Wally Schirra, 1923-2007

New York Daily News: Back when space exploration was still a breathtakingly thrilling endeavor in the popular mind and America's astronauts were the most valorous of public heroes -- before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and we all got blase about these things -- Hackensack, N.J.'s, Wally Schirra was a Right Stuff guy, one of the nation's original Mercury Seven spacemen who blazed those unimaginably bold trails into the beyond.
He was the son of two archetypal 1920s county-fair barnstormers -- indeed, his mother was one of those daredevil wing-walkers of the day -- and he grew up with that kind of derring-do in his blood.
In 1962 he orbited the Earth six times, and in 1965 he commanded the Gemini mission that made the first rendezvous of two spacecraft in orbi. In 1968 he headed the Apollo 7 flight, the prologue to Armstrong's moonwalk a few months later.
Capt. Schirra was, in fact, the only astronaut to have flown in all three NASA projects -- Mercury and Gemini and Apollo -- back in those storybook days, all those years ago.