College Mourns Loss of Co-Founder
(Fall 2000 Newsletter)
Lt. Col. William S. Lawton, Jr.
“I was in a foxhole, the shells were exploding all around,
and all of a sudden I was seized with fear for my immortal
soul. I remembered then my Catholic Faith, which returned
in an instant, and I promised God that I would amend my life
and serve Him faithfully if He got me out of there alive.”
Captain Bill Lawton, recently returned from Korea, told me
this in one of the many conversations we were to have after
evening classes at the University of San Francisco in the
fall of 1956, where the Army had just assigned him as a teacher
in the ROTC program.
We met because he had been bounced years before from West
Point for violating discipline (the last straw, he told me,
was walking in a tunnel which was off-limits), and was therefore
taking courses to get his degree. As I was then an Instructor
of Philosophy, he ended up two nights a week in my course.
At the end of our first class together I was putting my books
in my briefcase as he approached me and said, with mock consternation,
that he didn’t know about the other students, but that
“I won’t just listen to professors. When I don’t
understand something I’ll hound you until you explain
it to me; be prepared for that.”
He was prophetic, but it became clear that his warning had
been what it seemed – a friendly challenge to help him
learn. He wanted somehow desperately to succeed, as if, I
began to think, he were making up for opportunities neglected.
When, then, he told me about the incident in the foxhole,
it anchored my experience of him, and our growing friendship
led on my part to an admiration, and then to a love which
one can have for only a few in this fallen world.
No one could have had the slightest understanding of Bill
Lawton, at least by the time I had met him, without knowing
that his primary aim, of which he was constantly aware, was
to obey God, and in so doing to please Him. His duty, which
he saw with a clarity not given to all, was exacting; it was
forthright in its demands and invulnerable to the lure of
an ever-expanding catalogue of exceptions.
Our greatest spiritual writers teach us that while we must
serve God in the same way, essentially by obeying His commandments,
frequenting the sacraments, praying, fasting, and almsgiving,
there are at the same time as many ways to tailor the essentials
as there are those who enter His service. Bill Lawton was,
by temperament and background, a warrior, and warrior he remained.
Born into an Army family, his father a Lieutenant General,
his ambition was to serve his country with honor as an officer
in the infantry, “the only real branch of the service,”
to hear him spit it out. By the time we had met he had fought
in Korea, and then, years later, he was to fight again in
Vietnam. During the years before and after his time in Vietnam
my wife and I became fast friends with Bill and his Peggy,
who, if the truth is to be told, was the “sheet anchor”
of his life. Many of our conversations touched upon the alarming
decline of the moral tone of the country, and of its effect
on the Catholic body. When, then, we were trying to found
the College, which was a battle by other means against American
education and the Catholic imitation of it, one thought instinctively
of by-then Lt. Col. Lawton, for whom our activities were a
small part of the larger struggle against the forces arrayed
to destroy what remained of our once-Catholic civilization.
Bill’s willingness to stand with us as a possible founder
of a non-existent college with uncertain prospects was in
character with his many other acts of friendship over the
years – spontaneous, trusting, and animated by the warmth
of his affection. His love of all things Catholic prompted
him not only to join with us, but also later to help so many
of our students and graduates he came to know – arranging
an interview, acquiring a green card, extending a visa, finding
a scholarship, gaining financial help – with a persistence
and determination with which, I thought with approbation,
he probably led his men into battle. How many there are of
us whose lives are the better for his exertions in our regard!
So then the record, all in warfare against the Prince of
Darkness and his minions: Korea, Vietnam, founder and a Vice
President of Thomas Aquinas College, Vice President of Catholics
United for the Faith, and willing prisoner in the jails of
Southern California for standing against abortion – all
accomplished by the devoted husband of a most charming and
loving wife and the concerned father to their six children,
whom he loved above all and for whom he prayed as if nothing
else mattered than that they would save their souls.
Belloc, speaking of the old age of William the Conqueror,
observes that “in the phase of human life there is, for
most men, and for nearly all mature men, a period of some
years introductory to death: which years are years of disappointment
at the least, and at the most of tragedy.” He goes on
to say that “with those who have done much there is an
added burden, which is that they must cease from battle; for
the body is no longer supporting the immortal mind.”
Bill Lawton was a luminous exception. His body did indeed
decay, but with his “immortal mind” he battled on,
impervious to the passage of time. His unquenchable relish
for the things of heaven gave testimony to the joy of the
spiritual childhood which awaits those who enter the lists
in the service of that Commander and Chief Who has, in His
own words, “overcome the world.”
I for one will miss him as I will miss few others. He was
my good and steadfast friend, a wonderful companion, and lavish
in arousing the pleasure which seemed to permeate our activities
together. I have no idea whether in sum I ever taught him
much of anything, but he, by word and deed, taught me the
deepest meaning of “duty, honor, country,” the motto
which signifies the commitment which had prompted his career.
He told me three days before his death, in a voice barely
audible, that he was offering his sufferings for the College,
and that he had been trying to make connections for it in
Rome when he became too weak to go on. May we then, his friends
and associates, pray for his children, and for Peggy, the
constant companion in body and spirit without whom he might
well have faltered in fulfilling the promise he had made in
the foxhole; and accept as our duty to pray for the soul of
our faithfully departed friend. May his soul rest in the peace
he so ardently desired as the goal of his many labors.
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Fall 2000
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