John Young was one of my boyhood heroes. I was quite the space buff in my early teens, and always enjoyed the corned beef sandwich story. So he outlived his Gemini 3 partner, Gus Grissom, by almost 51 years.
He spoke here at the Convention Centre in early '82, and I attended along with some of my college classmates. He was a very good speaker, and opened with something like "Well, it was 80 degrees in Houston this morning, and about -35 here when I got off the plane, so that's comparable to the temperature differentials we experience in space."
Young & Crippen's first Shuttle flight of April 20, 1981, was 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin's first manned orbit spaceflight.
RIP John Young - now all of the Mercury astronauts are gone, and Geminis are thinning out.