Adapted from Family-Placed Death Notice
Robert deTreville Lawrence, III, of Marietta, Georgia, died January 26, 2007. He was 91. A member of St. James Episcopal Church, he will be buried with military honors in the family plot in the church cemetery on Polk Street, Marietta. At his request he will be in his U.S. Air Force uniform, with ribbons and Lt. Colonel insignia.
He is survived by his wife, the former Howard Dean Gramling Perkinson, and his three children, Robert deT. Lawrence, IV, of Warrenton, Virginia, Lelia R. Clark of The Plains, Virginia, and Caro L. Bahnson also of The Plains. His first marriage was to Lelia Aiken Friend Turner of Richmond and The Plains, mother of his children.
He subsequently returned to Marietta in 1997 and married a sweetheart from his youth. His last years in Marietta were most happy. He has seven grandchildren.Lawrence was born June 21, 1915 in Atlanta.
His father was Maryon McDonald Lawrence (1881-1960), the first civil engineer graduate of Georgia Tech (Class of 1902) and a Cobb County engineer. His mother was Mary Warren Laverty (1885-1974) of Talledega, Alabama. They lived and died at the family home at 267 Whitlock Avenue, SW, Marietta.
Through his Mother he became a member of the Mayflower Society, tracing his ancestry to Governor Bradford of Massachusetts.
Lawrence is survived by his sister Helen Vander Horst, Centerville, Tennessee, widow of John Vander Horst (1912-1980), Episcopal Bishop of Tennessee.
A sister, Mary Warren Sessions (1908 -1992), widow of Lee Moultrie Sessions (1903-1977), of Marietta died in 1992.
Originally the Lawrence home was on Lawrence Street behind the Fletcher Cole property. His great-grandfather Judge Samuel Lawrence, for whom Lawrence Street is named, was one of the early Mayors of Marietta.
After the War Between the States, Lawrence's grandfather, the first Robert deTreville Lawrence (1841-1933), for whom the Lawrence Chapel at St. James Church is named, married Anne Eliza Atkinson (1842-1919), granddaughter of Georgia Governor Charles McDonald, and built the family home on Whitlock Avenue, where Lawrence grew up. The property remained in the family until recently when it was sold on condition that the home would be restored and preserved. It is a part of Walnut Grove development.
Lawrence was a 1933 graduate of Marietta High School and a 1937 graduate of the University of Georgia where he was an SAE. After taking a degree in journalism, Lawrence said jobs were scarce due to the depression.
He worked in Atlanta as a board boy for the brokerage firm, Beer and Company, and as a bank runner with the Federal Reserve, before working as a reporter with the Hearst daily newspaper The Atlanta Georgian until it was sold. He premiered "Gone With The Wind" in 1939.
An amateur photographer, he worked for the Brumby Chair Company in the photography department.
While fishing on the Etowah River, he heard on the radio one of the great speeches on the war by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, inspiring Lawrence to enlist in the U.S. Army. He was at Fort Benning when Pearl Harbor was bombed.
While in the U.S. Army Air Corp, later the U. S. Air Force, he went to India and China during World War II, and to Korea and Japan during the Korean War. He saw active duty in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He was proud to have served his country in three wars.
While in the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Information Service (USIS) and U.S. Agency for International Development (US AID), he was stationed in Edinburgh, Scotland, Pretoria, South Africa, Athens, Greece, Saigon, South Vietnam, and Monrovia, Liberia, as well as in Washington, DC.
In preparing President Eisenhower for a summit talk at Bermuda, Lawrence coined the phrase "Atoms for Peace" which became a popular Cold War slogan.
He visited many places and relished the local foods and culture, much of it distasteful to the average American tourist.
Lawrence was at heart a journalist. He said that the newspaper is essential to a free democracy. In Liberia he established over two dozen newspapers. He said all he needed for a newspaper was a mimeograph machine and a person with a pencil to go get stories. He said his African friends called him "Lawrence of Monrovia."
Throughout his military and civilian careers he was an information and public relations officer. At Chatham Field, Savannah, he started the base newspaper The Liberator.
As PRO (Public Relations Officer) with the India-China Wing, Air Transport Command, China-Burma-India Theater, he started a newspaper, the Hump Express, which was published in three countries. His commanding general was William H. Tunner, well known for the airlift of supplies over the Hump into China, and later for his role in the Berlin Airlift (1948-1949) early in the Cold War. He said that he flew the "Hump" seven times.
After the war he was editor of The Air Force Magazine, and the magazine Military Affairs, journal of the American Military Institute.
He received five or six public relations commendations from Major Generals and above.
The April 5, 1945 Cobb County Times carried a Mongin Bumbry by-line about meeting "Lawrence of India" in Calcutta.
He said Lawrence knew the ropes in that far-flung theater of the war and could get things done in a hurry. He saw Lawrence again in Chunking. Douglas Kiker, Atlanta Journal Washington Correspondent, writing in 1962 about Lawrence using journalism to fight Communism, said Lawrence's newspaper "Empire", consisted of 246 daily publications, all mimeographed, which he established in villages of South Vietnam.
After retiring from government, Lawrence settled in The Plains, Virginia, where he established the Rockley Foundation, a private foundation to preserve open space from development, and Save the RR Station, to save from demolition the historic train station in The Plains. He also created the Vinifera Wine Growers Association to promote the planting of premium vinifera wine grapes to make the highest quality wines.
He planted an experimental vineyard to prove it could be done, and, through his promotional skills, wine festivals and the Association's Journal (which he wrote and published), he is considered the spark, which established the modern Virginia wine industry.
Lawrence restored a significant historic house at 4 George Street, Charleston, South Carolina, known as "Big Four", saving it from ruin by neglect at a time when the Ansonborough District was a slum. He was robbed there at gunpoint.
He publicly opposed the building of a convention center because it razed over 150 historic Charleston structures. His collection of Atkinson-Floyd Papers and Lawrence Papers, as well as his genealogy research and books, are in the Lawrence Collection at Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia. Lawrence artifacts are at The Marietta Museum of History, Kennesaw House, Marietta, and The Old Jail Museum, Warrenton, Virginia.
In 2003 Lawrence gave an ancient Lawrence seal to the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society.Mayes Ward-Dobbins Funeral Home in Marietta, Georgia is in charge of arrangements.