Centennial of ex-astronaut, US Senator John Glenn marked

John Glenn has been honored over the weekend with a three-day festival in Ohio marking what would have been the history-making astronaut and U.S. senator’s 100th birthday

NEW CONCORD, Ohio -- John Glenn has been honored over the weekend with a three-day festival in Ohio marking what would have been the history-making astronaut and U.S. senator’s 100th birthday. Glenn, who died in 2016, was the first American to orbit Earth, making him a national hero in 1962. Before that, he served as a military fighter pilot in World War II and the Korean War and set a transcontinental air speed record. In 1998, he became the oldest person ever to go into space at 77. He spent 24 years as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate. The John Glenn Centennial Celebration Friday to Sunday was a collaboration between Cambridge, where Glenn was born on July 18, 1921, and nearby New Concord, where he grew up and met his late wife, Annie, who died last year at 100 of complications from COVID-19. Lyn Glenn, the late senator's daughter, watched parade floats go by Saturday from the front porch of her father's boyhood home, a place she felt at home, too.