A SALUTE TO JOHN GLENN ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF FRIENDSHIP 7

Fifty years ago today, Mercury Astronaut John Glenn blasted off and made history to become the first American to orbit the Earth.  Here's my small tribute to a true hero!

 

NASA has created an excellent tribute page celebrating the 50th Anniversary.  Click here to visit the site and be sure to watch the video!  

A vintage postcard that John Glenn signed for me through the mail.

I had the pleasure of meeting John Glenn back in 2004 during the weekend festivities for the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library.  I met some important and amazing people that weekend in Little Rock, Arkansas but John Glenn eclipsed them all.  At the Museum of Discovery, he gave an inspirational talk and spent the next hour or two meeting and greeting everyone with a smile, a handshake and few nice words.  

It really was an honor to meet John Glenn and his amazing wife Annie.  Truly a memory that will be everlasting for me!  They both graciously signed Glenn's excellent autobiography John Glenn: A Memoir.  If you don't have this book in your library you really should.

The next year after meeting Glenn, we made a pilgrimage to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.  Below are two (not the greatest photos) of John Glenn's spacesuit and spacecraft, the Friendship 7.

Since today is also President's Day, here's an appropriate item that I found in a flea market a few years ago.  It's a letter from John Glenn during his presidential run in 1984.

 

Hopefully man will continue to reach outside of our own world in the same spirit of NASA's first astronauts.  And maybe one day in the future, the first humans to orbit Mars will do so in a spacecraft named the John Glenn.