Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Read Online Free PDF Page A

attitude he inherited from the tight-knit, fiercely loyal, and wealthy Shepard clan.
    In town, the Shepards wore the nicer clothes, drove the newer cars; they kept a vacation house on a nearby lake. A hue of wealth tainted the other kids’ perceptions of Alan, and many peers assumed he lived a coddled life of privilege. He did, in fact, absorb a sense of entitlement and the self-assuredness that privilege engendered. But Alan—and his sister, Polly, who was two years younger—were far from pampered rich kids. Their father valued work and made sure each child performed their share of domestic chores.
    Each morning, for example, Alan grabbed a flag from the front hall closet, poked the rod into the front lawn, waited for his father to come out, and then stood back to salute. After cleaning his room, he might lug one of the last, half-melted, sawdust-coated blocks of ice from the icehouse in the woods and put it in the ice chest. Then he’d deliver newspapers to half the homes in town. On Saturday nights he’d sit in the foyer buffing and polishing every last shoe in the house, lining them up to gleam on the stairs.
    Bart Shepard was a stern and serious disciplinarian, and Alan inherited a stoicism and toughness of character from him— traits that Bart had inherited from his own prosperous and industrious father.
    Alan’s grandfather Frederick “Fritz” Shepard was one of the most powerful local businessmen of his day. He owned Derry National Bank and Derry Electric Light Company, ran a stage-coach service and an electric rail line, and built the town library. Fritz Shepard was also a prominent Republican, East Derry’s town treasurer, and a colonel in the National Guard. He served as aide-de-camp at the historic month-long Russo-Japanese Peace Conference, organized by President Theodore Roosevelt in Portsmouth in 1905 (which ended the war between Russia and Japan and earned Roosevelt the Nobel peace prize). Until the crash of 1929, Fritz Shepard was a very wealthy man.
    He and his wife, Nanzie, fairly lorded above the town in their enormous house on a high knoll off East Derry Road, a Victorian mansion with a tennis-court-sized ballroom where the Shepards entertained such dignitaries as President Howard Taft.
    Though Fritz’s Derry empire was battered by the Depression, causing him to lose the bank and the rail line, he subsequently threw his energies into making his own line of sodas, tonics, and ginger ale, which allowed him and Nanzie to keep in their employ the African-American couple who served for decades as their maid and butler.
    While Fritz tended to his business enterprises, his wife governed the family as its rock-steady matriarch. Nanzie Shepard’s lineage was also seriously old guard, and she became an important influence on her grandchildren—especially Alan.
    Short, redheaded Nanzie was an equally important social and political figure in East Derry. She led the New Hampshire Daughters of the Revolution, became the first female president of the Republican Club of New Hampshire, and as one of New Hampshire’s presidential electors cast her vote for the Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924.
    She and Fritz had high expectations for their sons, imbuing in them an ethic of success and the expectation that they would get a good education and make their mark in the world. Two of their sons, Henry and Frederick junior, went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, en route to careers as successful businessmen in Massachusetts.
    But Alan’s father, Bart, chose a different course. He joined the National Guard in 1915 and then shipped off to France with an infantry division of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. When he returned home in 1918, he joined the Army Reserves and began working as an assistant cashier at his father’s bank, Derry National. Bart took his military service quite seriously and eventually rose to the rank of colonel, which was how Alan and his sister, Polly, addressed