Read Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman for Free Online

in winter, cars with spiked tires raced in ovals around it, and Shepard sometimes skied behind a car, towed by a rope tied to the bumper, once reaching sixty-eight miles an hour. When it snowed, he and his friends built ski jumps on a steep hill behind his house andmeasured their distances, striving to beat each other. Shepard’s personal best was thirty-five feet.
    Shepard’s favorite form of entertainment, though, was spending time beneath his grandparents’ mansion next door, in a basement full of his dead grandfather’s tools and machines— a dank hideout that hosted Shepard’s most glorious childhood moments.
    His grandfather Fritz had been a tinkerer, drawn to the technology of his day: radios, electric-powered tools, a wind-up phonograph. When he died, those techno-toys collected dust until Alan discovered them—along with Fritz’s workshop, racks of tools, a treadle-powered band saw, and a cider press—in the stone-walled, dirt-floored basement. As Willy Loman says in
Death of a Salesman:
“A man who can’t handle tools is not a man.” And in that regard, Shepard—like many of the engineers, pilots, and astronauts who became his colleagues—was all man. With his school friends or all alone, Shepard spent many lost hours in that basement, dismantling and rebuilding small engines or sawing and shaving wood scraps into model boats that he’d launch into naval skirmishes on Beaver Lake.
    Fritz and Nanzie’s basement was also the sanctum sanctorum where Shepard hatched naughty schemes. From an early age Shepard was attracted to the type of fun that had a whiff of danger or mischief about it. In that basement, for example, he learned to transform apples into alcohol.
    He and some friends would collect apples from the small orchard out back—only those that had fallen, because they were more ripe—push the apples through a hand-cranked apple grinder, then dump the mashed apples into a press, beneath which they’d collect the strained juice in ceramic jugs and wooden caskets. Shepard would let the jugs and caskets sit a few weeks in a corner of the basement, fermenting. When the cider ripened and turned boozy but not yet vinegary, he’d invite a few classmates down into the basement and they’d all get loopy drinking his hard, slightly alcoholic cider.
    In his pursuit of devil making, Shepard sought the thrill of attracting attention, but he worked hard to minimize any chance of implication. His hard cider parties, for example, were relatively safe affairs because Grandma Nanzie was hard of hearing.
    He didn’t shoplift or get into fights or openly defy his parents or do drugs. But he did fall in love with the buzz that came from a perfectly executed, low-risk, high-impact prank. Later, as a Navy pilot, he became infamous for his high-speed devilry, such as ripping terrifyingly low across a crowded Maryland beach in a jet or flying beneath a bridge. As an astronaut, he raised such stunts to an art form as he and his colleagues regularly taunted news reporters, innkeepers, politicians—and each other. They put rotten fish in each other’s cars and sabotaged the engines, always striving for the perfect “gotcha.”
    Shepard’s love of a good prank created many tensions between him and his stern father. One Christmas he gave a cigar to Bart’s older brother, Fritz. After dinner, Uncle Fritz lit the stogie only to have it poof in his face. While Shepard was happily amused by the gag, his cousins were shocked. Not until Fritz broke into a grin did they laugh, too, though a bit nervously. Bart, sitting at the head of the table, didn’t even crack a smile.
    Within an otherwise serious clan, Shepard’s mold-breaking pranks stood out, as did his total lack of fear and his indifference to reprisal—as one cousin observed, Shepard was “not awed by authority.” Renza often struggled to keep her son focused, and she once acknowledged how difficult it was to “keep a teenager with boundless energy out of