Sunday, November 1: He's been up there three days now and by all reports he's doing fine, sleeping with wires on and doing his experiments right along with the young ones. I've added my notes on Thursday's launch below. Landing: Saturday, November 7. I'll write it up!

Hello, and welcome. My name is Shirley McPhail. I taught second grade in eastern Ohio for thirty-one years, until I retired in 1996, and every single one of those years, every February, I taught my children about John Glenn and Friendship 7. He's one of ours. He grew up in New Concord, not so far down the road from here, and I wanted every child who came through my room to know that a boy from a little Ohio town went around the whole world.

Now, at 77, he's done it again. I had to make a page.

Where I was in 1962 · Friendship 7 · The man · The new mission · Watching the launch · My Friendship 7 lesson

I was at home with our first baby, Janie, who was six weeks old. My husband Buford was at work. We had a black-and-white television set in the front room, and I had been watching for that launch for weeks, it seemed, because it kept getting put off, for the weather and for one thing and another. Every morning I'd turn on the set and every morning they'd say not today.

That Tuesday morning it went. I was rocking Janie with one arm and holding my breath. When the rocket went up I stood right up out of the rocker, baby and all. I stayed in front of that set all day long, while he went around three times, and I didn't do a lick of housework. When they said he was down in the ocean and safe, I cried, and Janie cried because I was crying. I have told my students that story every year. Janie is 36 now and has heard it more times than she'd like.

• John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth. Two Americans had gone up before him, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, but only up and down again. He went all the way around.
• He launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on top of an Atlas rocket, on Tuesday, February 20, 1962.
• His capsule was named Friendship 7. His children helped choose the name.
• He went around the Earth three times, in just under five hours.
• There was a scare. A signal on the ground made it look like the heat shield might have come loose, and the heat shield is what keeps the capsule from burning up when it comes back through the air. So they had him leave his retro-rocket pack strapped on over it, to help hold it in place, and he came down through the fire not knowing for sure. It held.
• He splashed down in the Atlantic and was picked up by a Navy ship, the destroyer Noa.
• Afterward the whole country went crazy for him. New York gave him a ticker-tape parade, and the people of New Concord had their own celebration for their own boy.

• Born July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, and raised in New Concord.
• Went to Muskingum College there, and married his childhood sweetheart, Annie. They've been married fifty-five years this year.
• A Marine Corps fighter pilot in World War II and in Korea.
• A test pilot. In 1957 he flew from California to New York faster than the speed of sound, the first time anybody had done that.
• One of the seven Mercury astronauts.
• Elected to the United States Senate from Ohio in 1974, and he's served ever since. He ran for President in 1984. He's retiring from the Senate this coming January, and I'd say he's picked a fine way to go out.

The space shuttle Discovery lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday, October 29, 1998, at 2:19 in the afternoon, our time. The flight is to last about nine days, with the landing back at Kennedy set for Saturday, November 7.

• Senator Glenn is 77 years old, the oldest person ever to go into space. Thirty-six years after Friendship 7.
• He's not just along for the ride. He's a payload specialist, and part of the work is a study of aging. The doctors want to know how much of what happens to astronauts in space, like their bones and muscles getting weaker, their balance going off and their sleep getting poor, is like what happens to all of us as we get older. So they're testing him before, during and after, and comparing.
• The crew also brought along a small satellite that flies free for a while to study the Sun, and they're testing equipment for the next repair mission to the Hubble telescope.
• The President and the First Lady were there at the Cape to watch it go up. I read that no sitting President had ever been there in person for a shuttle launch.

The crew of seven:

Mrs. Harter, who has my old classroom now (and has done wonderful things with it, I'll say), called me the week before and asked if I'd like to come watch the launch with her second graders and tell them about 1962. Would I! I brought my old Friendship 7 posters, which I had kept in the basement in a tube, and the scrapbook I made in 1962 out of newspaper clippings, and wore my flag pin.

The launch was in the early afternoon, just right for school. They rolled the television cart in and the children sat on the rug, and they counted down right along with the man on television. When it went, every one of them jumped up and yelled, and I'm not ashamed to say I did too. Thirty-six years later, same as with Janie, I was on my feet.

Afterward they asked me questions. One little boy wanted to know if Senator Glenn would get to go to the bathroom in space. One little girl asked if he was scared. I said I expected he was a little bit scared both times, and that being brave doesn't mean you're not scared, it means you go anyway. Mrs. Harter said that was going on her bulletin board.

They made him a card, all twenty-three of them signed it, and Mrs. Harter is mailing it to his Senate office.

For any teachers who find this page, here's the lesson I did every February for thirty years. It works for second grade and you can make it harder for older ones.

1. Read the class a short book about John Glenn and look at the pictures of the capsule. Find Ohio on the map, and then find New Concord.
2. Each child makes a capsule out of a paper cup turned upside down, with a construction paper cone on top and a window drawn on. They put their own name on the side, the way the astronauts named theirs.
3. Tape a long string to the capsule. One child holds the globe and the "astronaut" walks the capsule around it three times while the class counts the orbits out loud.
4. Talk about how long three times around took: less than one school day. Then talk about how long it takes to drive to Grandma's.
5. End with each child drawing a picture of what they think the Earth looked like out the window.

I still have a folder of those pictures from 1979. Blue and green and a great many clouds.

Coming next weekend: the landing on Saturday, November 7, and what the doctors find out. Buford and I go to Janie's for Thanksgiving this year, but I'll have it all written up long before then. God bless all seven of them.