John and Annie Glenn met when she was 3 years old and he was 2. He was born in Cambridge, Ohio, and she in Columbus, Ohio. Their parents, Homer and Margaret Castor and John and Clara Glenn, were friends, and the couple grew up together as playmates in New Concord, Ohio. In writing about his wife, John said “We practically grew up in the same playpen — we never knew a time when we didn’t know each other.”
As the two entered high school, their pairing became the normal course of events. John wrote many years later: “Somewhere in my teens I took a second look at Annie and liked what I saw.”
“He was motivated by commitment, which is the reason he and Annie had this huge relationship,” said M.J. Veno, John’s former Senate staff director. That faithfulness really cemented itself when both were teenagers. A telling story is the time Annie developed mumps. Glenn trooped over to her home, cut a hole through her bedroom window screen, passed in a radio and kept her company during her illness, Veno said.
Wedding Bells
Toward the end of high school, the couple discussed marriage and toyed with the idea of eloping to Kentucky, but elopement never went beyond being a romantic notion. Both enrolled in Muskingum College, where Annie majored in music. She played the trombone and piano and also grew to love the pipe organ, developing her skills enough to receive a scholarship offer from The Julliard School of Music. However, when World War II began and John proposed, she declined the scholarship, and they were married.
The Glenns’ son, David, was born in 1945, followed by their daughter, Lyn, in 1947. Annie was the stay-at-home parent during John’s days as a combat pilot in World War II and the Korean War, a test pilot and when he entered the Mercury space program. John, in public speeches and in his writing, clearly recognized the contributions Annie made to the family and to the success of his own careers. He wrote about his life as a Marine in his 1999 memoir.
“She accepted uncomplainingly the life of that decision — not only the frequent moves and the scramble for housing that each new move required but the dangers inherent in flying and the possibility that I would go back into combat,” he wrote.
John remembered how Annie sobbed with relief during their first conversation after he returned to Earth in his Friendship 7 capsule in 1962. She had been told the craft’s heat shield might fail, causing total incineration of the capsule. And he had lost contact with controllers for 5 minutes when he re-entered the atmosphere.
“Despite her crippling stuttering problem, Annie always did what she had to do to make things work,” he said. “I knew too, that her speech continued to make life more of a burden for her than it was for many other people, and that I could have alleviated that for her if I had been around more.”
Out for a Pack of Gum
The couple had long shared a memorable parting line on the eve of his perilous adventures, from the early days when he left to serve as a Marine pilot in the South Pacific in 1944 to more recent times before he departed on the Discovery shuttle mission in 1998.
“I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum,” he would say. To which she replied, “Don’t be long.”
Annie always took an intense interest in her husband’s activities. She attended Senate briefings and went to training sessions for the 1998 Discovery mission. Dale Butland, Glenn’s long-time press secretary and political advisor, called her “the absolute rock” of the family.
“A lot of people on the staff thought she was the most natural politician in the family,” Butland said. “She was enormously and completely supportive of everything he had ever done, that’s not to say that she didn't have a mind of her own. And she didn't mind speaking her mind at times.”
“They were inseparable,” said Deborah Merritt, the first permanent director of the John Glenn Institute of Public Service and Public Policy at Ohio State. “Students hear that the Glenns literally met in a playpen and wonder if they can find a soul mate in their lives.”
Annie’s tenacious spirit was the glue that held her family together, especially during long stretches when John was away serving his country as a combat pilot, test flight aviator, astronaut and politician.
Their spirited relationship remained playful through the years. Don Stenta, the Glenn Institute’s former associate director, remembers watching both Glenns near a dessert table at a Page Hall reception.
“They each kept reaching over and taking bite-sized pieces and looking at each other and laughing,” Stenta said.
The two were so inseparable that in 1981 the Ohio Democratic Party gave the “Democrat of the Year” award to them as a couple for their efforts the previous year.
Fittingly, Glenn shared the spotlight at Ohio State’s spring 2009 commencement with Annie when she received an honorary Doctor of Public Service degree in recognition of her work on behalf of children and others. Several months later, at Ohio State’s season opener football game against Navy, the Glenns joined the privileged few selected to dot the “i” of the Ohio State Marching Band’s Script Ohio formation.