Captain Lawrence W. Kelley '44
Captain Lawrence (Larry) W. Kelley died on August 23, 2007. He left Amherst in September 1943 for the Notre Dame Midshipman School, receiving his Amherst diploma by mail, and he spent the rest of his life on the seas.
After midshipman school, he served in New Guinea and the Philippines, including time with the Philippine guerrillas on Mindanao Island. In the 1960s, he served in Vietnam with anti-infiltration forces, in the Pentagon in charge of US Navy Special Warfare, and he also served thirty-one months in Korea.
In 1955, when he was in Monte Carlo as skipper of the minesweeper Aggressive, he met Florence Ulbrech, who was then pioneering in Monaco for the Baha’i faith. They were married in 1958. After Larry’s retirement from the US Navy in 1974, they lived in Hawaii until his death.
In 1983, he became captain of the Constitution, a Pacific cruise ship, until he retired in 1992.
—William C. Hart ’44