MEMORIES John Glenn with President John F. Kennedy.  In the winter of 1962, the nation needed a hero.  Americans had yet to recover from the Soviet Union’s launching of the first spacecraft, Sputnik, in October 1957 — a rude jolt to our confidence as world leaders in all things technological. The space race was on.  Soon after he took office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy had thrown down the challenge to send men to the Moon by the end of the decade. But the Russians still set the pace, boastfully. They launched a dog into orbit, then the first man, Yuri A. Gagarin, and another, Gherman S. Titov.  The United States lagged, managing only two 15-minute suborbital astronaut flights — only five minutes of weightlessness each time.  Then, on Feb. 20, 1962 — 50 years ago next Monday — a Marine Corps fighter pilot from small-town America stepped forward in response to the country’s need. The astronaut was John Glenn, whom the author Tom Wolfe has called “the last true national hero America has ever had.”  Squeezed into the cockpit of a Mercury spacecraft called Friendship 7, launched by an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., Mr. Glenn circled the Earth three times, becoming the first American to orbit the planet. Perhaps no other spaceflight — all 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds of it — has been followed by so many with such paralyzing apprehension.  Mr. Glenn saw three sunsets and sunrises that Tuesday, from a maximum altitude of 162 miles. At each sunrise, an explosion of what looked like fireflies appeared outside the window, mystifying him. Then came a signal of a suspected problem that had ground controllers bracing for an uncertain, possibly catastrophic re-entry into the atmosphere.  The ending was a happy one. A collective sigh of relief was heard across the land. The president rushed off to Cape Canaveral to hail the returning hero. Bands played. Ticker tape streamed from the high windows of Broadway. People cried. Never mind that a Soviet cosmonaut had already spent 25 hours in orbit. As Mr. Wolfe has written, “John Glenn made us whole again!”  Now, at 90, Mr. Glenn was reminded in one of two lengthy interviews that the author of “The Right Stuff” had judged him the country’s last true hero. His response was a kind of dismissive aw shucks. “Hero” is an elastic word, after all, stretchable to fit a favorite ballplayer or a great conqueror in war or discovery — almost anyone admirable.  “I don’t think of myself that way,” Mr. Glenn said. “I get up each day and have the same problems others have at my age. As far as trying to analyze all the attention I received, I will leave that to others.”  (For his part, Mr. Wolfe stood by his characterization, saying a national hero was someone seen as “a great protector” of the people. “He really wasn’t their protector, but that’s what people felt and thought,” he said of Mr. Glenn in an interview last week. “He made them cry, and this made him a hero.”)  On Saturday, Mr. Glenn will again get a hero’s welcome at Cape Canaveral for a reunion with the dwindling Mercury space team, those remaining managers, engineers and technicians who sent the first Americans into space. On Monday and Tuesday, he will be honored with a dinner and a spaceflight forum at Ohio State University, home of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs.  Mr. Glenn keeps an office at the school, holds seminars with students and is close to the archive of papers from his careers as an astronaut and, later, a four-term United States senator from Ohio and a candidate in the 1984 Democratic presidential primaries. It is quite an archive: about 1,800 boxes of materials. “I was a pack rat,” he said.  He and his wife, Anna (he calls her Annie), divide their time between a house in a suburb of Washington and a condominium in Columbus. She was his childhood sweetheart, and their marriage has stood the test of almost 69 years of devotion in the turbulence of spaceflight and politics. From the time they came to public attention, each has seemed the other’s center of gravity.  Through years of therapy, Mr. Glenn said, Annie has overcome the severe stammer that had made her ill at ease at public appearances. “She can give speeches now,” he said, and she likes talking to students of speech pathology. Both have had knee-replacement surgery.
The astronautâs first orbit of Earth â 50 years ago this month â revived national morale and hope.