She'd been raised the same way, with her dad a stranger.
"I got up in the morning, looked at the schedule and said, 'OK, here we go.' " She filled their lives with scouting, sports and church. In his absence, she tried to offer stability. She also felt he was spending more time in the clouds than with their three children, Bill Jr., Laurie and Wendy. Anne, dreading the knock on the door from a Navy chaplain, began objecting to her husband's work.
Some colleagues didn't survive in the job, and the Lawrences regularly attended funerals. He'd roar toward the moon, coast, then dive toward earth at Mach 2, listening - just like the doctors with their stethoscopes - for rattles, shimmies, any signs of imperfection. Lawrence returned to test piloting, grueling days highlighted by audacious feats. Nothing life-threatening - but an imperfection. Doctors said it was the flapping of a mildly defective valve. When the list was pared from 100 to 32, Lawrence's name was on it, alongside friends John Glenn and Alan Shepard.īut inside a heat chamber, with wires stuck to his body and the temperature at 120, Lawrence's heart made a strange murmur. When the fledgling Project Mercury space program came looking for men to become the first Americans in orbit, Lawrence eagerly tried out.įor six months, scientists searching for seven perfect astronauts poked and prodded him, ran electricity through his muscles, measured his sperm count. He flew 1,300 miles an hour, becoming the first Navy pilot to fly at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound. As a test pilot, his job was to push new jets to extremes. His wife's fears didn't keep Lawrence from doing the Navy's riskiest flying. At age 10, she had waited months to learn if he was dead or alive. Though she was raised by a pilot and chose one for a spouse, Anne had hated flying ever since her dad was shot down over the Philippines. He was chosen for the Navy's elite test-pilot school.Īt Christmas that year, Lawrence married Anne Williams, daughter of a World War II flying ace. He graduated in 1951, eighth in his class of 725, and went off to flight school to earn his wings.
That became the school's moral code, and has always been his own. By his senior year, he was a three-sport varsity athlete, class president and the top-ranked midshipman, the brigade commander.Ĭoncerned about midshipmen cheating on tests, he teamed up with a classmate, Ross Perot, and wrote the "honor concept:" Mids do not lie, cheat or steal. In 1947, Lawrence turned down a Yale scholarship for an appointment to the Naval Academy. His father, Fatty, a popular Vanderbilt University football player who became the city's sewer and water director, trained Lawrence and his three brothers to become baseball, football and basketball standouts at West End High. There, his mother, Tennie, and her family of teachers told him to study hard and read often. He attributes his success to lessons in mental and physical toughness learned in Nashville, Tenn. Time and again, he was elected class president and team captain. Quietly and with ease, William Lawrence became tops at everything he did.
At 69, the admiral is fighting another battle - perhaps his most harrowing. Wendy has also become a source of sustenance for her father, who after six years as a POW would endure more hellish prisons.īut instead of a storybook ending, there is a twist. Wendy's career path shadowed his own, and in that Lawrence takes great pride.
0 kommentar(er)
