Everything is still A-OK

Thanks to all that sensitivity training and consciousness raising and other psuedo-intellectual psycho-babble of the later Sixties and Seventies that evolved into today's political correctness which makes it a Federal offense to even possess a sense of humor, much less use it, we now know that Bill Dana's Jose' Jimenez--and Alan Shepard's impersonation of him--was totally insensitive. And, for that matter, Shepard's "Well, I'm a wetback now" transmission to CAPCOM after he peed in his spacesuit to keep from having the mission scrubbed yet again was a bit insensitive even by the anything but touchy-feely standards of the time. But, I don't care. Alan Shepard was the first American in space.

We now know that Shepard and the other six of the Mercury Seven weren't the square-jawed Eagle Scouts LIFE and CBS and the DoD made them out to be. Well, okay, John Glenn may have been the self-described lone beacon of sanity in a squall of car-crazies, and maybe Scott Carpenter was up there on the pedestal with him, but the rest were a squall of car-crazies indeed, and we know about the way they traded on their astronaut status to get good deals on the 'vettes they used on those late night races on the beach and abandoned air force base runways, we know about the other deals--real estate and business--they used their fame to get in on, and we know about the womanizing and the foul language and, well, the fact that they were human after all. We know Shepard himself was a bit of Jekyll & Hyde, everybody's good ol' boy best buddy one second, and Captain Bligh the strict professional who expected all the amenities of rank to be observed the next, and a bit of a politicker who wasn't above working the NASA system to get the plum assignments for himself at the expense of his fellow astronauts. But, I don't care. Alan Shepard was the first American in space.

As I've mentioned before, I was such a hard-nosed little Cold Warrior as a child I wouldn't even buy Revell's model of the Russian Spy Trawler (or any other kits of Russian ships, tanks, or airplanes) because I wasn't sure Communism was a communicable disease, but I wasn't taking any chances. So, you might imagine what kind of righteous right-wing snit I was in on April 12, 1961, when that Godless atheistic knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing beetle-browed Bolshevik gorilla Yuri Gagarin--who, I had no doubts in my not-quite-yet-10-year-old mind, was probably forced into the Vostok I capsule at gunpoint by the KGB--became the first "human" to go into space. And, I didn't get out of said snit for a while. I remember mom turning off Davis Street onto Chalk Hill Road (to pick up my dad from the then-brand new Fire Station 16) a weekend or two later, hearing something on the radio (probably KIXL, maybe WRR or KRLD) about Gagarin's flight, and going ballistic about it, demanding to know why they were going on and on about it, how it was no big deal, that it was probably just Commie propaganda and they hadn't even done it anyway, etc., etc., and mom--who was by no means a liberal herself--telling me I shouldn't talk that way, because it WAS a big deal, rivaling Columbus' discovery of America, and we just had to acknowledge that the Russians had beat us to it.

All well and good (my thoughts at the time went), but this was, after all, still only a Russian, and we'd already put a monkey into space before they did. And, on that glorious day in May of 1961 (to misquote out of context Levon Helm in "The Right Stuff"), the pain was forgotten when dad let me stay home from school and watch with him as Alan Shepard became the first American--and, therefore, the first man that counted--in space. And I wasn't alone--if you were there then, you know the whole country went nuts, from the cheering crowds at New York's ticker tape parade to the local washateria and corner grocery changing their names or at least their advertising to connect themselves in the frenzied public mind to Project Mercury. Try though they do, "The Right Stuff" and the documentaries can't even begin to convey the absolute mania that swept not just this country but the whole Free World. And Shepard and Kennedy inspired it, not Gagarin and Khrushchev.

Of course, times have changed. I remember wondering back in those days if I'd live to see the turn of the century (with all the talk about all-out nuclear warfare between us the USSR, I thought speculation about living to see my 10th birthday might well be overly optimistic), but I never would have imagined that I'd not only live to see the millennium, but some three or four years after it I'd be standing on a truck dock in Tulsa, Oklahoma, smoking and joking with a Russian immigrant truck driver/honest-to-God Comrade Ivan veteran of the Red Army and THEIR war in Afghanistan. And if, in those days fifty years ago, I'd imagined having children of my own, I sure as hell wouldn't have imagined that a decade before the millennium Lenningrad would be called St. Petersburg again and a decade after it that the oldest of my three would be spending her junior year in college there.

I'm equally certain I wouldn't, couldn't, have imagined that I'd ever realize that mom was right after all--that Gagarin's flight WAS a hell of an achievement, that he was and is due all honor for having been first, and that the only gun to his head that forced him into his Vostok I was the same gun that forced Shepard into his Freedom 7--his pride as a pilot and desire to be the best of the best. Moreover, since he bought the collective farm in a MiG-15UTI crash, I've even come to believe that maybe there is a place in heaven after all for even a Godless atheistic Communist (especially since we now know that while he was reported to have said, "I don't see any God up here", no such words appear in the actual transcript of the flight communications, and know that he himself was baptized in the Orthodox church as a child, he and his family regularly celebrated Christmas and Easter and kept icons in the house, and he baptized his daughter Elena in the Church shortly before his spaceflight). Hell, I've even gotten so liberal I'm even imagining the possibility I might go surfing the web to see if there's an old Revell Russian Spy Trawler to be had (or, at least, one to be had at a price that isn't a capitalist oppressor of the working class exploitation of the people's resources).

But I still can't imagine I'll ever forget that Alan Shepard was the first AMERICAN in space.