Delivering a Stephen A. Ogden Jr. Lecture on Saturday, John Glenn outlined three steps to happiness:

(1) "Exercise all the talents in which you have an interest."

(2) Happy people are "people who have a purpose or a group bigger than themselves," such as politics, which he referred to as "the personnel department for the Constitution."

(3) "Do something to others. Maybe you can prevent another Littleton, Colorado, just by being a friend to a kid."

About his trip to space last year - "the only seventy-seven-year-old," he said, "ever to leave Florida in something other than a Winnebago" - he joked that, contrary to rumor, the reason NASA had refused him permission for a space walk was not that "they were afraid I would wander off someplace."