I was at the LBJ Texas White House Ranch (Friday Jan. 15, 2016), turned a corner in the gift shop/museum and...wow! Very neat, concise space display with...what's this...OMG! President Johnson collected autographs of the famous who visited the Ranch on concrete blocks, called "Friendship Stones." And before me were the Mercury Triumvirate--Shepard and Glenn (signed April 24, 1962) and Grissom (who put the date of his sub-orbit July 21, 1961). They must have been at the Ranch together. Look at hero Gus' with the Mercury 7 symbol! Nice little serendipity at an awesome American treasure--the LBJ Ranch 50 miles west of Austin, TX.
        

MARQ AT LBJ RANCH  and SPACE RACE DISPLAY

                 FRIENDSHIP STONES AT PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON'S TEXAS WHITE HOUSE A SWEET SURPRISE OF SPACE HISTORY

     No politician of the 1950s or '60s did more for space exploration than Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States.  As Vice President under President John F. Kennedy, it fell to him to oversee the new agency NASA and the Moon Race with the Soviet Union when Kennedy cast the die to the Moon in 1961.   America's launch in Florida is named for Kennedy.  But is in Houston at the Johnson Space Center where most of the training is conducted and astronauts live.  And all the Moon rocks are at JSC!  
    So it must have been a special day when Americas first three spacemen came to visit the Texas White House on April 24, 1962.  

The Friendship Stones:   
     

Alan Shepard 

ALAN SHEPARD, Mercury 1 and Apollo 14  At age 37, the Navy test pilot from Derry, New Hampshire was strapped in a tiny Mercury capsule called on top of a converted rocket built for a nuclear warhead.  On the morning of May 5, 1961, after long delays necessitating him relieving himself in his spacesuit, America's first spaceship "Freedom 7" blasted off the coast of Florida.

Shepard in First Mercury Space Suit

  The spaceship reached 115 miles high and Shepard experienced a few minutes of weightlessness as he took controls.  Arcing back to Earth and  a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean 350 miles from its launch pad, the 15-minute, sub-orbital flight propelled Shepard to fame--a hero's ticker-tape parade in New York City awaited.  Ten years later, Shepard would sand on the Moon and wack a golf ball with a 6-iron while the world watched the Apollo 14 mission of 1971. 

 Shepard was one of the first astronaut millionaires (real estate), and was actor Jack Nicholson's character study as the neighbor moonwalker in the movie "Terms of Endearment."  Shepard and Deke Slayton were at the top of NASA's astronaut managment, in charge of chosing the prime and backup crew assignments for all the manned missions.  

Both were grounded by medical problems (Shepard an ear balance problem; Slayton a heart murmur) and than ran the astronaut office until medical treatment cleared their problem.  Shepard put himself originally as commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13, but needed more training and moved to Apollo 14.


  Slayton flew the historic Apollo mission link with a Russian Soyuz spaceship in 1975.  Navy Rear Admiral Shepard died in 1998 at age 74, and his ashes were spread at sea.  Shepard has been immortalized in a US postage stamp. 

JOHN H. GLENN  Mercury 3 1962; Shuttle Discovery 1998

Look up the word "hero" in the dictionary, and there is John Glenn, one of America's finest.  At age 40, he took "Friendship 7" around the world 3 times, the first American to orbit Earth.  

Glenn, wife Annie and Vice President LBJ

The spaceman came back way too valuable to risk sending back to space. So after a few years of spreading NASA's good will, he became a Senator from Ohio for 25 years.  But he yearned for space, kept in shape, and flew again at age 77 aboard Shuttle Discovery in 1998.


In 2016, Glenn was age 94 and retired to his boyhood home of Cambridge, Ohio.

VIRGIL "GUS" GRISSOM  Mercury 2 July 21, 1961; Gemini 3 March 23, 1965


Born in Mitchell, Indiana, Grissom was 34 years old when he strapped a rocket on his back and blasted into space on a Mercury mission that duplicated Shepard's first American foray into outer space.  The mission was a success except for one problem...a big one--the Mercury capsule sunk after filling with water, and Grissom nearly drowned when water filled his suit. 

Grissom on ship after rescue

 Grissom claimed the emergency hatch explosion was not caused by him, but he may have accidentally hit the button. Anyrate, he was redeemed, and chosen to fly the maiden flight of the two-man Gemini spaceship with rookie John Young.  That highly successful mission in March 1965 paved the way for Grissom to be given the nod as commander of America's new moonship, the Apollo. While testing a simulated flight while on top of their Saturn rocket at Cape Kennedy, a spark inside the pressurized spacecraft caused a flash fire that killed Grissom and two other astronauts in a minute. Date was Jan. 27, 1967. 

 The first US spacewalker Ed White and rookie Roger Chaffee perished with Grissom because of shoddy workmanship. Space history has many twists and turns in its story, and this is one that may have kept the name Grissom from eternity's history books as the first man to walk on the Moon.