Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman by Neal Thompson

high-winged Voyager or Reliant, the predominant private planes of the day. When Park let him take the controls and Shepard held that stick, he knew he was hooked. Shepard loved to be in control—of people, of situations, of himself. But in a plane, he was in control of everything: of up and down, of the entire world beneath him. One twitch of the control stick, and the whole world tilted. A slight, slow pull on the stick and the world disappeared, unveiling nothing but sky and space and clouds—nothing and yet everything.
    New Hampshire produced a few home-brewed aviators of note in those early decades of human flight. Manchester Airport had been christened in 1927, with its first landing and takeoff by Robert S. Fogg, who that summer delivered mail twice daily to Vermont towns marooned by a massive flood. By 1940, just two years after Shepard’s first lessons, the airport would be renamed Grenier Airport, in honor of a daring Army Air Corps pilot from Manchester, Jean Grenier, who was killed in 1934 while scouting a dangerous new airmail route across the Rocky Mountains ofUtah. New Hampshire also produced a daredevil named Carmeno Onofrio, who once landed his J-3 Cub, outfitted with skis instead of wheels, fourteen times in one day on the snow-covered peak of 6,288-foot Mount Washington, known for clocking two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds.
    But even more profound feats would soon be performed by the men who’d replace Lindbergh as Shepard’s driving inspiration: the aviators of World War II.

    On September 1, 1939, as Shepard began his last year of high school, German soldiers—having already occupied Czechoslovakia—marched into Poland. Hitler had already allied himself with Italy and the Soviet Union, which would become his partners in the Nazi dictator’s subsequent trouncing of the better part of Europe.
    At the Shepard household, Alan’s father began discussing some options for college the following year. Alan had managed to find his place at Pinkerton and had studied hard, and by his senior year he ranked eighth in his class of fifty-five, with all A’s or B’s except for a C in French. With the escalation of war in Europe, Bart strongly suggested that his son consider the Army’s military academy at West Point. It was free, and it would perpetuate a proud heritage of Shepards in the Army. Besides, with the growing likelihood that America would someday join the fighting overseas, Alanmight have the chance to do what many Shepards had done before him—to serve his country on the battlefield.
    Bart was the type of guy that newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle would call, admiringly, a grunt. He believed in the ethos of the dogface soldier, which he’d been in World War I. But to Alan, the Army life seemed dirty and degrading. Alan loved his father and respected his simple New Hampshire lifestyle, but he had no interest in the Army soldier’s life. Alan knew all too well that the United States would likely soon join the war. He saw it at Manchester Airport, whose runways were becoming busy with military cargo planes. Indeed, before long, the Army would take over Manchester Airport, nudging aside Alan’s instructor friend Carl Park as it turned the place into a sprawling military air base.
    In the coming conflict the Army would be no place for an aspiring pilot. Thanks to a $2 billion infusion from President Roosevelt, the Navy was buying thousands of planes and training pilots for previously unthinkable feats. They had been welding flight decks atop ships, and Navy pilots were taking off from and landing on these wildly dangerous makeshift landing strips. In the mid-1930s the Navy began building a new generation of aircraft carriers, an entirely new type of ship whose sole purpose was to serve as a floating runway for pilots crazy enough to attempt such risky landings. The Navy was becoming
the
place to fly.
    One Sunday in late 1939, Alan’s uncle Fritz came to visit and—picking up on the disagreement between