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

him—that or “sir.” Bart was enormously proud of his military rank and leaped at any chance to wear his uniform.
    When he wasn’t in uniform, Bart wore a suit and tie—even on weekends. He kept his thin mustache neatly trimmed and never smoked or drank. Most workdays he ate a thirty-cent cheese sandwich at a downtown Greek lunch counter, and once in a while he splurged on pie. His lone hobby was music—across six decades, he played the organ at nearly every 10 A.M. Sunday service at the First Parish Church, the oldest church in town.
    Bart lost his bank job when Derry National followed five thousand others into oblivion after the 1929 crash. When his father then started a family insurance company, Bart took a job and worked there the rest of his life. Bart had the same large eyes as his son, but they appeared more sad than eager on his long face, above a pinched, down turned mouth.
    One day Alan would appreciate how his own character was shaped by his father’s work ethic, the consistency and simplicity of his demeanor. But those realizations were many years off. As an energetic child, Alan often looked at his father and asked:
Why?
It just wasn’t Alan’s idea of a life. Bart had none of the qualities Alan admired as a child: bravery, a sense of adventure, a determination to be the best. Instead, his father seemed happy doing his plodding darnedest in a town Alan considered “a small pond.”
    Alan and his father were hardly chums. Not in the way Alan was close with his mother and his grandmother, Nanzie. Alan and Bart shared few common interests and spent little one-on-one time together, except for tuning the church organ together once a month. It nagged at Alan that his father simply wasn’t . . . fun. “He appreciated a chuckle once in a while,” Alan once said. “But I can’t say he had a playful side.”
    The sense of playfulness that became one of Alan’s more notable attributes derived instead from his mother, Renza. As powerfully as Bart’s side of the family had influenced Alan, his emotional temperament was shaped more by his spirited mother.
    Renza Emerson’s family owned Derry’s largest shoe factory and had built a home beside Fritz and Nanzie Shepard’s mansion. Bart and Renza barely knew each other as children; he was a decade older and had gone off to war. When Bart returned from war, he noticed that the girl next door had grown into an energetic young beauty who seemed to have qualities that he did not—a sense of fun, a sense of humor. Bart fell in love and, at age thirty, proposed to his twenty-year-old neighbor. The local paper gushed at the engagement of “two popular and prominent young society people.” After a honeymoon drive through Vermont and Montreal, dancing at Lake Placid and Niagara Falls, the couple built a two-story Colonial on a plot of land smack between their parents’ houses.
    To maintain the fine balance of their opposites-attract marriage, it made perfect sense to live with each other’s families, like parentheses, on either side. While Bart’s side of the family hammered in the value of seriousness and determination, Renza taught her children the value of a good time. Renza, nearly the polar opposite of Bart Shepard, cherished fun and laughs and was, in short, the radiant and playful luminescence of Alan’s boyhood.
    An example of her high energy and lust for life was her choice of religion. In a sharp counterpoint to the Shepard family’s Protestantism, Renza was a Christian Scientist. While Bart attended church as a matter of duty, Renza attended the local Christian Science church for its preaching on positive thinking, its unshakable insistence that happiness is the lone antidote to illness.
    The Christian Science Church was founded in 1879, twenty-five miles north in Bow, New Hampshire. Controversial from the start, the church lured many independent-minded New Englanders with its commonsense doctrines. Renza approved of the fact that the religion had