Free Republic

Annie Glenn, the wife of the late astronaut and U.S. Sen. John Glenn, is turning 100 Monday and is doing fine, a spokesman said. But she is eschewing the media spotlight that shone on her and her husband for nearly six decades. “The Glenn family is appreciative of the continued affection and interest toward Annie. She is well but is no longer doing interviews,” Hank Wilson, a spokesman for the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University, said in an email.

To many, theirs was an odd pairing. As John himself wrote: “We practically grew up in the same playpen. We never knew a time when we didn’t know each other.” (Annie says they were 2 years old when they met.) But they were different. John was athletic and outgoing while Annie barely spoke, not because she didn’t have anything to say, but because when she did, people often assumed she was either deaf or mentally deficient. For most of her life, Annie was afflicted with an 85 percent stutter, meaning she would become “hung up on 85 percent of the...

An interesting story surrounds last month's  50th anniversary celebration of the  Mercury-Atlas 6 manned space flight... John and Annie Glenn with VP Johnson, 1962 John Glenn's own true heroFor half a century now the world has applauded John Glenn as a heart-stirring American hero. He lifted the nation's spirits when, as one of the original Mercury astronauts, he was blasted alone into orbit around the Earth; the enduring affection for him is so powerful that even now people find themselves misting up at the sight of his face or the sound of his voice. But for all these years, Glenn has...