OK, this frosts me a bit. The South Bend Tribune recently ran an article about Iven Kincheloe and Robert White, but I just found out they only keep stories online for a week. Here’s a blurb I was able to grab from CollectSpace.com:
Who was the first man in space?
Cassopolis residents are likely to say it was Iven Kincheloe Jr., a Cassopolis native who in 1956 set a new altitude record when he flew a research plane 126,200 feet — nearly 24 miles — above the Earth. Kincheloe was quoted as saying that at the peak of his Bell X-2 research plane’s trajectory, he was weightless…
“At the time, he was declared the first spaceman. It was a big deal,” recalled Steve Arseneau, director of the Southwestern Michigan College Museum in Dowagiac.
So it was something of a surprise recently when news accounts of the death in Orlando, Fla., of Robert White, 85, identified him as the first man to fly a winged craft into space.
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