Mark Kelly’s first campaign for office was decided by a coin toss. His twin brother, Scott, also wanted to be student congress president at their suburban New Jersey high school.
It was Scott who ended up vice president that time.
Fast forward four decades and it could be Mark Kelly’s turn to serve as vice president of the United States.
Arizona’s junior senator, a Garden State native who was pushed into politics after personal tragedy, is being vetted as a possible second-in-command as Democrat Kamala Harris makes a bid for the White House.
Kelly’s resume led Arizonans to send him from Tucson to Washington, D.C., in elections in 2020 and 2022: Navy combat and test pilot, astronaut, gun control advocate, husband of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz.
Americans followed along in newspapers and television spots as Mark and Scott became the first sibling astronauts, let alone identical twins, for NASA’s shuttle program in the mid-1990s. The nation watched after a 2011 shooting left Giffords gravely wounded, and six others dead, and as Mark Kelly helped her recover.
But Mark Kelly’s path from a New Jersey township to Navy captain — from rambunctious kid to a decorated aviator — is less well known. It’s a course that friends and former classmates said tested Kelly’s leadership ability in the most competitive environments.
“I've literally had my life in his hands hundreds of times, and I trust him absolutely,” said Paul Fujimura, who flew with Kelly in Operation Desert Storm.
'Favorite sons' of West Orange
The Kelly twins watched men land on the moon when they were five years old at their family home in West Orange, New Jersey, a township of about 39,000 wedged into a patchwork of suburbs commuting distance from Manhattan.
Mark Kelly has often said his parents taught him about the importance of public service.
His father, Richard, was an Army paratrooper and police officer in West Orange who rose in rank to captain. His mother, Patricia, worked as a secretary but put herself through rigorous training in the family’s backyard to become the township’s first female police officer.
“The boys don’t fear being astronauts, because they were born into a family of risk-takers,” Kelly has recalled his mother saying. “It’s in our blood.”
Kelly was not available for an interview for this story. His own account of growing up is taken from numerous public speeches and two books he co-authored with Giffords: “Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope,” published in 2011, and “Enough,” from 2014.
The accounts show an injury-prone and adventurous boy that some may have considered “borderline juvenile delinquents,” he wrote.
“Scott and I were rowdy kids,” he wrote in "Enough." “We fought with each other and our neighbors. We had our run-ins with the local cops, who let us off but made sure our parents knew what we were up to.”
He was hit by a car in kindergarten after he didn’t follow his mother’s direction to cross a street at the corner. He broke his knuckles in a fight in 9th grade.
“I guess I had a habit of coming out swinging in part because I was the son of a hard-charging, hard-drinking, hardworking New Jersey detective,” he wrote. In Scott Kelly’s 2017 book, “Endurance,” he describes their father as an alcoholic who once left the family without food and money for a weekend. Scott Kelly recalled violence and arguments at home.
Mark Kelly wrote that his parents also taught him and demonstrated for him the importance of a strong work ethic. His father told the boys they could join the welders' union, he had a contact there.
Mark Kelly became "nearly a straight-A student" from then on, he wrote.
Politics weren’t a prominent part of their childhood. Kelly wasn’t “all that interested” in local or national politics and didn’t know his parents’ partisan affiliations. His own have shifted over the years.
Now a Democratic senator, he voted in a Republican primary while an astronaut in Texas and records show he spent many years not affiliated with either major party.
Kelly graduated from West Orange’s Mountain High School in 1982. Yearbook and family photographs show the Kelly twins as skinny boys under mops of brown hair. They were captains of the swim team, and on the track team.
Decades later, and donning the iconic blue flight jackets synonymous with astronauts, the Kelly brothers returned to West Orange to see their elementary school renamed for them.
Pictures of Earth that Scott Kelly took on his shuttle flights line the walls of what is now Kelly Elementary School. Local leaders read dictionary definitions of “hero” and “pioneer” during an invite-only ceremony that drew former New Jersey Gov. Richard Codey.
The pair was deemed “favorite sons” of West Orange — and Mark Kelly not so subtly told the children in attendance to do their homework.
'He’s a pretty down-to-earth, normal person'
From West Orange, the teenage Mark Kelly went to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York. A career at sea was part of his family history: His paternal grandfather served in the Navy during World War II, and his maternal grandfather served as a merchant mariner.
After three years at the intensely hierarchical academy, school leaders chose Kelly to serve as regimental executive officer during his senior year. He was the student second-in-command of the whole academy, and Mark Baden was the No. 1.
Baden recalled that in other years students balked at being second in charge. They wanted to be commander.
“Being the No. 2 guy, there's no glory in that,” Baden said in an interview. “You're there to implement policy. You don't make policy. So it's just more work and no glory. And I mean Mark has always been very selfless that way, and I saw that there at school.”
Kelly’s role was to lead indoctrination of first-year “plebes.” Think of a routine like basic training as depicted in the movies: Marching, running, calisthenics, shining shoes, shaving heads. If a student faltered to the pressure, Kelly’s job was to correct them, Baden said.
Indoctrination that year included a uniquely Kelly twist.
Scott Kelly, who was across the East River at the State University of New York Maritime College, visited. He put on one of Mark Kelly’s uniforms and headed to a square on campus.
The seemingly two Mark Kellys flanked an underclassman doing drills, asking him who was in charge. When the student answered “Mark Kelly,” he was ordered to about-face — and turned 180 degrees to find another Mark Kelly who asked the same question, as Baden recalled.
“All the freshmen were seeing double,” said Jack Griffin, who also graduated in Kelly’s class. Griffin said it showed Mark Kelly “didn’t take himself too seriously.
“He’s a pretty down-to-earth, normal person,” he said. Griffin, the son of a Boston firefighter and telephone company clerk, saw Kelly as a peer who also came from a working-class family.
Kelly graduated with a dual degree in marine engineering and nautical science, one of about 30 students known as “dualies” who earned both degrees offered at the academy.
“Destiny is not a matter of chance, but a matter of choice,” was the quote he chose for his senior yearbook.
'Mark knows his duty and he will not hesitate'
Kelly went on to the U.S. Navy and became an aviator the following year. By his account, he "wasn't a particularly good pilot" to start, but it taught a lesson he’s talked about often in years since.
“How well you perform when you start trying something difficult is not a good indicator of how good you can become,” he wrote in "Gabby." "Looking back, I’m a prime example of someone who was able to overcome a lack of aptitude with persistence, practice, and a drive to never give up.”
Two years later he married his first wife, and they had two daughters who are now adults. They divorced in 2004. Court records show the case dragged out for years, though, because of custody issues.
As a Navy pilot, Kelly trained on an A-6 Intruder, a low-altitude attack aircraft used for decades in combat. Baden flew the same planes, which were not the rockstar Tomcats of “Top Gun” fame, but the workhorses.
Kelly deployed twice on the USS Midway aircraft carrier and flew 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, according to his NASA biography.
For most of those, Fujimura was by his side as bombardier-navigator. In an interview, Fujimura remembered an attack on an Iraqi patrol from just 200 feet in the air. Kelly and Fujimura came up with the mission plan and ordered another aircraft to come along.
“This was our duty,” Fujimura recalled, calling it a courageous decision to order others into a dangerous situation. “Mark knows his duty and he will not hesitate. He prepares. Studies.
“That experience, that cauldron or pressure, that helped crystallize all of our characters, but his character especially, to be a great leader.”
Kelly earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in California and he finished test pilot school. And two years later, he got the call: NASA inviting him to join a coveted astronaut class.
Kelly flew to space four times, twice as a shuttle pilot before NASA elevated him to commander of his final two missions.
To his longtime friend and merchant marine classmate, Baden, it was another example of Kelly in a competitive environment.
“NASA thought enough of him then that they upgraded him to commander and he did two missions there,” Baden said. “Again, he doesn't just do an adequate job, he excels.
“The competition, it's greater and greater as you move up the chain. And he’s still coming out on top.”
Reach reporter Stacey Barchenger atstacey.barchenger@arizonarepublic.comor 480-416-5669.
