Alan Shepard, America's First Astronaut

Alan Shepard, the first American to travel to space, was born in East Derry, New Hampshire in 1923. On May 5, 1961, just three weeks after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first human in space, Shepard rode the Freedom 7 capsule on a 15-minute suborbital flight that made him an American hero. He later walked on the moon on the Apollo 14 mission in 1971, and in a moment of pure New Hampshire practicality, smuggled a golf club head onto the lunar surface and hit two golf balls, describing the second shot as miles and miles and miles in the moon's low gravity.

Source: Wikipedia