How a railroad signalman's son from Mitchell, Indiana became the first man to fly in space twice
Virgil Ivan Grissom was born April 3, 1926, in Mitchell, Indiana, a town of 2,700 in the southern limestone country, where his father Dennis worked as a Baltimore & Ohio Railroad signalman. He graduated Mitchell High in 1944, served as a USAAF aviation cadet, then went to Purdue for a mechanical engineering degree, working as a short-order cook to pay his way. He earned his Air Force wings in 1951 and flew 100 combat missions in F-86 Sabres over Korea. NASA selected him as one of the original Mercury 7 in 1959. On July 21, 1961, he flew Liberty Bell 7 on the second American spaceflight, a suborbital arc that ended with the hatch blowing prematurely on splashdown; the capsule sank and was not recovered from the Atlantic floor until 1999. On March 23, 1965, he commanded Gemini 3, the "Molly Brown", with John Young, becoming the first person to fly in space twice. NASA named him commander of Apollo 1 in 1966. On January 27, 1967, a cabin fire during a launch-pad rehearsal at Cape Kennedy killed Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The former Bunker Hill Air Force Base was renamed Grissom AFB in 1968. A limestone memorial shaped like a Redstone rocket stands in downtown Mitchell; Liberty Bell 7 lives at the Kansas Cosmosphere, and the Molly Brown is at the Grissom Memorial in Spring Mill State Park, a few minutes from his boyhood home.