Free Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman by Neal Thompson

weekends and nights off, attended dances or parties in town as well. If he didn’t already have a “crab”—also called a “drag”—by his side, he would by night’s end. He seemed so at ease around women, able to walk right up to a young lady and almost disarm them with a social grace that made him seem older than his nineteen years. Classmate Bob Kirk said Shepard had “a facility for creating the impression of instant friendship.” Shepard once boasted to friends of a girl he met during a weekend trip back home and how he infuriated his father by leaving two sets of muddy footprints in Bart’s car—on the ceiling. Kirk said Shepard “appreciated the better things in life” and was “almost as facile (with) the young ladies as he was managing to evade the duty officer’s search for would-be jitterbuggers.”
    Shepard’s roommate, Bob Williams, “was in awe of him . . . he processed a lot of women.” But during the Christmas holidays of 1942, during a brief trip to the nation’s heartland, Shepard would meet the woman who eclipsed any of Annapolis’ crabbies.

    Due to wartime travel restrictions, Alan’s sister, Polly, couldn’t make it home to New Hampshire for Christmas break that year, so Alan decided to visit her at Principia College, a college for Christian Scientists outside St. Louis, where she was a freshman. He planned to spend the first half of his Christmas break with Polly, then travel back to East Derry. Hopping a Navy cargo plane, he arrived in St. Louis on a Friday night in time for dinner. After dinner, he and Polly walked to Principia’s field house, which blinked and glittered with decorations for the annual Christmas dance, with streamers of blue and gold (also the Naval Academy’s school colors) hanging from basketball hoops, twinkling lights on a potted pine tree.
    Within minutes of entering the room he spotted Louise Brewer, standing with friends across the gym floor. The routine had become second nature for him: quickly sweep the room, find the prettiest girl, make a beeline. But rarely had the prettiest girl looked like this. “Who’s that girl over there?” he asked Polly, who told him not to waste his time chasing Louise Brewer, who was beautiful, popular—and had a steady boyfriend. But Alan, looking fit and slim in his dark blue uniform, feeling confident and strong from his early-morning exercises, persisted. Boyfriend or not, he wanted tomeet the girl with the narrow waist, long brown hair, and wonderful, radiant face.
    At a glance, it’d be hard to call Alan the handsomest in the room; he had a long face, and everything on it was just a bit too pronounced—the eyes, the ears, and the enormous smile, framed by dimples, with his teeth slightly askew. But he had developed a grace, a way of carrying himself, chin up and out, that caught people’s eye.
    Louise’s boyfriend, it turned out, had traveled home for the holidays, so she sat talking with Alan most of the night. Alan told her about life at Annapolis, his childhood in the snowy New England hills, his plans to someday fly airplanes. Louise spoke of her own childhood as a “VIP kid” at Longwood Gardens—a sprawling estate southeast of Philadelphia, owned by chemical baron Pierre S. DuPont, where her father ran the maintenance department. She had a great laugh and was full of confidence and poise. They danced nearly every dance, and met again two days later at a Sunday nightTea Sing at the chapel, where they stood side by side singing carols.
    Louise Brewer could easily have been mistaken for Rita Hayworth’s younger sister. She had luxurious hair, perfect teeth, and a long, sensuous neck. She was virginal and sexy at the same time. And there was something else—something ethereal about her composure that, Alan would learn, made many men worship her from afar.
    Alan joined the club of worshipers, and on Monday’s train ride toward Boston he kept thinking of Louise’s green eyes and elegant smile. She