Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman

by Neal Thompson

  But, as the shortest member of the team, a full three to four inches shorter than the others, Shepard spent his first two seasons on the freshman or junior varsity squads. He didn’t yet have the strength or arm reach to make varsity. Earning a varsity letter in at least one sport was an important feat in the competitive world of the academy. Plus it was required for attendance at the senior-year Letterman’s Ball.

  In the spring of 1943 Shepard began lifting more weights, rowing harder in practice, doing more push-ups—intent on getting his varsity letter and inviting Louise to the ball.

  The team practiced, sometimes at dawn or in the afternoons after classes, under the guidance of coach Buck Walsh, a Naval Academy graduate and an Olympic gold medalist in 1920. After a half-mile walk to the boathouse, they’d climb into their boats as Walsh’s deep voice boomed through an amplified megaphone, yelling, “Pull! Pull! Pull!” When all eight men were rowing in sync, gliding across the orangey surface at sunrise, it felt as if they were actually flying above the glassy water. Rowers called such moments of synchronized rowing being “on the bubble,” and at the end of practice Walsh would bark, “Let ’er run,” and they’d lift their oars and coast to an exhausted stop.

  Shepard began to impress Walsh with his strength and determination. What he lacked in size he compensated for with strength and quickness, and Walsh developed a special affection for the short, hardworking young man he called “Shep.” Roommate Bob Williams, who rowed on the varsity squad, said Shepard initially “had no business in the varsity shell” but proved himself with “the fastest reflexes of anyone I’ve ever known.”

  Once Shepard was hospitalized a few days due to a bout of the mumps. But he wasn’t about to let an annoying childhood disease slow his fight for varsity. At 2 A.M. one morning, a nurse entered Shepard’s room to check on him. She found him on the floor, and it looked as if he was having some kind of attack. Her shrieks filled the academy’s hospital ward until she realized what he was doing: push-ups.

  “I thought it was ridiculous for him to go out for crew because he was so small,” said classmate J. T. Cockrill. “He really seemed to have more drive than normal guys.”

  During his rigorous efforts to make the varsity squad, Shepard also started to display more openly his ego and his aggressive competitiveness. A race against Columbia University was once canceled at the last minute due to high winds that had turned the Hudson River choppy. But the two teams continued to row for practice. Shepard’s boat—with just six of the eight men rowing—pulled alongside the Columbia boat, then passed it, and Shepard taunted the other team. “Look,” he said, pointing at the other rowers and laughing. “We’re rowing with six and we’re leaving them behind.” During some races he tried to psych out opponents with a Bugs Bunny impression: Nyah . . . what’s up, doc?

  “He was like a racehorse,” said teammate H. Y. Davidson. “He had that instinct to be out in front all the time.”

  The academy’s accelerated three-year schedule meant that in the spring of 1943 Shepard was both a junior and a sophomore; the next school year would be his last, which didn’t give him a whole lot of time to achieve the goals he’d set.

  At the end of the current school year—during a series of events known as June Week, which culminated with the senior class graduation—Shepard’s class would receive their senior year rings and attend their Ring Dance, after which Shepard’s class would officially become seniors. Shepard wanted Louise Brewer to be the one to share the symbolic moment with him, and in letters to her he repeated his invitation.

  Louise initially declined the invitation, but Shepard persisted. He sent a Valentine’s Day card, which she said was “mighty cute.” Louise, in turn, began signing her return letters affectionately, “Weezo” or “Weezer” and “as ever, Louise.”

  A week before the dance, Louise finally accepted. She arrived in Annapolis early in the week, and the weather was beautiful. After dropping her bags at a downtown boardinghouse that catered to visiting girlfriends, she and Alan walked around the yard, past the statues, the crypt of John Paul Jones, the graveyard of naval heroes. Later Alan took her sailing on the Severn River, and they snuggled—him shirtless and her in white shorts and her hair tied up—in the back of the yawl as he steered.

  Alan seemed intent on proving that the Christmas Dance at Principia six months earlier had been no small encounter. He was charming, funny, and attentive, and he introduced her to all of his friends. Alan had, typically, volunteered for the Ring Dance decorating committee, and a yearbook photographer caught Alan and Louise together: she standing on a crate, in saddle shoes and a knee-length white skirt, he handing her a Chinese lantern, wearing a tight T-shirt and looking up at her with a grin.

  That night when Alan escorted Louise into the beautifully decorated ballroom, all heads turned. She was stunning in a floor-length sleeveless white gown. “Spectacularly beautiful,” they said. “A real knockout.” Few who were there would forget the sight of her, or of Alan, in his dress blue jacket, white pants, and white shoes, radiating pride.

  A Navy band played moody ballads in the background, and World War II seemed far away. After a turkey dinner, Alan and Louise walked through a giant replica of a ring, dipped his own class ring into a basin containing waters from the seven seas, and kissed.

  The next day he rode with her on the train to Baltimore. She hailed a taxi to take her home to Longwood, an hour north. Their goodbye was so fast she felt the need to write him as soon as she got home. “I wish there were some way I could tell you what a really wonderful time I had,” Louise wrote on June 14, 1943, on red stationery.

  Thanks seems like such an inadequate word sometimes. Oh, I was sure I’d have a good time. But the whole weekend— rather, week—surpassed any expectation. Thanks to you. I suppose no fellow likes to be called sweet, so I won’t call you that, but that doesn’t alter the fact that you were terribly sweet to me. You know, you really don’t have to worry about me coming down again, for if the “invite” is still good, I’ll be down with bells on. Figuratively speaking, of course. It would be a little noisy the other way. Love, Louise

  On the heels of his giddy, romantic week with Louise, Shepard climbed up the gangplank of an aging World War I battleship, the USS Arkansas. For the next three weeks he’d sleep fitfully in a festeringly hot bunk, eating lousy food, with no land or women in sight and always a chore to do—his first bitter taste of the real U.S. Navy.

  Naval Academy midshipmen, in the summer before their senior year, are assigned to a “summer cruise,” which exposes them to life aboard a ship. For many it is a shocking experience that quickly dispels notions they might have courted of the romantic life of a sailor. Aboard ships like the Arkansas—nicknamed Old Arky—midshipmen often learn, with disgust, about their latent claustrophobia or seasickness.

  Because German U-boats still lurked off the Atlantic coast, Shepard and his classmates spent their nineteen-day cruise a bit closer to home: sailing up and down the Chesapeake Bay, which in August can turn as sweltering as a hot bathtub.

  At two football fields long, Old Arky easily swallowed up the thousand midshipmen, who got hopelessly lost and disoriented in her bowels. The chain-smoking and ruddy enlisted Navy men who operated the ship introduced Shepard and the others to the hard truths of their chosen profession. Some of those lessons were thrilling, such as firing the Arkansas’ twelve-inch and five-inch guns, feeling the concussive explosions and smelling powder for the first time. Other lessons were sobering and mundane: scrubbing the wooden decks, standing watch alone in the dead of night, learning the complexities of navigation, sextants, and stars. Being restricted to Chesapeake Bay meant that, unlike peacetime academy classes before them, they would not be able to dock in New York or Boston and spend a drunken night ashore. Mainly Shepard counted the days until his return to Annapolis and pined for the occasional twilight happy hour, whose offering of a few cans of beer made it a little easier to fall asleep in his cramped metal bunk.

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p; For Shepard, the trip was further proof that the life of a Navy sailor wasn’t for him, sound and convincing evidence that the Navy pilot’s life, instead, was his true calling.

  Ever since his uncle had suggested he attend the Naval Academy, Shepard knew that his real purpose in choosing the Navy was not to become a sailor but to use the academy as a stepping-stone toward the elite ranks of naval aviators. At the time—as he well knew from the aviation magazines in his footlocker—American pilots had begun dropping bombs onto Tokyo, and for the first time in history entire battles were being won and lost in the sky. Leading the way in this brash new style of modern warfare—more so than their counterparts in the Army Air Force (the Air Force’s predecessor) or the Marine Corps—were the aircraft carrier pilots of the Navy. President Roosevelt, sensing that the Navy was developing the airborne power to win the war, approved thousands of new Navy planes each month, nimble and nasty fighter planes called Hellcats and Hose Noses. Shepard was hungry for that thrilling and powerful aviator’s lifestyle.

  After the better part of a month at sea with a thousand men, he was also hungry for Louise Brewer. Shortly after returning from his summer cruise aboard Old Arky, he called her one night and got her out of bed. She was groggy, and his words were so unexpected she couldn’t believe her ears. “I think I love you,” he said. It had been on the “tip of my tongue” for weeks, he told her, and he finally had to release it.

  The next morning, Louise wrote him a long letter, telling him how “topsy turvy” the world seemed to her. The summer, which she’d spent at home at Longwood, had been filled with air raid drills and blackouts; even church services got interrupted by the sirens. At a time such as this, how could he be so sure of his own feelings? How could anyone? She still considered Alan “almost a stranger.”

  Their relationship had consisted of a few dates, a few dances, a flurry of letters, and a kiss or two. “Maybe,” Louise suggested, “we just better go along and finish our respective jobs and let the future take care of itself?”

  Louise was just a girl when her parents sent her to Principia, and her first close friend there was a handsome, athletic boy with “pugilistic” features, named George Dietz. He and Louise dated steadily through high school and seemed destined for marriage. After Alan proclaimed his love to Louise for the first time, she invoked George’s name. “Alan, I think a lot of you, but as I said once before, I haven’t known you very long,” she wrote. “I’ve known George for 9 years now and how long have I known you?”

  But in subsequent phone calls and letters, Alan refused to give up, and Louise began questioning whether she was being too careful and logical. This was all just infatuation, she tried to tell herself. There was no such thing as love at first sight. Then again, she had never known anyone quite like Alan, with his bigger-than-life personality and his puffed-out chest, his jaunty walk and his muscles. He was so exciting, and he seemed to have enough confidence for the two of them. Maybe too much confidence.

  In a letter to Louise in the fall of 1943, he invited her to the next year’s Letterman’s Ball, neglecting to tell her that he didn’t actually have a varsity letter yet. A few weeks after that, he sent her a bracelet for her birthday. And his persistence began to unsettle Louise. “I really don’t know you too well,” she wrote yet again.

  Indeed she didn’t.

  In 1943 it wasn’t unusual for young men and women to date multiple partners. Testing the waters was an acceptable and prudent preface to choosing a partner for life. And so, while courting Louise from afar, Shepard spent most weekends that fall semester with a pretty young secretary from Philadelphia named Fran, whom he’d met at a dance. She’d ride the Saturday morning train, he’d meet her on the platform of the Annapolis station “at the usual time,” and they’d go to football games, dances, the movies. Like Louise, she stayed overnight at Mrs. Chestnutt’s boardinghouse in Annapolis. Unlike Louise, Fran let Shepard know that she was flat-out, no-bones crazy about him.

  “Oh Shep, you’re the most wonderful, handsome, lovable, bad boy this side of heaven,” she once wrote. “You’ve got me all wound up. Love (and I do mean it), Fran.”

  Fran couldn’t have been more different from Louise Brewer. While Louise was regal, refined, composed, Fran was feisty, passionate, a little insecure, but sexy. “Right now I need a little bit of your loving to keep me warm,” she wrote during an afternoon break from her job at the switchboard of Episcopal Academy outside Philadelphia. She signed it “your dizzy, datty, drowsy little dame, Fran.”

  Weekends in Annapolis bustled with young women hoping to spend time with a nice officer-to-be—and maybe find a husband-to-be. In those uncertain times of war, many midshipmen found themselves betrothed to a girlfriend after just a few dates. It was clear from Fran’s talk of marriage, children, and grandchildren that she likely wanted more from their relationship than a few dances and kisses.

  “When I get married I’ll pick a fight with my husband once a week just so we can kiss and make up,” Fran said in one of two letters she wrote to Shepard on the same day. “Makes it much more exciting, don’t you think?”

  As Christmas of 1943 approached—sensing that the fling was cruising toward dangerous ground—Shepard told Fran that he wouldn’t be able to see her during the upcoming holidays. He had plans, he said in a letter, without much elaboration. She was crushed that he was, as she put it in her response, “too handsome and popular for this Philadelphia lassie.” She’d have been even more devastated had she known that the man she loved would be spending his holidays with the woman he loved.

  Little by little, in his letters to Louise, Shepard was wearing her down. Louise had always been proud of being practical, conservative, old-fashioned. She was so sure she was living a proper life, valuing caution and security above romance. “But Alan, I was wrong,” she finally confessed in a letter in October.

  “I wasn’t too sure I believed in love,” she wrote. “How could you be in love with someone when you didn’t know how they really thought about things of importance or what their standards were? My head did a wonderful job of getting me all confused.”

  A few days before Christmas 1943—exactly a year from when they first met—Shepard visited Louise at Longwood Gardens. They hadn’t seen each other since summer. Still, while skating on the pond one night, Shepard asked Louise to decide: Is it us?

  When Shepard returned to Annapolis two weeks later, to start his final semester at the academy, he had the answer.

  The relationship would never be a perfect one. Like many relationships born during wartime, it was lopsided, with all the power in his court. And while their different personalities would often complement each other, Shepard’s zest for good times would just as often grate against Louise’s desire for quiet and simplicity. But Louise would decide that it was best to let him chase his dreams.

  In late January 1944 Shepard invited Fran to Annapolis for one last dance. He told her about Louise, then spent the rest of the night stanching her tears. He had never meant for things to get so serious, he explained. It was just a few laughs, wasn’t it? They’d had fun, hadn’t they? But Fran felt “struck by lightning” and fell into his arms, crying and clinging to him, begging him to change his mind.

  A month later Fran wrote to apologize for “making a scene [and] building a few castles without a firm foundation.” After all, she said, “heartbreaks . . . are a part of life.”

  George Dietz, meanwhile, had been watching Louise slowly slip away into the arms of another. Louise finally told her longtime boyfriend it was over. George was crushed and would never forget her—or the name Alan Shepard.

  By early 1944 General Dwight D. Eisenhower had been named supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe and began preparing for a full-scale, all-out invasion of Nazi-held France. Even the decades-old USS Arkansas was relieved of its duties as a midshipman training ship and chugged toward the beaches of Normandy.

  Meanwhile, the airplanes Shepard so anxiously wanted to fly continue
d to dominate the course of the war, exhibiting the newfound strength and abilities of naval aviation.

  While Shepard attended classes that spring, American planes began round-the-clock bombings on Berlin and dropped paratroopers into Italy. But it was in the South Pacific that the airplane really began to exact some revenge for Pearl Harbor. Men who would in time become Shepard’s colleagues were at that moment dog fighting Japanese Zeros, earning the coveted title of ace, awarded to pilots with five confirmed kills.

  Shepard, eager to join them and with just months separating him from the war, wrote to tell his grandmother how soundly Annapolis had prepared him for battle. “I could never have been happier in any other place. It has put me on my two feet, entirely independent, and has broadened my outlook and matured me much more evenly than any other college or university could have done in three years,” he wrote.

  Annapolis had been a strict, demanding training ground— certainly the most challenging experience of Shepard’s otherwise pampered life. But in a display of determination that would eventually become the most notable aspect of his complicated personality, Shepard had gotten himself back on track. He had wooed the girl of his dreams and worked his way back from academic failure. His grade in Spanish rose to an acceptable 2.89, and his average in EHG nudged up to 2.73. When the academic board met in the spring of 1944 to determine Shepard’s fate, they decided that he was now “proficient.”

  Meanwhile, Shepard had also impressed Coach Walsh with his strength and hard work, and Walsh finally named Shepard to the eight-man varsity boat. The team would go undefeated that spring of 1944 and be named eastern intercollegiate champions. Although the playoffs would be canceled due to the war, Shepard had become one of the team’s workhorses—which meant he would get the varsity letter he so intensely desired. And, he reminded Louise, that meant she had an excuse to come back to Annapolis once more and dance with him at the Letterman’s Ball.