Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman by Neal Thompson

or khaki-and-white of uniformed men, so much so that writers called it “War City.” Civic groups urged residents to comfort men headed to or from war with the slogan “Make a serviceman happy.” Residents planted victory gardens to raise food for the war effort, bought $18.75 war bonds, and dumped their pennies into collection bowls, which raised money to buy cigarettes, gum, books, magazines, playing cards, and soap for their men at war.
    No expectation was spared—San Franciscans donated blood that was sent to the front lines, and the
San Francisco Examiner
conducted a “Save a Life with a Knife” campaign, urging readers to donate knives (four inches or longer) to be delivered to soldiers in the Pacific. Recruitment posters with brawny, shirtless men hung in shop windows: “Man the Guns—Join the Navy.” By the time Shepard arrived, the nagging threat of Japanese attack had abated, nighttime dim-out restrictions had been lifted, and the city’s thirty air-raid sirens wailed less frequently. Still, people kept their shades drawn at night, listening to Jack Benny or Fred Allen and sometimes picking up snippets of Tokyo Rose’s propaganda program
The Zero Hour.
    Shepard’s few weeks in San Francisco were both heady and invigorating. Savvy San Franciscans knew the difference between a mere sailor and an officer, and as a newly commissioned ensign, Shepard was treated with deference and respect. Restaurants, nightclubs, and movie theaters showered him with military discounts, and everywhere he went people clapped him on the back, offered encouraging words, and called him “sir.”
    But, at the same time, a subtle pall of sadness mixed with the wind and fog of the city.
    John Dos Passos, in a Harper’s magazine story entitled “San Francisco Faces West; The City in Wartime,” described how men counted the foggy, drizzly days to their inevitable departure from War City to war. Young men—often mere teenagers—sat quietly in restaurants eating a final meal with family, friends, or girlfriends. “No wonder they keep their lips pressed tight when they stare out toward the western horizon,” Dos Passos wrote.
    Shepard was never one to let depressive thoughts intrude on a good time, and he enjoyed his days and nights in San Francisco, slurping noodles in Chinatown, watching the seals on Seal Rocks from the Cliff House restaurant, hiking the crooked streets of Nob Hill. But he had to know what all departing Navy men knew: These could be his last days on American soil.
    Finally, in late August, he and Williams found their names on the roster. Navy veterans must have chuckled when Shepard asked about the transport ship posted beside his name. Though he’d one day command the most intricate and costly machines ever built by man, Shepard’s introduction to military life was aboard a stinking, decades-old rust bucket.

    The USS Willard A. Holbrook began life in 1921 as a luxury passenger ship, but in middle age it was demoted to freighter, regularly crisscrossing the Pacific, its holds stuffed with coconut meat, jute grass, burlap, and other exports from Asia. At the start of World War II, the U.S. Army took command of the rust-splotched ship to deliver troops to and from Pacific islands. The pungent stench of coconut, spices, and rotting grasses had seeped into the
Holbrook’
s steel frame, and Shepard and the others called her “Stinkin’ Old Holbrook.”
    As they steamed slowly toward the South Pacific, Shepard shared a tiny room with four other men. Inside those steel walls, it felt as if he was being roasted alive. Many men, sick of sleeping in puddles of sweat, slept up on deck beneath the stars with just a bedsheet—and, if they were lucky, accompanied by one of the thirty-one Army nurses aboard. For weeks they saw nothing but open water. They played marathon games of bridge and joked about how another classmate’s enormous penis should earn him an immediate promotion. As they crossed the equator, Shepard