Those were heady days. For a moment in the early 1960s, Al Shepard was probably the most famous American on Earth. All of us in Mercury were racing against the Soviets, but Al was determined to be the head of the pack. His competitive nature had already gotten him places–he’d graduated from the Naval Academy and served in World War II before becoming a test pilot at the elite Patuxent River airbase in Maryland. He desperately wanted to be the first man in space. When he heard that the Soviets had successfully sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit, he said all sorts of things you couldn’t print.
On May 5, 1961, Al made his historic first flight. Following an old flight-test custom, Wally Schirra and I were supposed to follow the rocket in chase airplanes, F-102s. We listened to the countdown over the radio, but we couldn’t see the liftoff because we had to stay a certain distance away. With the whole country looking on, Al shot straight up into space and just left us all behind. Wally and I never saw a thing. When he splashed down and came home, I don’t think Al–or any of us–quite expected the reaction the flight prompted in the American public. It was just overwhelming: the trip to the White House, the ticker tape parade in New York. Al had never much liked the press, but now every camera in the country seemed to be pointed right at him.
Years later, when Tom Wolfe published “The Right Stuff,” Al wasn’t too happy about it. He didn’t like the book much–the way Wolfe took readers inside the early days of Mercury, describing the hot rodding and the skirt-chasing. But Wolfe’s characterization of Al was actually pretty accurate. He called him both “Smilin’ Al” and “the Icy Commander.” Smilin’ Al was the hail-fellow-well-met guy, the man who would later smuggle a 6-iron onto Apollo 14 in 1971 and become the first man to play golf in space. The Icy Commander was a no-nonsense, aloof naval officer–the same Al who would go on to be a supremely successful businessman. (In fact, Al was pretty proud of his reputation for aloofness. I even remember him calling himself the Icy Commander on a few occasions.)
Al would tell anyone who asked that he did what it took to get a job done. When he lived in Virginia Beach in the early days of the program, for example, he was always getting caught speeding in that Corvette of his. Finally, the police were going to yank his driver’s license. So Al took the car to a mechanic and had him overinflate the tires and then tell the police that the speedometer had been reading too low as a result. And he kept his license. In the Mercury program he was the same way. He did what he had to do to get ahead. But what helped Alan Shepard helped the space program, and what helped the space program helped America.
When I heard Al had died of leukemia last week at the age of 74, I turned on the TV and saw a clip of him talking about what he saw in space, both on his first flight and later, when he went to the moon. He talked about how moving it was to look down on the Earth and realize that the differences between people were really insignificant, and how fragile our planet seemed from that distance. The Al I had known wasn’t known for philosophizing. I’d never realized how he felt. It was nice to learn that, like me, he had been profoundly affected by his time in space: the Icy Commander, it turns out, wasn’t so icy after all.
