And in her larger role as mother, Lawrence reflected on the news that the USS Iowa opened earlier this month as a floating museum in Los Angeles Harbor.
Her eldest son, Errick, a 1978 graduate of Northeastern High School and a onetime pro pitching prospect, was killed by an explosion in the ship’s No. 2 Turret 23 years ago.
Then 29 years old, he was one of 47 sailors who absorbed the energy that should have hurled a 16-inch shell skyward through one of the battleship’s massive guns.
Instead a wave-shaped tombstone points skyward on the crest of a hill in Ferncliff Cemetery. It bears the image of the Iowa and its guns; has brass holders for the flags of the U.S. and the Navy; and on the back echoes a mother’s words: “God heard the gun roar and took our Ike.”
Smoldering controversy
As some will recall, reports of the Iowa explosion of April 19, 1989, were thick with controversy over whether it had been detonated by a jilted homosexual lover among the turret’s crew.
“It wasn’t just an immediate thing,” Lawrence said of the roil. “It went on and on, for what, two years? The entire time it was crazy.”
The dust began to settle when then Navy “backed off,” the allegations, she said. But it complicated 47 families’ grieving.
Lawrence remembers naval recruiters tracking her and her husband down two years after the explosion, when the Navy updated its stance.
“The (Navy) never gave an apology; they never admitted that’s not what happened,” she said. “They just backed off.”
The Navy ultimately said the cause couldn’t be determined. Sandia National Laboratories, hired to do an independent investigation, said the probable cause was an over-ram of powder bags.
“Whether or not (a homosexual affair) had any direct reference to the accident, I can’t say and don’t know,” Lawrence said. “We’ll never know.”
“What we have found out since is (that Errick) was the last one they heard from in the turret.”
His words: “We’re not ready yet! We’re not ready yet!”
Emotional knuckle ball
The day of the explosion, Lawrence’s late husband, Dick, a long-time Springfield banker, came to the Springfield Post Office where she worked to tell her the initial reports.
“You knew, you just knew,” Lawrence said. “I think (Dick) was of the same feeling.”
On his last visit home, he’d told them they’d had problems on the ship.
And if his death was like being hit by a inside fastball, its aftermath was an emotional knuckle ball.
“The tricks your mind plays on you ...” Lawrence said.
Because Errick had been away for home, it wasn’t unusual for him not to be around, and she sometimes found herself thinking he wasn’t gone.
“Your mind is saying, ‘It’s just a movie,’ and you want to go back and rewrite that movie.”
Born military
A home movie comes to mind when she describes his childhood.
“From the time Errick was born, he was military,” she recalled. “There were no gray areas with Errick, it was all black and white, and it was a straight line from Point A to Point B.”
He couldn’t tolerate the disorderly behavior of kids who were goofballs or brought shame on their families. That may be in part because his mother instilled in him a sense of accountability.
After a game in which he was the winning pitcher, but started into a laundry list of complaints, she called him “Alibi Ike” after the fictional baseball player who had an excuse for every mistake.
“It was just our little joke, but it stuck,” she said.
Although good at many sports, Errick loved baseball. In his youth, when he played on three teams at once, “I was the scorekeeper and statistician,” Lawrence said. “Errick and I were especially close, him being the first (of four), and I played baseball myself.”
A freak accident at a basketball game at Graham High School led to three knee surgeries in a year and the end of pro scouts’ interest.
But he continued baseball at Northeastern, at Anderson University and in AA ball.
In the Navy
Without her knowing it, on visits home from Anderson, Errick visited the Naval recruiting office in Springfield and finally brought up enlisting to his Navy veteran father.
Errick thought he’d end up on the West Coast, where he might also play baseball. But after training at Naval Station Great Lakes, he was assigned to the USS Saratoga.
Refusing to re-enlist because he wanted to switch to battle ships — particularly the Iowa — he left the Navy, joined the reserves, then in 1982 wrangled a re-enlistment in which his pay and rank were restored and he was assigned to gunnery duty on the Iowa.
At a time “when they were turning down guys for too much earwax,” Lawrence said, he’d pulled off a near-miracle.
The family’s vanity license plates celebrated the move with the message 16 (for 16-inch) GUNS.
At ease
Although he was engaged in an inherently dangerous job, Lawrence didn’t worry about her son much unless he was in a combat zone.
When she had known the Saratoga was on duty near Libya, “I was awake night after night after night worrying over this,” she said.
She had reason.
Errick, who taught weaponry to Marines on the Saratoga, volunteered as a helicopter door gunner on a mission over Libya, something she she didn’t learn until later.
But she was free of anxiety in 1989 when the Iowa had returned to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, busied as she was with getting ready for time they’d spend with Errick when he was on leave.
“We were almost packed, just waiting for him to get back, because we were going to Iowa to watch Brett play his spring football game,” she said.
After that, “he and his dad were driving up to Montana. Errick had saved a bunch of money” and planned to buy a hillside property.
It was during that relaxed time, when the Iowa crew were going through maneuvers and practicing that the sailor who won two bronze stars and a Navy Commendation Medal spoke his last words.
Coastal issues
Like a Navy mother, Lawrence has some concern over the East Coast ship as a floating museum on the West Coast.
Her first thought had been that the museum should be dedicated near the date of the explosion. She later decided that would be too sad an occasion, given the Iowa’s history back to World War II.
Lawrence hopes the destroyed turret, which forced the ship’s decommissioning after Operation Desert Storm, will be off-limits to tourists.
She also hopes to visit.
“Among our family, we’re talking about going out there at some point,” she said, “but we’ve not made any definite plans.”
Daughter Tori Weeks lives near London, Ohio. But son Brett, who played football at Iowa State University, is working near there, and daughter ReDawn Sisler is a dental hygienist near Des Moines.
It’s the practical reason she relocated to Ames, Iowa, after her husband died in 2005.
In the Hawkeye State, Lawrence these days finds herself doing what she did for so many years in the Buckeye State: spending time on the baseball field, this time for her grandchildren.
The hours
“You always wonder why things happen the way they do,” she said. “And I’m a firm believer that for every negative there’s a positive. Now I know why God gave me all those hours on the diamond with Errick.”
While running from game to game, working and raising four children, “you wonder how in the world you did it,” she said. “Now when you look back at it, it’s ‘Praise the Lord.’ I thank God every day that he gave us 29 years with him. We must have covered 59 years.”
Also of consolation is that Errick “did what he wanted to do, died doing what he wanted to and loved his country.”
And his mother.
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