About 45 years ago, former Muskingum College student-athlete John H. Glenn Jr. became the first American to orbit the earth, hurtling around the planet three times at a breathtaking 17,500 miles per hour.

Despite Glenn’s clear affinity for speed, the NCAA is pausing to honor the former combat pilot, NASA astronaut and retired senator from Ohio as the recipient of the 2008 NCAA Theodore Roosevelt Award.

Named after the 26th president of the United States, who is largely credited with the formation of the NCAA in 1906, the “Teddy” is the highest honor the Association bestows and is annually presented to a distinguished citizen of national reputation and outstanding accomplishment who was a varsity letter-winner in college. Glenn will be recognized at the Honors Celebration January 13 during the NCAA Convention in Nashville.

“It’s a great honor to join the long list of people who have received this award before,” said Glenn. “These are very notable folks and I appreciate being included in their company.”
Glenn’s accomplishments are numerous and lofty enough that it’s hard to pinpoint the one for which he’s most well known. While he is content to let others sort that out, he is quite clear on one point.

A classic example of the Association’s tagline that most NCAA student-athletes go pro in something other than sports, Glenn said some of his later achievements were more notable than those on the field.

The aviation bug bit Glenn early. At the age of 8, he and his father were driving past a small grass airport field in Cambridge, Ohio, where a pilot was taking people for rides in a small two-cockpit open airplane.

“My dad asked me if I wanted to go up for a ride,” he recalled. “It was quite an experience for me to look down and see what things looked like. I was hooked on aviation from that time on.”
Though he enjoyed building model airplanes and looked forward to annual trips to the Cleveland Air Races, Glenn never imagined he would become an aviator for the ages. In fact, he figured on being a doctor.

Early roots in the sky

Though he was born in Cambridge, Glenn grew up in New Concord, Ohio, population 1,200, not counting the additional 1,000 or so contributed by nearby Muskingum. His father operated a plumbing business and the family home doubled as a rooming house for college students. It was natural, then, that Glenn would matriculate at Muskingum, where he was a member of the football team and the freshman basketball squad.

Opportunity struck during his junior year when he saw a notice about the government’s Civilian Pilot Training program, which paid for participants’ flight training and allowed them to earn a private pilot’s license and pick up physics credit.

“That was too good to miss,” said Glenn, who went on to earn his pilot’s license in spring 1941. Later that year, Pearl Harbor was attacked, and the ensuing war led Glenn to exchange his lab coat for a flight suit.

Glenn would return to school and graduate with the Muskingum class of 1943, earning a bachelor of science in mathematics. He would end up flying 149 combat missions during World War II and the Korean War. A six-time recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross, Glenn went on to become one of the top test pilots in the nation. In 1957, he set a speed record flying from Los Angeles to New York in 3 hours and 23 minutes as part of “Project Bullet,” a steppingstone to his selection as one of the first astronauts for the nation’s burgeoning space program.

It was more than an opportunity to expand his already considerable professional career or to permanently etch his place in history — it was a chance to prove to the American public and the world that the United States was not lagging in the so-called “Space Race” with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

“The Soviet Union claimed they were proving their superiority by the fact that they had orbited vehicles successfully while we, too often, were blowing up on the launch pad. The Cold War was very real and people were very much afraid of the spread of Communism. It was a very tense time,” said Glenn. “When the people of our country finally realized we were ahead and we were coming back after those early flights, they responded to that in an emotional way. There was a huge, intense focus on the program and on us as individuals in the program that went beyond anything I think any of us had foreseen when we signed up.”

Public servant

Glenn’s successful orbit of Earth in February 1962 did more than ease tensions. It also served as his springboard into public service, a long-held interest of Glenn’s, thanks to a high school civics teacher. Though he initially resisted calls for him to run for public office because he wanted to reinvest his knowledge and experience of space travel back into upcoming flights, the assassination of John F. Kennedy changed his perspective.

“Like most Americans, I sat back and reassessed my responsibilities to the country and decided I would run,” he said.

His attempt to win an Ohio Senate seat in 1965 was aborted when Glenn was seriously injured in a fall, and his first full campaign in 1970 ended in defeat. Four years later, though, Glenn was elected to the United States Senate, a position he held for 24 years.

In that time he was the chief author of the 1978 Nonproliferation Act, served as chair of the Senate Government Affairs Committee and sat on the Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees as well as the Special Committee on Aging. He also contended for the vice presidential nomination and ran in the 1984 Democratic primaries as a presidential candidate.

Even after he retired from the Senate in 1997, Glenn couldn’t resist the call of sky and space. He accepted NASA’s invitation to rejoin the space program as a member of the space shuttle Discovery crew and returned to a very different space program than the one he helped launch decades before.
“The emphasis had shifted from trying to determine whether we could go up into space successfully on the first flight to conducting basic research on the second flight,” he said.

On October 29, 1998, Glenn became the oldest human to travel in space.

These days, it’s Glenn and his longtime wife Annie who are providing the opportunities. They founded the John and Annie Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy at Ohio State University in 2000. The institute, Glenn said, has two basic purposes — inspiring citizenship and training leadership — and while it’s the student-athletes who represent colleges and universities in a public forum, he encouraged all students to become engaged in service.

“The idea of students being interested in public service and in their communities, that’s something we encourage completely,” he said.

The Glenns also have backed the John and Annie Glenn Historic Site and Exploration Center in New Concord, in which Glenn’s boyhood home has been restored to the way it looked when he was growing up in the 1930s and ’40s. Actors educate groups about the Great Depression era as they lead tours through the house.

Glenn and his wife have remained connected to the Muskingum community, serving as trustees to the college.