John Herschel Glenn, Jr. (born 1921) was a military test pilot, astronaut, businessman, and U.S. senator from Ohio. In 1984 he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president. He retired from the Senate in 1999, a year after becoming the oldest person to enter space.

John Glenn was born in Cambridge, Ohio, on July 18, 1921, to John Herschel Glenn, Sr., a plumbing contractor, and Clara Sproat Glenn. His parents had two other children who died in infancy, and they later adopted his sister Jean. He was reared nearby in the small town of New Concord and graduated from high school in 1939. Glenn credits his parents for instilling his deep rooted Presbyterian faith and its accompanying philosophy that everyone is given certain talents and has a duty to use them to the fullest. He enrolled at Muskingum College, a Presbyterian school in New Concord, to study chemical engineering, but left there to...