Word: sheparded
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...best proof of history are its survivors, and just as a war shrinks in a nation's rear-view mirror as its veterans pass on, the early, headiest days of the Space Age have just gotten a little more remote: Alan B. Shepard, the first American into space, is dead. Though two of those original Mercury seven astronauts have fallen before him, the ebullient, iconoclastic Shepard is the first to go gently, of Nature, of old age. That is not an excuse to begin forgetting...
...biggest Jose Jimenez fan you ever saw? Alan Shepard, (not to be confused with Sam Shepard, who plays a great Yeager in this one) and you're looking at him. Scott Glenn does the old pioneer justice in all his guts, grace and flinty humor. From his lips we get one of space's first slogans -- "everything is AOK" -- and some lesser-known launchpad gems, namely "Dear Lord, please don't let me f--- this...
...standard of the original seven flies yet -- John Glenn, squeaky-clean and super-heroic to this day (and years older than Shepard) will go up again in this age, when space flights leave like crosstown buses, and that will be fun. But you always remember your first time, right? That was Shepard's, and always will...
...course, while he was up there he also hit a couple of golf balls, and perhaps that's the way Americans who watched it will remember him. But Kluger says that Shepard was known as "the ice commander" for good reason. "He was either all business or he was this genial swashbuckling rocket jock, and he would switch back and forth without warning, according to his own internal clock." Whatever foibles this space pioneer carried inside him, they never poisoned the camaraderie among the original seven Mercury astronauts named by NASA in April 1959. Not too long ago, says Kluger...
...Tuesday Al Shepard was old enough. The original seven are now down to four. America's heady days of giant leaps are receding into the past, their passing marked by the deaths of her pioneers. Alan Shepard's rank in that history is that of legend...