They were somewhere between Cambridge and New Concord, following the country road that cuts through Ohio's meadows of blooming wildflowers and grazing cows, when their eyes turned to the sky.
His father stopped the car. They both leaned on the machine for a moment, mesmerized by the biplane teasing the clouds overhead. Only one question could break the spell.
"You want go up, Bud?" his father said. Eight-year-old John Herschel Glenn Jr., said "yes."
Then, it was just one small word from one small boy in one small town in Ohio. One second during one day of a lifetime that lasted more than 34,600 days.
But that word, "yes," took Glenn and his father to the backseat of that cockpit, down a bumpy strip and into the wild blue above the land he always called home.
It took him to his first flight. His first adventure. His first of many firsts.
But Glenn's groundbreaking hours in the sky were just the first of more than 22,000 hours – and counting – logged in space by someone from our state. The first of 78 successful missions, too.
One of the original seven, the Cambridge native is also the just one name now on the list of 25 astronauts hailing from the Buckeye State. Ohio boasts a "statistically significant" number of astronauts, said Bill Barry, NASA chief historian, whose achievements add up to "a huge legacy for NASA."
Glenn, who died in Columbus Dec. 8, will always be one of our brightest stars. Depending on who you ask, his stature may only be eclipsed by another certain astronaut born nine years later and less than 200 miles away from Glenn's birthplace.
Almost 33 years after he circled his hometown in a WACO plane on that summer day, Glenn's first 4 hours and 56 minutes in space made him the first American astronaut to orbit Earth. And 36 years after that, the 213 hours and 44 minutes Glenn spent on the shuttle Discovery made him, at 77, the oldest person to fly in space.
Our down-to-Earth explorer's otherworldly feats are just a segment of his lifelong service to the world he never really left behind. Just one of many reasons why the war hero, astronaut and popular U.S. senator will lie in state in the Ohio Statehouse rotunda Friday. Why his memorial service Saturday has to be held at Ohio State University, one of the largest in the country.
The elite Ohio fraternity Glenn founded, however, can claim more superlatives than what's bold in his biography. There's Neil Armstrong, the boy from Wapakoneta who became the first man who stepped on the moon, of course.
There's also Mansfield's Michael L. Gernhardt, who performed the first U.S. space walk from the International Space Station in 2001.
Sunita Williams also belongs to Ohio. The Euclid native already holds the record for total cumulative spacewalk time by a female astronaut. And she's set to be one of the first astronauts to lead the upcoming U.S. commercial spaceflights, ensuring that Ohio's banner will be carried into the next era of space travel.
But how was Ohio there from the very beginning, from the moment of our country's space program launch? What is it about this place that made a boy nicknamed Bud the legend we now call Sen. John Glenn?
And why was it, when the inventors of human flight looked toward the heavens, they saw the Ohio sky?
More than can fit on a license plate
Glenn already helped answer one of these questions.
Actually, it's inside one of the very first answers he gave the afternoon of April 9, 1959. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration held a press conference that day in Washington, D.C., to introduce the Mercury 7, the almost one-year-old program's starting lineup in the intensifying Space Race against the Soviet Union.
A reporter asked what motivated each of these volunteers, all men with military backgrounds and most of whom hailed from small towns. A certain Lt. Col. Glenn, as the 37-year-old Marine was called then, included.
Born in Cambridge, Glenn grew up in nearby New Concord, home to just 2,126 others when he spoke into that microphone.
And when he answered what motivated him, he traveled back there. He compared his experience to that of two Ohio-based brothers who once stood at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, "pitching a coin to see who was shove the one off the hill down there."
"I think we stand on the verge of something as big and as expansive as that was 50 years ago," he added.
Glenn wasn't the first or the last kid from Ohio who idolized Wilbur and Orville Wright, the inventors of the first successful airplane. He wasn't the first or last who held a tiny version of their innovation out a window of a cruising car and dreamed about being born with the last name Wright.
The brothers are on all of our cars today, by way of those "Birthplace of Aviation" plates. It's still a statewide brand and bragging right.
Even though Wilbur was actually born in Millville, Indiana, four years before Orville was born in Dayton.
But that Indiana footnote doesn't change the story for Tom Crouch, senior curator of the Aeronautics Department for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
"If the Wrights had been born in Kitty Hawk, they never would have invented the airplane," Crouch said, who happens to also be from Ohio. Dayton, of course.
The architects of aviation, he said, had to hail from a city. Not some isolated coastal community like Kitty Hawk. A place with a hardware store around the corner, a machine shop down the block. A place still occupied by the Industrial Revolution.
A place just like Dayton at the turn of the 20th century. "Technology was in the air that people breathed," he said.
It was the atmosphere that hovered over much of Ohio, actually.
Almost 70 years before Orville Wright piloted a 12-second flight on the North Carolina coast, an experimenter named A. Masson displayed his flying machine, something he dubbed an aerial steamboat, on Race Street in Cincinnati. There's no evidence the mysterious aircraft ever left the surface of the Earth, according to Crouch's research.
But Masson's attempt is still important evidence: It demonstrates that human flight was viewed as a mechanical problem that required a mechanical solution. So it had to be an engineer, a technician, who would be the first to meet the sky, Crouch noted.
Someone who worked at places like The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company near Akron or the GE Aviation in Evendale. Someone like Wilbur and Orville Wright, whose first company was a printing press that published two newspapers.
Chris Burton, executive director of the Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta, traces ancestry of our astronauts back even further, beyond Glenn, beyond the Wrights.
"It's not just about pilots and aviation," he said. "It's about scientific endeavors." Imagination and education powers ingenuity. And Ohio's got plenty of both.
We claim one of the most prolific minds of the modern age, Thomas Edison. One of the oldest universities in the United States, too. That's Ohio University, founded in 1804, just the year after the western territory became the state.
In Ohio, "if you were creative or figured out a better way to do something, you would be rewarded for it," Burton said.
Building on a strong foundation
This structure of the mind built the self-sustaining infrastructure of industry here, from the universities and other government assets, to the private companies and entertainment outlets.
In 1938, that also meant the Cleveland National Air Show. And 17-year-old Glenn was there, with his father. The two of them, again, stared at the sky, entranced by the stunt pilots racing at speeds more than 280 miles per hour, banking dramatically, dangerously, around the course's high pylons.
"I loved the roar of those engines and sheer speed of the planes ... flying beckoned me as never before," Glenn wrote in "John Glenn: A Memoir," published in 1999.
But these demonstrations were more than adrenaline-fueled fun. These early aviators pushed the limits of human flight, said David DeFelice. Their vital research and development just so happened to be paid for by the price of admission.
DeFelice should know. He now works in the office of communication and external relations at the NASA Glenn Research Center, just outside of Cleveland. The parking lot there were once the air show field. You can still see their outlines from the sky, he said.
The center, founded in 1942, continues that community's tradition of cutting-edge research, continues to live in the future. Except instead of challenging the limits of physics to win a trophy, scientists there now strive to create technologies that are more economically and environmentally friendly, DeFelice said.
Originally called the NACA Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory, the organization notably developed the Centaur, a high-energy rocket that burned both liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. It propelled major NASA milestones. We wouldn't have made it to the moon without it, for one.
And it may activate future discoveries: The Centaur is still in use.
Some 200 miles southeast of the research center, the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base exists in a similarly exceptional timeline, one that extends from a prestigious past to the dreams of today.
Huffman Prairie is there, the flat grassy field where the Wright brothers tested plane design and trained hundreds of pilots.
The base outside of Fairborn also houses the Air Force Research Laboratory. In early 1959, lab tests there were part of the process that pared down 508 astronaut candidates to 110. Then 32. Then 18. And finally, seven.
The research there also shaped the overall program, said Doug Lantry, curator at the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton. The work explored the man in manned space travel. The tests were designed to not only make sure the human fit the machine, but the machine fit the human.
At Wright-Patterson, scientists violently shook Glenn and his six cohorts, all strapped seats and asked to read written instructions.
They dropped the seven guinea pigs from high elevations. Heated them up and cooled them down. Blasted them with noise. And then listened to their hearts.
These extremes conditions were all part of the effort to replicate what scientists guessed would be the physical experience of traveling, weightless in a cramped capsule, at 17,000 mph around the Earth.
To keep them safe out there and to bring them back home.
For Glenn, that meant here.
The matters of the mind
The examinations had other results not measured in the records.
The program also aimed to enhance their mental well-being, to enhance their confidence in the mechanics and the math. They all shook hands with the scientists who launched them into space. That means that Glenn not only watched this new science unfolding, he got to tend it himself, influence the specifics of the progress. He earned an engineering degree from Muskingum College in New Concord, after all.
Glenn had developed "The Right Stuff," as Tom Wolfe called it in his 1979 book about the experimental pilots of the U.S. space program, long before his time at the lab in 1959.
For Lantry, it's "habits of thought," noting that Ohio has a tradition of "developing the right people with the right outlook" for this line of work.
That outlook, well, looks a lot like the attitude and the aptitude associated with America's heartland.
NASA Chief Historian Bill Barry said the space program officials didn't intentionally select the majority of the seven first-generation astronauts from small towns in what we now call flyover country, from Shawnee, Oklahoma to Sparta, Wisconsin, to New Concord, Ohio. Five hometowns that, even when added together, represented just .03 percent of the United States' 180 million population at the time.
But a childhood back-dropped by rural America did cultivate the type of skills that kept those fighter pilots alive in combat. Like discipline and dexterity.
In New Concord, he was that boy named Bud who shot rabbits to feed his family during the Depression. Later, he harvested rhubarb and washed cars, saving each nickel and dime for that new bike. He lettered in every sport he played in high school: tennis, basketball and football.
And character counted. On the program's personality test, officials asked candidates if they ever feel like cursing. (No, was the likely correct answer.) Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7 were introduced as "family men" during that 1959 press conference.
In those first days of NASA, the astronauts were ambassadors, flag-wrapped symbols of hope and the promise of the American ambition.
We weren't just trying to beat the Soviet Union, then setting the pace with space records. We were trying to guarantee survival, the proliferation of our way of life. The triumph of capitalism over socialism. Because success in space also meant protection from the atomic annihilation of our country. And the fear of the big bomb gripped everyday Americans every day.
We looked around for heroes and we found the Mercury 7, "the new, modern knights," Barry said.
They were an unprecedented pop culture phenomenon, an irresistible hybrid of the American cowboy with the matinee idol. And freckle-faced Glenn, with his charming humor and quiet strength, was a leading man.
Glenn, and later Armstrong, "were two men who were absolute straight arrows, as honest as the day is long," the Smithsonian's Crouch said. These two Ohioans represented American virtues that Americans have always had, to "an extraordinary degree," he said.
Glenn belongs to this world and the ones beyond it now. But his gravity, that legendary magnetism, feels stronger at home.
Becoming an astronaut doesn't feel so far-fetched here. It's not just a Halloween costume or a fading childhood fantasy.
It's real people, 25 real people who are like us. At least in one way.
Gregory H. Johnson was born in 1962, just months after Glenn orbited the Earth in Friendship 7. In 1980, he graduated from high school in Fairborn, in the shadow of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Today, he's one of the 25 NASA astronauts who list Ohio in their official biography.
But on the night of July 20, 1969, he is a seven-year-old watching a black-and-white television set in his grandmother's living room. After about 11 p.m., he sprints to the backyard with his brother and sister.
They are all looking at the crescent moon. They are all looking for Neil Armstrong.
Johnson finds something else.
I'm going to be an astronaut, he says.
