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

been founded by a strong-willed woman, Mary Baker Eddy, who believed in self-reliance and self-healing.
    Like her husband, Renza eschewed smoking and drinking, but then again, she didn’t need stimulants. She loved the outdoors and throughout her life remained spry and active. She gardened avidly during the spring and summer and in winter joined her children for toboggan rides down steep backyard hills. She had a plain face, but it was made attractive by her natural ebullience. “A people person,” Alan called her. “Just a happy, loving individual.”
    Renza taught her children that it was up to them—not God, not fate—to make things happen in life. Alan admired and emulated his mother’s assertiveness, much more so than his father’s stoic passivity. While Polly was Bart’s little girl, Alan was hismother’s boy. Whereas he called his father “Colonel” or “sir,” his mother was always “Mum” or “Mumma.” And in time he came to exhibit plenty of what one cousin referred to as Renza’s invigorating and infectious “pizzazz.”

    The amalgam of influences inherited from his parents would serve Shepard perfectly through his career. His determination, smarts, and skill, combined with an upbeat and positive attitude, would carry him first into the elite upper ranks of the Navy and then to NASA .
    But to Shepard’s peers, the somewhat contradictory mix of qualities could be jarring.
    Fellow astronaut John Glenn called Shepard “an enigma . . . One side of him was cool, competent, and utterly dedicated, the other ready to cut up, joke, and have fun.”
    From a young age, Shepard struck most people as something of a mystery. He made friends easily enough and could be gregarious. Starting up conversations with strangers came naturally. Classmates felt special when he spoke to them, as though they’d been chosen. But then a week would go by and they’d see him at school or in town, and he’d walk right past, his eyes straight ahead, as if they’d never met—and they’d realize they weren’t his friend after all. Friends were people Shepard needed for fun or adventure. But for the most part he could take or leave them and quite often preferred to be alone, biking, skiing, or hiking through town, swimming, sailing, or skating on a backwoods pond. He had a deep capacity for solitude and a self-propelled energy that, whether alone or with buddies, kept him constantly busy—sometimes industriously, sometimes mischievously.
    If a few boys wanted to tag along after school, that was fine. He didn’t entirely exclude people; it’s just that he didn’t need the company of others the way most people do. “If he wanted to talk to you, then you’d have a conversation,” one friend recalled.“Alan was really kind of a loner,” said his childhood friend Harold Moynihan.
    To most of his peers, Shepard seemed to exist in a world separate from theirs. He could be a clown, could be friendly when he wanted to, but he didn’t hang around after school for clubs and sports. He could be a flirt, but he wasn’t known to have girlfriends. Classmates were intrigued by him, but he was not one of the “in” crowd. It was obvious in the way he carried himself, though, that Shepard didn’t seem to care if he was “in.” Instead of the downcast eyes and timid gait of a shy, self-conscious loner, Shepard strutted around confidently, with his head back, chin up, and eyes wide.
    That quality of self-confident aloofness would follow him through life. Few people would ever consider themselves true friends. “You only got so close to Alan and then he shut you out,” said Dee O’Hara, the astronauts’ nurse.
    Another lifelong quality, which began in childhood, was Shepard’s taste for physical challenges. Because he was small for his age, he shied away from team sports, but he excelled at solo sports. He learned to sail, swim, canoe, and ice-skate on Beaver Lake, down the hill behind his house. When the lake froze over