Sunday, November 15, 1998

Glenn completes a beautiful symmetry

By Rheta Grimsley Johnson

I met astronaut John Glenn back when he wanted to lead a free world, not hitch a ride into one.

It was spring of 1984, and a few dozen of us waited at a small Tuscaloosa, Ala., airport to see what candidate Glenn had to say. He was running for president against Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale and Jesse Jackson.

Even in that lackluster crowd, Glenn wasn't making much of a splash. He had one too many five-point plans for three-point programs.

It came as a shock to some of us that the former astronaut was a tad tedious. I had seen his tin-can chariot in the Smithsonian and knew he had guts. But the man who had been hurled into black space was -- no polite way around it -- boring. Without Tom Wolfe to write his lines, John Glenn was just another politician.

Also waiting at the airport that day was a man named John Verdi. I'll never forget him. Verdi had an ample white beard and looked like Father Time in blue jeans. He had flown 131 missions in Korea, he told me, several of them with John Glenn. A New York native, Verdi had lived on the West Coast before it became too crowded; then he moved to Alabama.

"Everyone goes his own way," he said when I asked him about his long hair and beard. It seemed natural enough response to 26 years in the Marine Corps.

There was a brief, but dramatic reunion between the two Marine buddies. Glenn certainly remembered Verdi; it was clear from the look on his face. For a few minutes Glenn dropped his politician's pose, and the rest of us might have been in another galaxy. The two Johns talked excitedly, quietly.

When John Glenn went back into space last month, I thought about two people. Annie Glenn, John's wife, for one. Most old people worry when a spouse makes a trip to the corner store. Acceptable hobbies for seniors are golf or needlepoint. Not space travel. Annie Glenn has been the wife of an astronaut and politician. Forget John. Annie's the one who must have incredible strength.

I also thought about John Verdi, wondered if he's still around. The hero he flew with 45 years ago was orbiting the earth again. That must make Verdi proud.

For John Glenn is much more than some geriatric guinea pig, more than First Fossil in space. Before a single experiment was done, Glenn was proof that there's always something to look forward to in this life. You just have to find it.

Not all of us can be the first American to orbit Earth, or win a blue ribbon in the walk-trot class at the Kentucky Horse Park, or bottle a successful spaghetti sauce and give all the proceeds to charity. Most of us have mundane lives by celebrity standards.

By John Glenn standards.

But all lives have worth. Our assignment, should we decide to accept it, is finding that worth. Some have tried to paint John Glenn's latest journey as political, i.e. wasteful, an expensive gimmick billed to taxpayers. Cynical analyses blast from the radios in our Japanese and German cars.

I disagree. Even if scientists don't learn much from his blood, there are lessons to be had from his heart. Glenn wanted this mission so much that he probably did pull every string available to him. But his motives, if not his methods, were pure.

Lives have worth, and they have symmetry. There is a certain beautiful symmetry, not just for Glenn, but for all Americans in this hero's return to space.

This time he had the wisdom of advanced age -- and a window. This time he had a history tailing his spaceship, a lifetime of friends and memories, admirers and Marine buddies, to ride right along.

King Features Syndicate