Where I Stand -- Mike O'Callaghan: Shepard and friends made U.S. 20th century leader

"YOU ONLY HAVE to ask him once and he'll bring it out of the closet," astronaut Tom Stafford told Carolyn, my wife. Tom was referring to the six-iron used on the moon a year earlier by our Houston host. So she asked, and in a minute Alan Shepard with smiling eyes appeared in his living room with the famous iron he used to make two golf shots on the moon after arriving there as commander of Apollo 14.

Shortly after Shepard and fellow astronauts Stuart Roosa and Ed Mitchell had returned from the moon, they came to Las Vegas. During those days of the 1960s and early 1970s, Nevadans, through the efforts of Las Vegan Herb Kaufman, became very familiar with the men taking our nation into outerspace. Kaufman and Nevada's Sen. Howard Cannon were instrumental in several Nevada contacts with the space program. Also, the late Gen. Harry Wald and Billy Weinberger made them feel at home as guests at Caesars Palace.

Despite the national turmoil over the war in Vietnam, Americans were looking at the sky and cheering for the heroes taking our colors into outerspace. Even the Battle Born flag of Nevada went with the astronauts, and the governor's office has one of those flags and a piece of the moon as reminders. The space race had been triggered by the Soviets' successful launching of an unmanned satellite called Sputnik in 1957. Four years later, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, in Swallow, circled the earth.

The immediate response to the Soviet success by some power brokers and politicians was to sit this one out. According to Shepard and fellow astronaut Deke Slayton in their book "Moon Shot," President John F. Kennedy's chairman of his Science Advisory Committee, Jerome B. Wiesner of MIT, was among the powerful wanting to "gut the whole national space program." This approach to the situation didn't sit well with Kennedy, who the year before, when seeking office, had promised to move our country forward.

Our nation's answer to the Soviets was to send Shepard into space flying Freedom Seven in May 1961. Upon his return, Americans were jubilant and President Kennedy told them and Congress, "I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and," he paused, "none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

Two years later Kennedy was assassinated, but his promise to land on the moon became a reality eight years after he had made the commitment before Congress. In fact, four Americans, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean and Pete Conrad all walked on the moon in 1969. It was Shepard's turn in 1971 when taking Apollo 14 for history's longest trip to play golf on the lunar surface.

During a period of four years, 24 Americans went into space on the way to moon. Half of them rode their landers to its surface, and they are the only people from earth who have accomplished this adventurous task. They showed the courage and skill that brought pride to a country built on this kind of a foundation. Yes, Old Glory had been taken to the moon, and many astronauts returned to the Silver State where they had experienced some of their most strenuous survival training.

Alan Shepard was a leader among these courageous Americans. Although 27 years have passed since he landed on the moon, I have no doubt that the youngsters of today would consider him "cool" if they knew him. Personally, I came to regard him as the kind of man I would want with me going down a dark alley in the tough part of town or when preparing for a difficult math or science test.

After hitting the golf ball on the moon, Shepard murmured, "Beautiful." Then he added, "There it goes! Miles and miles and miles." If he could hit the ball that far on the moon, just imagine the length of a drive he could have hit from even farther out in space.

I wonder if he took his golf club with him on the trip he started this week.

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