HYPERNORMAL:

Americans of his or any generation remained at the center of American life for so long, personifying his time and the American character for all time. He explored the new frontier of space for a nation that defined itself by the frontiers it pierced. He embodied the New Frontier for a nation eager for challenge.

He was exceptional because he was in so many ways unexceptional -- except for the 4 hours, 55 minutes of the flight of Friendship 7, which rallied an American space program that had fallen dangerously far behind the Soviets and which rallied a nation that seemed stunned by the chill of the Cold War.

His was, in many ways, the classic American life. He grew up the son of a plumber in New Concord, Ohio, in the center of the country, and though he didn't marry the girl next door he began a courtship, love affair and marriage with the girl just down Bloomfield Road, the former Anna Margaret Castor, that spanned 73 years.

He became arguably the least colorful, least iconoclastic, least wild-eyed test pilot in history. He was not especially articulate, especially visionary or especially interesting. Scores of reporters combed his childhood and adult years, failing utterly in their desperate effort to uncover a single anecdote of note. (The one exception: A devoted airman and a proud symbol of pilots everywhere, Mr. Glenn flew until he was 90 years old -- and sold his plane the day after he passed his last aviation test.)

A Puritan among pugilists and a rector among reprobates, he fought in America's wars of the mid-century, World War II and Korea, and retained an elemental and abiding fascination for the very field of aviation that had provided the only other American hero of his century who rivaled Mr. Glenn, Charles Lindbergh.

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