John Glenn: A Personal Connection

On December 8, the news bulletin came across that former astronaut, war hero and U.S. Senator John Glenn died at age 95 in Columbus, Ohio. The tributes and obituaries recorded that Glenn was born in Cambridge, Ohio and married his childhood sweetheart Annie while both were attending Muskingum college in Ohio. He entered World War II in 1943 as a Marine fighter pilot.  In that war and the Korean War, Glenn flew 149 combat missions and was awarded six Distinguished Flying Crosses.

After the Korean War, Glenn became one of the military’s top test pilots and established a record by flying a Vaught Crusader jet fighter at supersonic speed from New York to Los Angeles in 3 hours and 23 minutes in 1957. In 1959, Glenn and six other military pilots were named as the first group of astronauts in Project Mercury with the mission to place a man in earth orbit.

My personal connection with John Glenn is through my father Neil Collins who was a public relations executive with North American Aviation located in Columbus during the 1950s. North American developed and built some of the U.S. military’s top fighter aircraft during World War II and the Cold War era including the P-51 Mustang, which was a stalwart in World War !!, the F-86 which was used in the Korean War, and the F-100, the first fighter capable of supersonic speeds.

While at North American, my dad got to know John Glenn and they became professional acquaintances. When I was three or four years old, dad brought Glenn to our house for dinner. I don’t remember it, but my older brother Neil, who was about eight, has told me about mom furiously cooking and cleaning the house and warning him and my other brother Ed to be on their best behavior because a very special visitor was coming.

Neil recounts how impressive then Colonel Glenn looked when he arrived at out house in a full dress Marine uniform.

When Glenn became a Project Mercury astronaut, he and dad kept up their professional relationship. The seven original astronauts were only paid standard military pay for their rank even though they participated in the intense training of the potentially dangerous Project Mercury program. But, the astronauts were allowed to earn extra flight status pay, provided they could log enough hours in the air each month.

So, my dad said Glenn called him a number of times from Florida or Houston to set up an appointment to visit the plant in Columbus and have lunch. This way, Glenn could log several hours of flight time, get a briefing on new aircraft technology and return home that evening.

On February 20, 1962, Glenn rode into orbit in the Mercury space capsule dubbed “Friendship 7” atop an Atlas rocket. A little less than four hours later, Glenn’s spacecraft splashed down safely in the Atlantic after three orbits.

That day, I was in the eighth grade at St. Catharine’s school in Columbus. Our class watched the launch on television and cheered when it was announced that Friendship 7 was in orbit. There was a reporter from WBNS radio in Columbus with us. He had a portable tape recorder and asked several of us what we thought about the launch.

At our house, we were very much aware of news because of dad’s job and his involvement in a defense company during the Cold War era. When the Soviet Union launched the first satellite (Sputnik) in 1957 and sent the first man (Yuri Gagarin) into orbit in 1961, I remember the concerned look on my dad’s face and reading and hearing multiple news accounts of how the Russians had beaten us into space.

The day of Glenn’s flight, I commented to the reporter that the successful mission would increase U.S. prestige around the world. That evening, on the WBNS evening news, I heard my voice on the radio because the reporter chose to use my sound bite. So, my career in broadcasting had begun.

Fast forward about 20 years later and Sen. Glenn was scheduled to deliver a fundraising speech in Akron. The day of the speech, the PBS program “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” wanted to interview with him about some pending legislation. So, Robin MacNeil interviewed him that afternoon via satellite from our studio at the University of Akron. When Glenn arrived, he made a point of asking me about my mom and dad and we had a short conversation in the studio before the interview.

A couple of years later I visited Senator Glenn’s office in Washington, D.C. Another producer and I went to the Capitol to interview several area congressmen and Sen. Glenn for a documentary on how Congress affected Northeast Ohio. After we shot the interview, Glenn and I had another pleasant conversation about my family and the space program.

A younger, thinner me with Sen. Glenn at his Senate office.

The last time I saw him in person was in 1998, the year he retired from the U.S. Senate after serving four terms representing Ohio. Pam and I attended a mid-day speech he gave at a restaurant ballroom in Akron. The place was packed and you could feel the admiration for him from the audience of about 1,000 as he delivered his speech. Afterwards, I tried to get to the front of the room to say hello, but he was surrounded by reporters and well-wishers. Pam and I had both taken extended lunch hours from work to hear the speech, so we didn’t have time to wait around for a chance to see him.

He is the last of the original seven Mercury astronauts to die and he will be missed by his wife of 73 years, Annie, his family, and by the people of our state and the nation. He was truly an American hero and a devoted public servant. When he was launched into orbit in 1962, the ground communicator said as the rocket lifted off the launch pad, “Godspeed, John Glenn.”

Yes, John Glenn, Godspeed indeed.

What If?

“What If?” 

Two words that could mean nothing at all or mean a complete change in a person’s life.

The reason I am thinking about this is because few of my poker playing buddies and I were discussing this last week. We are all about the same age, mid-60s to early 70s and we agreed it is counter productive to ask this question at our age. Our careers are set or we have retired. We have kids and grandkids and long-term marriages. The consensus was it might actually be harmful, or at least depressing, to consider “What if?” at this point in our lives.

Yet this nagging question does creep back into my consciousness every once in awhile and I usually push it out of the way. Still, I sometimes wonder, “What if?”

Before high school, I don’t really recall too many conscious decisions that I could have changed. And that’s what I am talking about—not incidents where fate is involved.

Reaching the Age of “What If?”

Once I reached high school, there were more choices with meaningful “what ifs.”  What if one of the girls I asked out had said “yes” instead of “no” and things had clicked. What if I had decided attend Ball State University—my oldest brother when there--instead or Miami University. If I had gone to Ball State and majored in Radio-TV, I probably would have been in classes with David Letterman (we are about the same age) and, who knows. But, I wouldn’t have met Pam and shared 46 years of marriage together.

Our senior year at Miami, Pam and I both looked for jobs. She was offered an elementary school teaching job in a nice suburb of Cincinnati, but I couldn’t find a TV or radio job in Cincinnati or Dayton, so she turned it down. My only job offer was at Eastern Kentucky University and we moved to Richmond, Ky., the summer after graduation. The week before school started, she interviewed for a teaching job in rural Estill County and was hired to teach a split third and fourth grade class—her first and only year teaching in an elementary school.

What if she had accepted the job in Cincinnati and I had continued to look for something in that market or if I had decided to switch careers?

In the late 70s, we decided to start a family, but after a year nothing happened, so we started going to a fertility specialist at the Cleveland Clinic. After several fruitless years of tests, procedures, etc. there was no pregnancy, so we explored adoption. During those few years, I was offered a new job a couple of times, but we would have had to relocate. I declined these offers, because we were moving up on the adoption waiting lists and still seeing the specialist.

Mid-Career Move: What If?

After we adopted Brian, I didn’t look for other jobs for a few years because we had a nice house and Pam had completed grad school in accounting and was working for a good local CPA firm. In the early 90s, enrollment at UA was declining and it was becoming apparent that our video department at the University of Akron might fall victim to budget cuts. So I began looking for another job. I had several interviews, mostly outside of northeast Ohio, but I never got any offers.

A university in Florida contacted me and I applied for a doctoral fellowship that would meant relocating for a year and then writing my dissertation. Dr. Collins anyone? Could have happened but I missed the final cut.

After our department was axed in 1995, I scrambled around to make a living teaching part time and transitioning into journalism and then multimedia. I returned to UA in 2001 and now that I am retired, I try not to give much thought to “What if?” moments anymore.

I checked Google to see if there were any good articles about this question. There were over four million entries, but I didn’t see anything that dealt with this question to my satisfaction. There have been several fictional stories, a few movies and about two dozen songs containing this question.

I think the reason you shouldn’t speculate on this question is because there is no way to get an answer. A scientist can hypothesize “What if…” and there is a chance of finding a definitive answer.  But, I will never find the answer to my “what if” questions, unless I can find a time machine and go back like the film “Back to the Future.”

Still, every once in a while I wonder: “What if?”

The Nostalgic Summer

“Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means 'the pain from an old wound.’ It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.”

--Don Draper in a “Mad Men” episode titled “The Wheel”, 2007.

A few weeks ago my wife and I were recalling the events we experienced this past summer, two major trips, two 50-year high school reunions and a major concert that was fantastic. “It certainly was a summer for nostalgia,” she said.

Yes, it was and I have been thinking about how to write about that. I could take the chronological approach, but that’s too easy and it might sound a lot like a Rick Steves travelogue. Or it could end up sounding like the “What I did last summer” essay—an assignment many of us dreaded at the beginning of the school year.

This summer we saw a lot of wonderful sites and reunited with old friends and family. But, as I look back, I realize the trips and reunions were mostly about rekindling memories both good and bad—thus, nostalgia.

The Reunion

Let’s start with my 50-year high school reunion. There was the delight of seeing classmates that I really liked in high school and rekindling those friendships for just a moment half a century later. But, there was also some pain remembering classmates who had passed away or who couldn’t attend because of illness.

At my reunion there was a display of photos of the 24 classmates who had passed away. One of them, only a couple of weeks before the reunion. I looked at some of the photos and remembered happier times and then felt sad for the loss I felt along with their loved ones felt—nostalgia.

It's Only Been 56 Years

A few weeks later, Pam and I had dinner with my cousin Kevin at a very nice restaurant on a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean in LaJolla, near San Diego. He once lived in Macedonia, Ohio—about 15 minutes from where I live now. His parents divorced when he was 12 and his mom (my dad’s sister) moved to Florida.

Kevin ended up going to college in Texas and then medical school in Utah where he met his wife and they had a daughter. They eventually divorced and Kevin is now a professor at the medical school at UC San Diego.

We had not seen each other since 1960 and we had a lot of catching up to do.

We reminisced about our visits to his childhood home, living in Ohio versus California and family members still alive and ones passed. He talked about visiting his birth father’s grave on a trip to Ohio. The visit was a mixture of good memories and pain—nostalgia.

The California Couple

One of Pam’s childhood friends lives in Camarillo, Calif., about 45 minutes from downtown Los Angeles. When I was dating Pam, we went out with Carol and her date a couple of times and I always liked her. She was a flight attendant for a few years and eventually met her current husband John and moved to SoCal.

John is a vibrant, likable guy who was manufacturers rep for a men’s clothing company for a number of years. But, he contracted a very rare disease that affected his circulation and has since lost both feet and several fingers. He is now wheelchair bound, but he is able to get around driving a specially-equipped van. We had a great time visiting Ventura Beach one afternoon.

After lunch, while Pam and Carol went shopping, John and I talked over coffee on a patio overlooking the marina. He told me he was a student at Kent State University when the Ohio National Guard fired the shots that killed four students on May 4, 1970. He was walking between classes and saw one of the victims fall about 20 feet in front of him. He said he dove under a nearby car and didn’t move for about an hour. The mood of a pleasant conversation had suddenly turned somber—nostalgia.

A Concert to Remember

After returning from the west coast, we went to a concert at the “Q” Arena in Cleveland. Paul McCartney put on a phenomenal show that lasted almost three hours in front of a sellout crowd. There was no intermission and the 74-year old Sir Paul never left the stage. It was so great to hear the old favorites and one thing I’ll remember most is the enthusiastic audience signing along with many of the songs. But there were a couple of somber moments when he talked about the two Beatles now passed and performed songs identified with each one.

Pam and I had tickets to see Sir Paul in 1978 at the Richfield Coliseum, but we could not attend and I had to sell them to a co-worker. She was in graduate school and her prof scheduled a mid-term exam that night and she didn’t want to ask him if she could take the test another time.

So, there was the pain of missing that concert and the delight of seeing McCartney 38 years later. His music defined my high school and college years and it’s a little sad to think those years have passed—nostalgia.

Can you imagine us

Years from today,

Sharing a park bench quietly?

How terribly strange

To be seventy.

Old friends,

Memory brushes the same years,

Silently sharing the same fear...

--Simon and Garfunkel song “Old Friends”, 1968.

It was quite a summer.