1930. “How lucky can you get?” Collins remarked. “We just happened to come along at the right time.”²

Four years earlier, Goddard pierced the sky with his primitive rocket. The 11.3-foot-tall collection of steel tubes and propellant weighed just over ten pounds. It rose that momentous day 41 feet above his aunt’s farm, covering a horizontal distance of about 184 feet before landing in his Aunt Effie’s cabbage patch. The flight lasted 2.5 seconds. Maximum velocity was sixty miles per hour.3

Anticipating the names bestowed on later rockets, Goddard called his prototype “Nell.”⁴

Less than a month later, the first son of Dennis David Grissom, a signalman for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and Cecile King Grissom entered the world on the evening of April 3. The boy was born at about 8 p.m. in the Grissom’s Sixth Street home in the southern Indiana town of Mitchell.

The Grissom’s first child, a daughter named Lena, was either stillborn (according to an early chronicler of the family’s history) or died shortly after her premature birth in March 1925. Hence, the expecting mother was “excessively anxious” about her second pregnancy.⁵ Virgil Ivan was small but arrived healthy. A daughter and two more sons would follow over the next seven years, quickly filling up the modest, white wood-frame house the Grissoms moved into a year after Virgil’s birth.

Lowell Grissom, the youngest of Virgil’s three siblings, has no idea why Dennis and Cecile picked such an unusual name for their first son. (Lowell believes he was named for Lowell Thomas, the popular American newsman, commentator, and adventurer from neighboring Ohio.) The choice of “Ivan” as a middle name was even more curious and would prove particularly vexing for Virgil in the chilliest days of the Cold War when he would emerge on the world stage as a key protagonist.

What mattered more than the boy’s name, of course, was the time and place of his birth. Never was this fact more relevant than the coming age of aviation and space exploration.

That same year, 1926, toiling in isolation a world away, the legendary rocket theorist Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was completing his treatise, Plan of Space Exploration. Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and the Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist Hermann Oberth would emerge as three of the greatest rocketeers of the age, fleshing out the theoretical underpinnings of spaceflight.

Goddard too continued to work mostly in isolation. Beyond some financial backing from the Smithsonian Institution, the work of the mythic Clark University physicist who earned 214 patents went largely unnoticed in the United States. Goddard later managed to attract the attention of Charles Lindbergh, who helped arrange the financial support of millionaire financier Harvey Guggenheim. That backing allowed Goddard to move to the wide-open spaces of New Mexico to continue his research in secrecy. His work would eventually be put to use during World War II by German rocketeers led by a team that included the young Wernher von Braun. They would build the Nazi’s V-2 rocket used against civilians in England and continental Europe.

Near Roswell, New Mexico, Goddard’s path crossed with a local lad who walked along a white gravel road past the rocket scientist’s encampment each day on his way to school. “Though I have no recollections of rockets flaring into the night skies or the ignition of exotic new fuels, there were stories that circulated among the natives of Roswell—stories of fire and brimstone igniting the heavens, strange machinery, and a quiet, reclusive mind assembling it all,” the schoolboy later recalled. “This was a man who would loom large in my imagination, a man of the proportions of my grandfather. He was mythic, and I now see how his life ran so counter to the setting he must have found himself in. Here was a man of science, a man from that ungodly world beyond the perimeter of Roswell. By any standard, Robert Goddard was part of the scientific lore of the times.”6

That New Mexico schoolboy was Edgar Dean Mitchell, who, like Virgil Grissom, would grow up to become a top military test pilot. Mitchell would go on to earn a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With impeccable credentials, he was eventually selected as an astronaut, becoming the sixth human to walk on the moon.⁷

The US Army’s Redstone booster, a modified version of the V-2 rocket von Braun and his men built for Hitler and based on Goddard’s work, would eventually launch two American astronauts into space. One was Virgil Grissom.

The eldest Grissom son arrived at the dawn of the Rocket Age. Just as significant, Virgil’s birthplace teemed with machinery, manufacturing, and tinkering. Mitchell was a rural town seemingly situated in the middle of nowhere. There was no significant river or body of water nearby. But it was a railroad junction, a fact that in the early twentieth century often determined whether a small American town survived and thrived or died on the vine. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Dennis Grissom’s employer for forty-seven years, ran East-West through Mitchell. The Chicago, Indianapolis, and Louisville Railroad, affectionately known in the Hoosier State as the “Monon,” ran North-South.

The freight trains that passed one block from the Grissom’s first home on Sixth Street were a constant part of the town’s background noise, along with the cicadas of the steaming summer months. The train whistles were among the first mechanical sounds young Virgil Grissom heard. “Watch out for the trains, [and] don’t play on the tracks!” Cecile warned her son when he was old enough to explore the neighborhood.8

The family had moved to a larger house on Baker Street when Virgil was a year old and Cecile was pregnant with her second child. As his family grew, filling the small wood-framed house, Dennis Grissom somehow managed to hang on to his twenty-four dollar a week job with the B&O as the Great Depression deepened. By today’s standards, the Grissom home would have seemed cramped. During the Depression, it was cozy.

Virgil would grow up among machines and men who fixed them when they broke down. Even today, the neighborhoods of Mitchell are dotted with makeshift repair shops. The boy quickly learned that he would first have to earn the money for a bicycle, and then would have to make his own repairs.⁹ Like several of his future astronaut colleagues, Virgil also would eventually earn the money required to take his first airplane ride.

But first he had to be raised and educated while finding his place as the eldest son of a growing family in a small, isolated but relatively prosperous town that was equal parts midwestern and southern. The citizens of Mitchell were described by a local historian as “not overly ambitious, but they do show vitality.”¹⁰ From an early age, it was clear Virgil was different: he exhibited both ambition and vitality. He would not be content with a quiet, safe, nine-to-five existence. There was too much to accomplish. The train whistles reminded him there was a larger world beyond State Route 37, the main road through town, one that a boy born in the middle of a vast continent would one day view from the high ground of space.

A description of the first human in space also could have been applied to Virgil Grissom. “Was he special?” remembered Yuri Gagarin’s foreman at the Lyubertsy Steel Plant in Moscow, the future cosmonaut’s first apprenticeship. “No, but he was hard-working.”11

Mitchell, seventy or so miles west and north of the mighty Ohio River, also was nothing special. But its citizens were mostly industrious, thrifty, self-reliant, and insular.¹² Mitchell also was nearly flat—a “rolling plateau,” an ancient seabed. Hence, it was a perfect location for a railroad junction.

The town was laid out in 1853 and surveyed by Ormsby McKnight Mitchel, a West Point graduate, University of Cincinnati professor, and Union Army major general. The town of Mitchell (the second “L” was added later) was incorporated in 1864.

Dennis David Grissom was born in Martin County, just southwest of Mitchell, on October 14, 1903, the son of John Wesley and Melissa Stroud Grissom. The Grissom men were all of Hoosier stock. John Wesley was born in Martin in 1877. Virgil’s great-grandfather, Thomas Elsworth Grissom, whose last name may have been changed from “Grisham,” according to some genealogical records, was born in Orange around 1853. The Grissom family name may also have been derived from “Gresham,” a surname associated with Virgil’s great-great grandfather, John, a North Carolinian born in 1824. John eventually made his way over the Appalachians, across the Ohio River, and married Ruth Hopper of Orange in 1845.

Indeed, many of the first settlers of the southern part of the Indiana Territory arrived around 1815 from North Carolina and Virginia. Others, like the Lincolns of Rockingham County, Virginia, chose to settle first in Kentucky. There, the future sixteenth president of the United States was born in a log cabin at Sinking Springs Farm, near the present-day Hodgenville, on February 12, 1809. Title disputes and, legend has it, abhorrence of slavery prompted Thomas Lincoln to move his family in 1816 to the wilderness of Spencer County, Indiana. It was at Pigeon Creek Farm that Abe Lincoln learned to wield an ax and split rails.

By the time of the western migration, the legendary Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his failed tribal confederacy had been subdued after opposing the United States during the War of 1812. The territory appropriately christened “Indiana” in 1800 was also home to the Chippewa, Delaware, Erie, Huron, Iroquois, Kickapoo, Mahican, Miami, Mohegan, Nanticoke, and Potawatomie tribes. Indiana, or “land of Indians,” entered the union on December 11, 1816, as the nineteenth state in the Union.13

Cecile King was nearly two years older than her husband, who had moved to Mitchell in 1924. Dennis and Cecile were married there in March of that year. Cecile’s parents, Charles Asbury “Charlie” King and Sarah Alice “Sally” Beavers were still alive when the Grissom children were born; Sally died in 1932 at the age of fifty-four.

Like the Grissoms, the King family’s roots were in North Carolina: Cecile’s great-grandfather William A. “Billy” King, born in 1824, apparently moved his family west and died in Lawrence County, Indiana, in 1873. His son, John Wesley King, married Margaret Elizabeth “Betty” Terrell in Mitchell in 1867. Their son, “Charlie” King, Cecile’s father, was born in November 1871.¹⁴

After moving to Mitchell, Virgil’s father went to work as a signalman for the B&O Railroad, eventually providing his new wife with a modest but comfortable single-story home within easy walking distance of the town’s schools. Virgil’s sister Wilma was born in 1927, followed by Norman in 1930 and Lowell, the youngest, in 1934.

In the forty years, nine months, and twenty-four days of Virgil Grissom’s life, he was to play a central role in some of the greatest technological advances in human history. All this seemed improbable when the oldest son of a railroad signalman was born in an obscure southern Indiana town a few years before the Great Depression.

The future Gus Grissom would later describe his hometown as “small and unhurried.”¹⁵ It remains so today. Growing up in Mitchell, he also recalled, one was likely to encounter characters like Penrod Schofield and Sam Williams, the rascals immortalized in the Indiana author Booth Tarkington’s 1916 bestseller, Penrod and Sam. Virgil undoubtedly read Tarkington’s popular children’s book and saw in himself the mischievous, restless Penrod. Grissom and his future high school friend Bill Head, paired together in school by the sheer coincidence of alphabetical order, would become Mitchell’s version of Penrod and Sam. Virgil represented the former, viewing school as “merely a state of confinement” and, upon seeing his first brass band, “anxious to Make a Noise in the World.”¹⁶

Mitchell was a town of tinkerers. If you needed a mechanical part, you made it yourself. If farm machinery broke down, you fixed it yourself. If you yearned for the fastest hot rod, you tore down the engine and put it back together. If there were parts left over, you did it again.

Mitchell, Bedford, and the university town of Bloomington up the road on Route 37 were situated over one of the richest deposits of limestone bedrock on the planet. By the early 1900s, thousands of big-city workers—Italians, Germans, and Scandinavians—flocked to the region to labor in the limestone quarries. Two-thirds of the nation’s building limestone came from Lawrence and Monroe counties. The choicest sections were shipped east to decorate the facades of skyscrapers and government buildings. The inferior grades were used for cement or crushed into gravel.

The Lehigh Portland Cement Company opened a plant in Mitchell in 1902, initially covering the town in a cloud of dust.17 Automation after World War II eliminated much of the dust but also trimmed the payroll. When flying jet fighters out of Dayton, Ohio, as an Air Force test pilot, the future Gus Grissom would scan the Indiana skies for the cement plant’s dust cloud before buzzing his hometown.¹⁸

Shortly before Virgil’s birth, another manufacturer arrived in Mitchell—the Carpenter Body Works. Its founder, Ralph Carpenter, had operated a blacksmith shop on the same street Virgil was born. In 1922, he opened a factory to build buses for the local school district. Bare chassis were delivered to the factory where workers installed yellow school bus bodies.

After his discharge from the Army Air Corps in 1945, Grissom would spend several months installing doors on busses while contemplating his future.

The self-reliant men and boys of Mitchell had grease under their fingernails and calluses on their hands. When their noses weren’t under the hood or repairing farm equipment, a few were in the air gazing at the occasional flying machines seen in those parts in the early 1930s. The Grissom family radio and the Indianapolis Star brought news of great aviation exploits, most notably Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight a year after Virgil was born.

The eldest Grissom son arrived in an America mad for aviators and their flying exploits. Airplanes had become a way to break the bonds of Earth and see the world from an entirely new perspective. Then there were the Buck Rogers comic strips, launched in 1929, and, debuting in 1932, the radio show. Cartoonist Dick Calkins fired the imagination of a generation of American boys with lines like this from the Buck Rogers strips: “That cosmo-magnetic hurricane hurled us down the curvature of space—into a different universe!”19

Like other boys his age, Virgil was fascinated with the tools of war: airplanes, guns, tanks. Later, Grissom the astronaut would profess indifference toward futuristic space fantasies. “I had never been much of a science-fiction or Buck Rogers fan. I was more interested in what was going on right now than in the centuries to come.”²⁰

A contemporary of Grissom growing up in rural Virginia, the future newspaper columnist and wit Russell Baker, summed up the fantasies of many of America’s boys in the early days of aviation: “I had been in love with the romance of flying since first hearing as a small boy about Charles A. Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, Lucky Lindy, who’d flown all the way to France by the seat of his pants. The pinups over my bed had been Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, Wrong-Way Corrigan, Roscoe Turner, Wiley Post, and Amelia Earhart.”

After much struggle, Baker would eventually become a Navy flyer. Like Virgil Grissom, he would be too late to get into World War II. “In my fantasies I flew over the trenches on the dawn patrol, white scarf streaming behind me in the wind as I adjusted my goggles and maneuvered the Fokker of Baron [Manfred] von Richthofen [the German World War I ace, also known as the “Red Baron”] into my gun sights,” recalled Baker.²¹

Nearly all the future astronauts built model airplanes or pinned pictures of Rickenbacker, Post, and Earhart on their bedroom walls. Virgil too built balsa wood models and suspended them to the ceiling in one of the rooms he shared with his siblings. There was a need to give form and substance to dreams of flight, to be going somewhere, anywhere.

Upon entering the boyhood home of Virgil Grissom at 715 West Grissom Avenue, one immediately understands that the future astronaut had no problem with cramped spaces. The modest, one-story house included five rooms, a covered front porch, a small back entrance, an attic, and little else. The house was situated on a deep lot, allowing for a family garden the Grissom children tended. Cecile canned the produce for use during the winter. At one time, six Grissoms lived in these five rooms: a parlor/living room, a decent-size kitchen, and three adjacent bedrooms. With each new child, Virgil moved to another bed, eventually sleeping on the living room couch.

By Depression standards, however, the home was comfortable and close to everything in Mitchell, a primarily Protestant town of about three thousand souls roughly midway between Indianapolis and Louisville, Kentucky. Up Route 37 about thirty miles, past the limestone quarries of Bedford, is the college town of Bloomington. (Native son and Indiana University law school graduate Hoagy Carmichael, having quickly tired of the law, was writing the music for Stardust, one of the great popular tunes of the twentieth century, at the Book Nook on South Indiana Avenue in Bloomington the year after Virgil was born.)

In his spare time, Dennis worked on home improvements, upgrading Cecile’s kitchen with cupboards he built himself. His eldest son certainly observed this early example of sweat equity and may have pitched in himself to help with the project.

Virgil entered Riley School in 1933, at that time Mitchell’s main elementary school, just a block or so from the Grissom homestead. The school was presumably named for the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley, the “Children’s Poet” famous for appealing to young readers. Whether Virgil gave much thought to Riley’s sentimental poems is unknown. He was, it turned out, an unremarkable student with an aptitude for numbers. Mrs. Myrtle McKeever, Virgil’s first grade teacher, thought him conscientious, as was expected by his parents. He was neat, his ears were clean, and by all appearances he was an earnest lad.22 Virgil read books but remained more interested in numbers, popular science, and machines than in English grammar or rustic poetry.

After Virgil’s death, the local librarian remembered that the boy was his father’s son in appearance and demeanor. “They were both alike,” Mrs. Fiscus, the Mitchell librarian, said of Dennis and his eldest son. “They both had a sparkle about their personalities.”²³

Grissom was intelligent; his IQ was said to have been 145. But IQ was only one measure of intelligence. Virgil also possessed a native intelligence that was focused primarily on problem solving and to a lesser extent on abstractions. His elementary school report cards and grades in high school and college reflected the way his brain was wired. He was more interested in acquiring practical knowledge than boosting his grade point average. He took what he needed and discarded the rest. What no metric could quantify was his restless energy and determination to succeed at something. The question was, What?

Grissom’s early interest in flight showed that he could focus intensely on something he was passionate about, and then channel his energies and intelligence to achieve the goal of becoming a flyer. It was in instances like this that the reserved boy who was small for his age would emerge from his shell and display a measure of self-assurance and confidence. For example, the conventional wisdom holds that the pugnacious Grissom harbored a sense of inferiority about his small stature—five feet, seven inches when fully grown. He would nevertheless turn his compact body into an asset when he became a pilot and astronaut. Indeed, his size would aid him as a flyer and eventually help save his life at the end of his first space flight. Similarly, the British test pilot Eric Brown, who also stood five-foot-seven, claimed he would have lost his legs on at least three occasions had he not been able to curl them beneath his seat.24

While Virgil was described by his earliest biographer as a “mild introvert”²⁵—Lowell Grissom considered his older brother a “mild extrovert”²⁶—Virgil also was a “joiner” in every sense of the word: he made things, carefully assembling the pieces of a model airplane. He also joined organizations, beginning with the Riley Elementary Safety Patrol and Boy Scout Troop 46, where he reached the level of “star scout” and leader of the troop’s Honor Guard.

A 1938 photo of the Riley School Safety Patrol shows an earnest group of crossing guards in spotless white rain gear under the customary guard’s sash and belt. Standing at attention in the center of the front row is a stern-looking twelve-year-old boy holding the flag used to signal oncoming traffic or pedestrians to halt. Virgil and his classmates took their duties seriously.

Later, the tendency toward fellowship expressed itself by enlisting in the Army Air Corps, joining the Hi-Twelve, a student branch of the Masons, reenlisting in the US Air Force, and eventually joining Masonic Lodge No. 228 in Mitchell. There, he rose to the rank of Master Mason. According to the frequently inscrutable code of Free Masonry, the Master Mason “has symbolically, if not actually, balanced his inner natures and has shaped them into the proper relationship with the higher, more spiritual parts of himself. His physical nature has been purified and developed to a high degree. He has developed stability and a sure footing. His mental faculties have sharpened and his horizons have been expanded.”27

Whether the Master Mason Grissom actually believed these words is unknown. But his actions from an early age tended to support the view that he would attempt to live his life in accordance with the ideals expressed by the Masons. His faculties were indeed “sharpened” far beyond what any of his teachers expected and his horizons surely would be “expanded” far beyond Mitchell, Indiana.

A central reason was flight. As daring aviators followed Lindbergh’s lead in the 1930s, breaking one distance record after another, the serious business of model-airplane building began in earnest across the country. Virgil was an avid and meticulous model builder, suspending the balsa woods airplanes from ceilings. It was the making that interested him, at least initially, not the starry-eyed dream of flight.

But model airplanes and the supplies needed to make them did not grow on trees. Nor did the schoolbooks that Virgil was expected to help pay for. When old enough, the eldest son rose at 4 a.m. to deliver the morning newspaper, the big-city Indianapolis Star. There were the usual hardships of slogging through high drifts in winter along with the mundane tasks associated with the paper route. Among them was knocking on doors on Saturdays collecting subscription fees from annoyed customers who were more often than not falling behind on their payments. Virgil was on the hook for all those newspapers—the Sunday edition cost twice as much—until he could persuade his customers to pay up. Then there were the dogs that snarled at mailmen, paperboys, and traveling salesman. Virgil maintained his bicycle himself so he could speed up deliveries and outrace the howling neighborhood hounds.

Two determined brothers from Dayton, Ohio, invented the world’s first powered flying machine.28 One of the coincidences in the early days of the American space program was the fact that many of the astronauts either grew up in the Midwest or attended an engineering school in the Big Ten conference. Indeed, the state of Indiana alone has so far produced about a dozen astronauts.

Raised in rural Michigan, the childhood of another astronaut was likely similar to Grissom’s. “As a little kid, I had a lot of freedom,” recalled Al Worden, who circled the moon on Apollo 15, becoming the first human to climb out of a spacecraft and float in cislunar space—the void between the earth and the moon. Born in 1932 in Jackson, Michigan, Worden remembered wandering along the railroad tracks to watch the steam engines go by. “I did my own thing, followed my own interests, and didn’t rely on others,” Worden wrote of his idyllic youth. “From an early age, I could take care of myself, and I knew it.”²⁹

In those Depression Era days, country boys and those who lived in small towns like Mitchell wandered the fields and woods alone, making up their own games and adventures. They were accustomed to, even welcomed, being on their own. They were free, and the life of the mind was unleashed. The result for boys like Al Worden and Virgil Grissom was self-reliance.