COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Annie Glenn, the wife of the late astronaut and U.S. Sen. John Glenn, is turning 100 Monday and is doing fine, a spokesman said.
But she is eschewing the media spotlight that shone on her and her husband for nearly six decades.
“The Glenn family is appreciative of the continued affection and interest towards Annie. She is well but is no longer doing interviews,” Hank Wilson, a spokesman for the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University, said in an email.
The Glenns had been married for 73 years when John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, died in 2016 at age 95.
Annie Glenn, an advocate and educator in communication disorders, has rarely appeared in public since then. The college threw a small 97th birthday celebration for her in 2017, shortly after her husband died, where she said she missed her lifelong companion “terribly.”
A miniature replica of “The Annie,” the premier public award of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, was carried to the International Space Station in 2018.
John Glenn had already been awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, but a resolution urging Congress to award the Glenns a joint medal is pending in the Ohio Legislature.