Obituaries
John Herschel Glenn
July 18, 1921 - December 8, 2016
Interment:
Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia
John Herschel Glenn Jr.
Born
July 18, 1921
Died
December 8, 2016
John Glenn
was an American aviator, engineer, astronaut, and United States Senator from Ohio. In 1962 he became the first American to orbit the earth, circling three times. Before joining NASA, he was a distinguished fighter pilot in both World War II and Korea.
John Glenn, American hero, aviation icon and former U.S. senator, dies at 95
His legend is otherworldly and now, at age 95, so is John Glenn.
An authentic hero and genuine American icon, Glenn died this afternoon surrounded by family at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus after a remarkably healthy life spent almost from the cradle with Annie, his beloved wife of 73 years, who survives.
He, along with fellow aviators Orville and Wilbur Wright and moon~walker Neil Armstrong, truly made Ohio first in flight.
John Glenn is, and always will be, Ohios ultimate hometown hero, and his passing today is an occasion for all of us to grieve, said Ohio Gov. John R. Kasich. As we bow our heads and share our grief with his beloved wife, Annie, we must also turn to the skies, to salute his remarkable journeys and his long years of service to our state and nation.
Though he soared deep into space and to the heights of Capitol Hill, his heart never strayed from his steadfast Ohio roots. Godspeed, John Glenn! Kasich said.
Glenns body will lie in state at the Ohio Statehouse for a day, and a public memorial service will be held at Ohio State Universitys Mershon Auditorium. He will be buried near Washington, D.C., at Arlington National Cemetery in a private service. Dates and times for the public events will be announced soon.
Glenn lived a Ripleys Believe It or Not! life. As a Marine Corps pilot, he broke the transcontinental flight speed record before being the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962 and, 36 years later at age 77 in 1998, becoming the oldest man in space as a member of the seven~astronaut crew of the shuttle Discovery.
He made that flight in his 24th and final year in the U.S. Senate, from whence he launched a short~lived bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. Along the way, Glenn became moderately wealthy from an early investment in Holiday Inns near Disney World and a stint as president of Royal Crown International.
In one of his last public appearances, Glenn, with Annie by his side, sat in the Port Columbus airport terminal on June 28 as officials renamed it in his honor ~~ the John Glenn Columbus International Airport.
In addition to his world~famous career in aviation and aerospace, Glenn had a relationship with that particular airport that is likely second to none. Glenn, who turned 8 the month that Port Columbus opened in July 1929, recalled asking his parents to stop at the airport so he could watch the planes come and go while he was growing up in New Concord, 70 miles east of Columbus.
Glenn recalled many teary departures and reunions at the airports original terminal on Fifth Avenue during his time as a military aviator during World War II. He and his wife Annie, who had been married 73 years, later kept a small Beechcraft plane at Lane Aviation on the airport grounds for many years, and he only gave up flying his own plane at age 90.
Privately, this man who had been honored by presidents and immortalized in history books and movies, told friends that for an aviator, seeing his name on the Columbus airport was the highest honor he could imagine.
Glenn, who lived with Annie for the past decade in a Downtown Columbus condo, dedicated his life to public service, devoting many of his later years to Ohio State University, which in 2005 converted the century~old Page Hall into the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy and the School of Public Policy and Management. It is now the John Glenn College of Public Affairs.
He was very proud of the Glenn College, said Jack Kessler, chairman of the New Albany Company, a former Ohio State trustee and longtime friend of the Glenns. Its a legacy that will carry on his mission toward good public policy.
While Glenn held office as a Democrat, he wasnt partisan, Kessler said. I never heard him say a bad thing about anyone. Some of his best friends were Republicans, and he could work with anyone.
Surrounded by dozens of students striving to earn masters and doctoral degrees from the institute, Glenn said at its dedication, If we inspire a few young people into careers of public service and politics, this will all be worth it.
Remarkably physically fit and energetic, Glenn only began encountering health problems in 2013 when he had a pacemaker implanted and missed some public appearances due to vertigo.
In 2011, he and Annie both had knee~replacement surgery, which kept them from repeating a planned road trip like the impromptu 8,400~mile journey throughout the West they took a year earlier in their Cadillac when she was 89 and he 88.
Raised in New Concord, where he and Annie both went to Muskingum College, Glenn aspired to be a medical doctor, but World War II sidetracked that ambition and launched a life of uncommon achievement and bravery. At age 8, he took his first ride in an open~cockpit airplane and ended up virtually living life in the sky, continuing to fly until 2011 when he put up for sale the twin~engine Beech Baron he had owned since 1981.
I miss it, Glenn told The Dispatch in 2012 I never got tired of flying.
Glenn flew 149 combat missions in World War II and Korea, where his wingman and eventual lifelong friend was baseball legend Ted Williams. In Korea, Glenn earned the nickname Old Magnet Ass due to his skill in landing his airplane under any condition, even after it was riddled with bullets and had blown tires.
Born not far from New Concord in Cambridge on July 18, 1921, Glenn and his parents moved about 10 miles west in 1923 to New Concord. His father was a plumber and his mother a teacher who joined a social group called the Twice 5 Club, which got together once a month. Another couple in the club had a daughter, Annie Castor, who was a year older than Glenn, and the two toddlers often shared a playpen while their parents played cards.
Their relationship evolved into a quintessential American love story, with the spark between them first igniting when they were in junior high school.
To write a story about either of them, if it doesnt include the other, then it just isnt complete, their daughter, Lyn, told The Dispatch in 2007. She and her brother, David, a California doctor, survive.
John and Annie were married on April 6, 1943, and the next January, as they held each other searching for something to say as he prepared to ship out for combat in the South Pacific, John said, Im just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum.
From that day on, she kept a gum wrapper in her purse.
To many with disabilities, Annie became a heroine in her own right as she struggled to conquer near~debilitating stuttering.
For more than half of her life, she counted on others to speak for her, publicly uncommunicative in a world that demanded more from her as her husbands fame ascended.
Through it all, John stood by Annie, who, in 1973, underwent an innovative treatment regimen that dramatically improved her speech to the extent that she was delivering speeches on behalf of her husbands 1984 presidential candidacy.
Glenn, who received his pilots license in 1941, was at home in the sky, soon evident after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and he left Muskingum College to enlist in the Marine Air Corps. In the Pacific, he flew 59 missions over the Marshall Islands.
After being stationed in China and Guam when World War II ended, Glenn was a flight instructor in Texas before being transferred to Virginia. When the Korean War broke out, Glenn applied for combat duty, and flew 90 missions. Overall, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross six times and was awarded the Air Medal with 18 clusters.
After returning from Korea, Glenn became a test pilot. He set a coast~to~coast speed record in 1957, piloting a Navy jet fighter from California to New York in 3 hours and 23 minutes. In 1959, he was selected as one of the countrys first seven astronauts, a historic group immortalized in Tom Wolfes 1979 book The Right Stuff, the basis for a movie of the same name.
The United States was enveloped in a cold war with the Soviet Union, and after a series of U.S. rockets had blown up, the American psyche was dealt a blow in 1961 when Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space and the first to orbit Earth.
The third American in space after suborbital missions by Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, Glenn finally equaled Gagarins achievement by blasting off on Feb. 20, 1962, after weather and mechanical problems caused his mission to be postponed 10 times.
Crammed into the 7~foot~wide Friendship 7 space capsule atop a 100~foot~tall Atlas rocket loaded with 250,000 pounds of explosive fuel, Glenn launched 160~miles into space, orbiting the world three times at 17,500 miles per hour.
Reflecting many years later, Glenn would say that computers were the greatest technological achievement during his life, but there were none on Friendship 7, and deep into the flight he had to take manual control of the capsule when systems malfunctioned.
As the capsule descended for a watery landing, mission control feared that its heat shield was peeling off. Well past four hours into the flight, Glenn was told of the problem and knew he could be burned alive in an instant (Annie was notified to expect the worst), but the astronaut stayed focused even as fiery pieces of his spacecraft flew by his window.
You didnt really have time to think about it, he told students at COSI Columbus 45 years later. Long before you actually got to the flight itself, you sort of made peace with mortality.
Safely splashing in the Atlantic Ocean 800 miles southeast of Bermuda, Glenns historic flight invigorated the nation and catapulted him into American lore. He addressed a joint session of Congress and rode in a convertible with Annie as 4 million people cheered him in a Manhattan ticker~tape parade.
In 2007, 45 years after his historic orbital mission, Glenn told a Columbus audience how much he longed to return to space right away, only to learn years after leaving the space program that President John F. Kennedy, fearing the worst, secretly had barred him from other flights to spare the country the potential loss of a national hero.
Glenn admitted in that speech that he was jealous in 1969 when fellow Ohioan Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon.
In 1964, only two years after his famous flight on Friendship 7, Glenn ran in the Democratic Senate primary against incumbent Sen. Stephen M. Young. But only six weeks after announcing his candidacy, Glenn dropped out of the race after damaging his inner ear in a bathroom fall, an injury that caused severe dizziness and balance problems. He recovered eight months later.
Glenn ran for the Senate again in 1970, but lost in the primary to Howard M. Metzenbaum, whom he defeated in a rematch four years later. He handily won election that fall over Cleveland Mayor Ralph Perk and won re~election by huge margins in 1980 and 1986.
After winning re~election in 1980 by the largest margin in Ohio history, Glenn ran for president in 1984. He was seen as the leading challenger to former Vice President Walter F. Mondale for the Democratic nomination, and was the candidate many considered to have the best chance of defeating President Ronald Reagan in the general election.
But plagued by a disorganized campaign and with a centrist theme ill~suited to a liberal~dominated Democratic primary process, Glenn finished back in the pack in the important Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. He borrowed $2 million to compete in the Southern primaries, but he didnt win a state and dropped out of the race.
The debt remaining from that race, which rose to more than $3 million, became a campaign issue for Glenn in subsequent Senate races and nagged him until 2006 when the Federal Elections Commission finally allowed him to close the books on it after years of chipping away.
The third term of his four in the Senate was dominated by a Senate investigation into allegations that he improperly interceded with S&L regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, who had raised or donated $242,000 to Glenns political committees. Glenn personally spent more than $500,000 to defend his honor, and the Senate Ethics Committee cleared him of wrongdoing.
I spend half a million dollars on my defense, and I wouldnt pull back a penny of it, Glenn said then. The reason I felt so strongly about it was that it involved my honor, and if I had to sell everything I had and mortgaged the house, I would have done everything I could to see the truth come out.
In his final year as a U.S. senator in 1998, Glenn was reborn as an astronaut. At 77, he orbited the Earth with six astronauts aboard shuttle Discovery, once again rendering his body and mind to the study of science, providing insight into how the oldest man ever launched into space held up. Glenn, remarkably fit, became an inspiration once again to mankind.
The events of John Glenns life, and his footprint on history, are chronicled in countless books and beyond. The Friendship 7 capsule is in the Smithsonian, his papers and memorabilia are archived at Ohio State, and his life with Annie ~ and much more ~ are displayed at the Glenn Historic Site in New Concord.
Joe Hallett is a retired reporter and senior editor of The Dispatch.
jhallett1949@gmail.com
The Following from Legacy.com
John Glenn, the NASA astronaut who was the first American to orbit the Earth and went on to serve in the U.S. Senate, has died at the age of 95, according to multiple news sources.
Born July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, Glenn was a veteran of both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as a fighter pilot in World War II and the Korean War. After Korea, he became a test pilot, and when the newly formed NASA began recruiting astronauts in 1958, Glenn applied and was selected as one of an elite corps of astronauts: the Mercury Seven, pioneers of U.S. space flight.
On Feb. 20, 1962, Glenn became the third American in space and the first to orbit the Earth when he lifted off in Friendship 7. His observations of the journey fascinated watchers at home, particularly his description of little specks, brilliant specks, floating around outside the capsule. When he returned from the five~hour spaceflight after touching down in the Atlantic Ocean, he was honored as a national hero, meeting President John F. Kennedy and riding in a New York City ticker~tape parade.
The fact that he was the first American to go into orbit was a really big accomplishment, said Dr. Michael Neufeld, senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum, where the Friendship 7 capsule is now on display. The Soviet space program had been scoring big propaganda firsts, and Glenns flight was a very important milestone on the way toward the United States beating the Soviets to the moon.
Glenn left NASA in 1964 and retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1965, aiming for a career in politics. His first campaign, running in 1964 for U.S. Senate as a Democrat to represent Ohio, was aborted early when he slipped and fell at home, sustaining a concussion. Glenn chose to withdraw from the race while he recovered. But when he ran again 10 years later, he was elected, and he went on to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate until his retirement in 1999.
Glenn sat on committees including the Committee on Governmental Affairs and the Special Committee on Aging, and he was the chief author of the Nuclear Non~Proliferation Act of 1978, which President Jimmy Carter signed into law. He sought the Democratic nomination in the 1984 presidential election, polling in second place behind eventual nominee Walter Mondale.
As Glenns political career drew to a close, he returned to space at age 77 in 1998, serving as a payload specialist on the space shuttle Discovery. Glenn lobbied hard to be included in the mission, citing the important work that could be done to research the effects of spaceflight and weightlessness on older adults.
In the years after his final space flight, Glenn founded the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy at The Ohio State University, now known as the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. He taught at the school as an adjunct professor.
Glenn was portrayed on the big screen in 1983s The Right Stuff by Ed Harris, and again in 2015 on TVs The Astronaut Wives Club by Sam Reid.
Glenns many honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Congressional Gold Medal and six Distinguished Flying Crosses. A number of schools and roads are named after him, as well as a U.S. Navy mobile landing platform ship. Before his death, he was the oldest living former U.S. senator.
John Glenn is a true American hero in every sense of the word, said author David Gerrold, one of the original Star Trek writers who crafted tales of space exploration during NASAs formative 1960s era. He inspired a generation of Americans to believe in ourselves and what we can accomplish when we commit to great challenges. What a remarkable life. Godspeed, John Glenn.
Astrophysicist Neil degrasse Tyson tweeted; Arent many Heroes left: WWII & Korean War Fighter Pilot. Marine Colonel. NASA Astronaut. Senator. Married 73 yrs. John Glenn RIP 1921~2016.
The last of Americas first astronauts has left us, but propelled by their example we know that our future here on Earth compels us to keep reaching for the heavens. On behalf of a grateful nation, Godspeed, John Glenn. â President Barack Obama
Glenn is survived by his wife, Annie, and their children, John and Carolyn.
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henry vinson
henry vinson williamson wv
henry vinson washington dc
howard stern i personally wish that he had never run, i told him that. he wants to be liked. he wants to be loved..........cnn trump white house toward obama policies
jim sciutto @jimsciutto
u. n. amb. haley hits russia hard on ukraine
president trump
don lemon
dana bash chief political correspondent @danabashcnn
trump's cabinet providing steadying hands
we do want to better our relations with russia however.....sounds like the obama administration
jim acosta @acosta