excerpt adapted from the book Generation Space about Anna’s mother’s memory:
In early May of 1961, more than four years before I was born and long before she deemed my sister’s holiday ornament Sputnik, my mother (Mary Lee Leahy), still a college student, was in a car accident. Bruised and sore, she lay in a hospital bed. When a nurse brought her personal effects from the Emergency Room, my mother noticed cash missing from her wallet. The nurse said that Chicago’s police accepted such items as perks of the job and she was lucky all her jewelry was there. This was Mayor Richard J. Daley’s city, known not only for corruption that included the police but also for vote rigging in the presidential election of John F. Kennedy the year before. (My mother, much to her satisfaction, would later win as an Independent candidate to the Illinois Constitutional Convention against Daley’s political machine.)
Alan Shepard (NASA)
On the morning of May 5, a doctor came into my mother’s room. He turned on the TV, and other physicians wandered in. My mother’s room was one of few in the hospital to have a television set; it was crowded that Friday. Across the country, forty-five million people watched the same event: the first American in space.
While a quarter of the nation prepared to watch on television the launch of Alan Shepard inside his Freedom 7 capsule, the beaches and roadways near Cape Canaveral were also crowded with the curious. This launch was the culmination of a two-year public spectacle. Since the first press-packed announcement of the hopeful spacefarers of the Mercury program—the Mercury Seven, as they were commonly called—these astronauts-in-training had never been far from the public eye. The Cold War American media fed the public’s gaze.
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