John Herschel Glenn Jr.

John Herschel Glenn Jr. died in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 2016. He was ninety-five. Born in Cambridge, Ohio, on July 18, 1921, and raised in New Concord, he flew in two wars, became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962, and later served four terms in the United States Senate as if the orbit had been a preface to committee work. Friendship 7 rattled and the heat shield was a question mark; he came down in the ocean and into a fame he treated as a civic job. In 1998 he flew again, at seventy-seven, a research passenger on the shuttle, still taking notes. He married Annie Castor, whose stutter he would not let a handler turn into a joke, and he kept New Concord as the town that had known him before the ticker tape. This memorial names Cambridge, the county seat of his beginning. He died in Columbus. He is buried at Arlington. Ohio claimed him twice: the orbit and the long second career. The museum in New Concord still talks in a small-town voice, which is the one he preferred. Annie Glenn outlived him and the applause. New Concord still treats the orbit as a local errand that went unusually far. Columbus was the hospital. Arlington is the official stone. He signed photographs with the care of a man who remembered being asked for them in 1962 and never learned to be bored by the request. He flew combat missions before he flew the atlas, a fact the ticker tape shortened. Cambridge, Ohio, remains the county seat on this page because that is where the map first wrote his name, not where the hospital closed it.