A cool guy with the right stuff

John, we hate to trouble you with this, but we’re having a little problem with your wife.

My wife?

Yes, she won’t cooperate, John. Perhaps you can give her a little call. We have a phone right here.

A little call?

The national problem was this: John’s wife, Annie, was at home with some of the wives of the rest of us watching the countdown on television. The only member of the press inside the house was a writer from Life named Loudon Wainwright [father of singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III – Doug], but outside, in the yard, was the nuthouse scene we described last time, all the TV crews and the reporters, baying for their scraps of information about how Annie Glenn was bearing up. At this point into the picture comes the Big Dipper, namely, Lyndon Johnson, who was vice president, of course … (and) he wants the Life reporter to get out of the house, because his presence will antagonize the rest of the non-TV reporters who can’t get in, and they will not think kindly of the Vice President … So the situation finally boils down to this: Johnson is waiting out of sight a few blocks away in a limousine, waiting for his cue. Johnson’s emissaries are saying that Life, in the person of Loudon Wainwright, must depart from the house so that the Vice President of the United States and his TV friends can come in … Wainwright is no fool and doesn’t particularly care to get caught in the middle like this, and so he offers to bow out, to leave. Annie shows her strength and tells him, “You’re not leaving this house” … NASA is freaking out, so finally the problem is bucked up all the way up to John Glenn himself … He says, “Look, if you don’t want the Vice President or the TV networks or anybody else coming inside the house, then that’s it, as far as I’m concerned, and I will back you up all the way.”

– “Post Orbital Remorse, Part Two: How the Astronauts Fell from Cowboy Heaven,” by Tom Wolfe, Rolling Stone, January 18, 1973, pg. 26.

I read that article when I was a senior in high school. It describes a scene that’s an audience favorite in The Right Stuff, the movie adaptation of the book that Tom Wolfe wrote based on his four-part series in Rolling Stone about the Mercury space program. I was in the first grade, 50 years ago, when John Glenn flew around the world three times. My son was in the first grade when John Glenn went into space a second time. Glenn wasn’t the first man in space, and he wasn’t the first American in space, but his flight is memorable to me, because it’s the first one that I remember from when it was happening, probably because the school played a radio report of the event over the classroom speakers.

This is a NASA video about John Glenn’s flight in the Freedom 7. Glenn is now 90 years old, which means he’s a year younger than Stephen Colbert’s mother and, no, that’s not Glenn in the preview frame.