February 20, 1962: John Glenn and Friendship 7 orbit the Earth three times.

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February 20 arrives again, this year, a mild day here in Ohio — 55 degrees, a warm spell that melted the snow cover.  I remember several February 20ths.  I remember 2020, little snow but cold.  As as an avid cross-country skier, I exercised on a small patch of icy, old snow – – back and forth as John Glenn flew again in my imagination.  I skied his entire flight.  And skied without a thought of Covid-19, already present vaguely in the news, but weeks away from exploding into crisis.  I remember February 20, 2022, the sixtieth anniversary.  Once more all the flight details flowed through my imagination.  I posted an account of the flight on this blog, still there in the archives.  I remember February 20, 2012, the fiftieth anniversary, an early spring, daffodils already sprouting up in the beds my father planted decades before.  In sunshine, I cleared them of brush and briars.  It couldn’t wait — I had life-changing elective surgery set for late March.  That day, as I worked the flower beds, I measure the time by John Glenn’s three orbits.  The beds were clean and ready for spring by the time he landed.  On the 25th anniversary of his flight, I was working on Countdown magazine, in the long aftermath of Challenger.  We had time and space in the magazine to journey into the past.  We published a story on the anniversary, a photo of Glenn in Friendship 7 on the cover.

The one February 20th I do not remember occurred in 1962 — frustrating me greatly.  I remember Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in 1961.  I was in first grade and we listened to it in school, a radio broadcast piped through the PA speaker.  I remember Gus Grissom’s flight that summer.  And later in 1962, I remember racing home from school to learn that Scott Carpenter had been found, floating in a life raft.

How could I not remember John Glenn’s flight?  I vividly recall his post-flight press conference, mesmerized by his account of weightless, how he could let his camera float in front of him a moment as he attended something else and then come back to it, how a roll of film floated out of reach behind the instrument panel.  I can still hear his voice.

So how could I not remember the flight itself?

This year, skiing a strip of melting snow, a scrap of a memory returned.  I heard my second-grade classmates asking — imploring — our teacher to let us listen to the flight.  Someone told her we’d gotten to listening to Alan Shepard’s flight over the PA system.  She replied, the PA does’t work in this room.  To prove it, she tried it.  See?  And it was back to our lessons.  I sensed, though, she was glad the PA didn’t work, that she thought such things as radio and space flights had no place in the classroom. 

Yet it’s had a prime space in my life.  And here we go again.  This is Mercury Control.  John Glenn is in orbit for the 54th time.  Zero-g and he feels fine.  Oh, the view is tremendous.  Be sure to leave your lights on.