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John Glenn, 1921-1916

It's the end of an era for any of number of reasons, but this column by Charles P. Pierce puts it especially well:

In 1984, when John Glenn was preparing to run for president, I sat down in a bar on Beacon Hill in Boston for a chat with one of his chief strategists. This fellow smacked my gob across the room when he said that the campaign was planning to "downplay the hero stuff." My god, I thought. Without The Hero Stuff, Glenn was just a kind of boring old sod from Ohio. Without The Hero Stuff, he wasn't the first American to orbit the Earth. He wasn't the guy who spent the last of those orbits in a tiny spacecraft with a problem the gravity of which the folks on the ground could only guess. Without The Hero Stuff, he wasn't…an astronaut.

 

Those of us of a certain age remember when the evening news had some wonder to it. We remember when the country's ambitions weren't measured in profit and loss, and when people thought we could do anything if we put our mind to it. "The government" wasn't this cramped and alien thing, but the vehicle through which we could achieve the damnedest things. We watched the launches in our classrooms, the nuns working the beads furiously.

 

We were all part of The Hero Stuff.

 

John Glenn died Thursday at the age of 95. There aren't many of them left anymore. Pretty soon, there won't be any of them alive, and there were only a few of them who knew what it was like anyway. Some are long forgotten, and a very good thing is going with them.