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.
Watch Ohio State Public Policy Archivist Carly Dearborn discuss the early lives of John and Annie Glenn.