06/05/2026
On the morning of May 19, 2020, the steady wife of the most famous American astronaut of the entire Mercury era died peacefully at a nursing home in St. Paul, Minnesota.
She was 100 years old.
She had been married to her husband John Herschel Glenn Jr. for 73 straight years.
She had been a widow for the previous 4 years.
She had been one of the last surviving members of the Mercury Seven astronaut-wives community that had quietly carried the original 1960s American space program through every one of its dangerous flights.
Her name was Anna Margaret Castor Glenn.
The American press, the Ohio public, and the entire global astronaut community had always known her simply as Annie.
She had also been, throughout the first 53 years of her own life, one of the most quietly courageous American women ever to live with the daily affliction of a severe lifelong stutter.
She had finally overcome it at the age of 53.
She had then spent the next 47 years using her own carefully recovered voice to advocate, on national television and in front of American medical-school audiences and grade-school speech-pathology classrooms, for every other American child and every other American adult who had ever sat silently in a classroom because they could not make their own mouth form the words they were trying to say.
She had been one of them.
She had spent 53 years being one of them.
She had not been able, by every careful account of her own family, to order coffee in a restaurant.
She had not been able to ask a taxicab driver where she needed to go.
She had not been able to use the telephone to call her own husband.
She had not been able, by her own 1976 description in People magazine, to imagine what she would do if one of her own children was ever injured and needed a doctor.
She had told the magazine directly: "I worried that my children would be injured and need a doctor. Could I somehow find the words to get the information across on the phone?"
She had spent every one of those 53 years quietly worrying about that exact question.
Anna Margaret Castor had been born in Columbus, Ohio, on February 17, 1920.
Her father was an Ohio dentist named Dr. Homer Castor.
Her mother was an Ohio homemaker named Margaret Castor.
The family relocated, when Anna was still a child, to the slightly quieter Ohio town of New Concord, in the green farmland country of the southeastern part of the state.
She grew up there.
She attended the New Concord public schools.
She met her lifelong love — the boy who would eventually become America's first orbital astronaut — when both of them were still children playing together in their parents' shared New Concord neighborhood.
His name was John Herschel Glenn Jr.
He was the son of a New Concord plumber.
His parents and Annie's parents were close friends.
The two families occasionally rented adjoining cottages together at an Ohio lake during summer holidays.
John Glenn would later describe the origin of their relationship, in a 1999 family memoir, with characteristic directness.
He wrote: "We practically grew up in the same playpen. We never knew a time when we didn't know each other."
She had been Annie since they were children.
She would be Annie for the next nine straight decades.
The two of them attended the same New Concord schools throughout the 1920s and 1930s. They graduated from the same Ohio high school together. They became high-school sweethearts. They both enrolled at Muskingum College in New Concord. She majored in music. She was an organist. She was, by every account, an unusually gifted student musician.
She was also, by the time she was in college, completely unable to recite any classroom assignment that required her to stand up and speak.
She stuttered too severely.
The Muskingum College professors quietly accommodated her.
She graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1942.
On the spring morning of April 6, 1943, the 22-year-old college sweethearts were married in a quiet ceremony at the Presbyterian church in New Concord, Ohio.
He was 21.
She was 23.
It was the middle of the Second World War.
He had just been commissioned as a Marine Corps Reserve fighter pilot.
For the next 73 straight years, Annie Glenn was the steady wife of one of the most consistently dangerous working military and civilian aviators of the entire American 20th century.
He flew 59 combat missions in the Pacific theater during the Second World War.
He flew 90 more combat missions in the Korean War.
He became one of the first United States military test pilots.
He set the American transcontinental speed record in 1957.
He was selected, in 1959, as one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts — the group of seven military test pilots who would crew the entire first generation of American manned spaceflight.
On the Florida morning of February 20, 1962, John Glenn climbed into the one-man Mercury capsule called Friendship 7 at Cape Canaveral.
He was 40 years old.
He became, that same morning, the first American ever to orbit the Earth.
The flight lasted approximately 4 hours and 55 minutes.
It made him, by sundown that same day, the single most famous working American military officer in the entire history of postwar United States aerospace.
He returned, by every quiet account of his own family, to the Ohio wife who had spent the entire 4-hour-and-55-minute orbit watching the grainy black-and-white CBS television coverage from the living room of their Arlington, Virginia home, with their two teenage children John David and Carolyn beside her.
She had been terrified.
She had been completely unable, by her own subsequent admission, to do live television interviews about her own terror.
She stuttered too severely.
The Vice President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, personally requested a private interview with her on the morning of the Friendship 7 flight.
She told her husband, over a NASA mission-control telephone line: "John, I don't want him here."
He said back to her, very simply: "Tell them I just said that if you don't want the vice president or the TV networks or anybody else to come into the house, then that's it. I will back you up all the way, one hundred percent, and you tell them that. I don't want Johnson or any of the rest of them to put so much as one toe inside our door."
She told them.
She backed him up.
She refused the live television interview with the Vice President of the United States.
She had been protecting her stutter.
He had protected her right to do exactly that.
He had said so himself.
For the next 12 straight years, Annie Glenn quietly accompanied her husband through every public appearance, every NASA ceremony, every Mercury anniversary reunion, every ticker-tape parade, every political campaign, and every fundraising banquet of his entire long postwar working life.
She did not give live television interviews.
She did not speak publicly.
She did not make dinner toasts.
She quietly attended every one of his public events as the dignified wife of one of the most beloved working American astronauts of the entire 1960s.
And then, in 1973, when Annie was 53 years old, her daughter Carolyn — a working speech pathologist herself by then — gently suggested to her mother that there was a new experimental speech-therapy program at the Communications Research Institute at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, that had been quietly helping adult stutterers learn to control their stutters for the first time in their adult lives.
Annie agreed to try it.
She drove to Hollins College, by herself, in the spring of 1973.
She spent the next three straight weeks at the Hollins facility undergoing intensive daily speech-therapy sessions for several hours each day.
She did not see her husband for the entire three weeks.
She did not see her two grown children.
She did not see her two grandchildren.
She did the careful daily work.
At the end of the three weeks, she walked into the Hollins administrative office and quietly asked, in a careful unstuttered sentence, to use the office telephone.
She placed a long-distance call to her husband at his Washington, D.C. Senate office.
He picked up.
She spoke one careful full sentence into the telephone receiver without stuttering.
It was the first complete sentence she had spoken to him over a telephone, by her own subsequent account, in 53 straight years.
John Glenn — the Marine Corps fighter pilot who had survived 149 combat missions across two American wars, the NASA astronaut who had been the first American ever to see the curved Earth from space — quietly cried on the other end of the telephone line.
He described the moment, many years later, in his 1999 family memoir.
He wrote: "I cried. I had never been able to imagine what hearing her speak a full sentence over the telephone would actually sound like."
She had spoken a full sentence.
She did not stop speaking them, by every quiet account of her own family, for the next 47 straight years.
For the rest of her adult life, Annie Glenn quietly used her own carefully recovered voice to do the work she had not been able to do for the previous 53 years.
She traveled to American grade schools.
She spoke to audiences of speech-pathology graduate students.
She accepted an adjunct teaching position at The Ohio State University Department of Speech and Hearing Science.
She lectured at academic conferences.
She wrote careful personal essays for People magazine, for Family Circle, and for the Ohio State University journal of communication disorders.
She also quietly accepted, in 1987, the honor of having a major annual professional speech-pathology award named after her.
The award had been created by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
It was called The Annie.
It has been awarded, every year since 1987, to the American individual who has demonstrated the most extraordinary personal courage in overcoming a communication disorder during the previous calendar year.
She was the original recipient.
She was the reason the award existed.
She had earned, by every quiet account of those who worked with her most closely throughout her late life, exactly the recognition that her own 53 silent years had quietly built.
She had been one of them.
She had become, in her last 47 years, the steady advocate for every other one of them.
In 1998, when John Glenn was 77 years old, NASA invited him to return to space one final time aboard the space shuttle Discovery.
He had been retired from the United States Senate for one full year by then.
He agreed to the final flight.
Annie had private reservations.
She told a NASA interviewer, in a public statement that has since become one of the most quoted lines in the entire history of postwar American space-program spousal patience: "John had announced one year before that he was going to retire as a senator, so I was looking forward to having him as my own because I had given him to our government for 55 years."
She had given him to the government for 55 straight years.
She had wanted, finally, to have him as her own.
She did get him back, very quietly, throughout the next 18 straight years.
The Glenns lived together in their Columbus, Ohio apartment throughout most of those final years.
They spent careful evenings together.
They read the daily Columbus Dispatch newspaper together over their kitchen table.
They visited their grown children and their grandchildren in Ohio and Minnesota.
They received, in May of 2012, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
John Glenn passed away peacefully on the evening of December 8, 2016, at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus.
He was 95 years old.
Annie had been beside him.
She had been beside him, in one form or another, since they were children playing together in the New Concord, Ohio dirt yards of the 1920s.
She would survive him by exactly 3 years, 5 months, and 11 days.
After his death, Annie quietly moved out of the Columbus apartment they had shared for the previous several decades.
She relocated to an assisted-living facility in St. Paul, Minnesota, to be closer to her daughter Carolyn — the speech pathologist who had originally encouraged her, 43 years earlier, to go to Hollins College and finally overcome her lifelong stutter.
She lived there quietly for the next 3 years.
In the spring of 2020, the global coronavirus pandemic that had quietly begun moving through American nursing homes reached the St. Paul facility where Annie Glenn was living.
She contracted the virus.
She died of complications from the respiratory illness on the Tuesday morning of May 19, 2020.
She was 100 years old.
Her daughter Carolyn was beside her.
She was buried, by her own clear earlier instructions, beside her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.
She had been the Ohio dentist's daughter who had stuttered for the first 53 straight years of her life.
She had been the high-school sweetheart of the New Concord boy who eventually became the first American to orbit the Earth.
She had been the Marine wife.
She had been the NASA wife.
She had been the dignified Mercury Seven astronaut's wife who had refused, in February of 1962, to grant a live television interview to the Vice President of the United States.
She had been the 53-year-old who had quietly driven herself to a Virginia college in 1973 to undergo three weeks of speech therapy that finally allowed her to speak a full sentence to her own husband over a telephone for the first time in their entire 30-year marriage.
She had been the adjunct professor at The Ohio State University.
She had been the national advocate for every other adult American stutterer.
She had been the original recipient of an award named "The Annie" in her own quiet honor.
She had also been, by every account of those who loved her best, exactly the Ohio woman she had always been: kind, dignified, fiercely protective of her own private life, quietly devoted to her one husband across 73 straight years, and quietly determined never to allow her own lifelong stutter to define the steady person she had always known herself to be.
She had been Annie Glenn.
She had been the reason her husband cried over a telephone line in 1973.
She had also been, in the most precise and most enduring sense of the word, the daily proof that a lifelong stutter does not get to be the last word about an ordinary human voice.
She had spoken the last word herself.
It had been a full sentence.
She had spoken it carefully into a telephone receiver in a Virginia college office on an afternoon in 1973.
She had been 53 years old.
She had spoken every sentence she had ever wanted to speak, very deliberately, for the next 47 straight years.
She had not stopped speaking them until the Tuesday morning of May 19, 2020.
She had been 100 years old.
She had been Annie.
She had been ready.
She had said so herself.
-- Wired drive
