by Buzz Aldrin
In her deeply religious family, Lois was sometimes a bit of a black sheep, wishing for more than the cloistered, conservative lifestyle fostered by the church. Her father, however, wanted her to attend Brigham Young University in Utah, to be in a “Mormon environment.” As a compromise, Lois agreed to go to the University of Utah (U of U). In those post–World War II days, college women rarely entered the workforce, so their education often focused on the liberal arts, rather than preparing for a career. Lois’s parents hoped that in the Utah environment she would at least by graduation find a good Mormon husband, settle down, and start a family. But Lois had different ideas. She balanced her studies and social life with a special emphasis on learning to ski during her two years at the U of U Despite the joy of skiing, Lois found Salt Lake City somewhat ethnocentric, and yearned for a more diverse college atmosphere. She applied to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and encouraged her older brother, John, to do the same. They were both accepted, and one September day they drove off in a big yellow Chevrolet convertible toward a new world at Stanford.
Life on “The Farm,” as Stanford is known by its students and alumni, proved to be everything Lois and John expected, and then some. John was quickly initiated into a fraternity (there were no sororities at Stanford at the time), and introduced Lois to his fraternity brothers, many of whom were football players. The star halfback, Emery Mitchell, grew attracted to Lois. As Emery and Lois dated, the reputation that followed her from high school on through college remained intact: she had high morals and was “hard to get.” She never went steady with one fellow, although she could have. Even the beaus she dated on numerous occasions suffered along without a single kiss. But that didn’t stop the many Stanford men who saw her as good marriage material, and by graduation, she had several proposals. To their disappointment, Lois was holding herself in reserve for her one true love, her Prince Charming.
Nevertheless, Lois made numerous lasting friends at Stanford, many of whom went on to great success, such as Sandra Day, a bright young woman with whom Lois struck up a friendship that flourished when Sandra and her husband John O’Connor moved to Phoenix to practice law. Years later, Sandra became America’s first female Supreme Court Justice.
Upon graduation from Stanford with a degree in education, Lois decided to take her fifth year at UCLA to satisfy the requirement to teach. She had another motivation to stay in California as well, since she was becoming increasingly interested in a young man she had dated during her senior year at Stanford, Bill Edwards, whose family lived in Long Beach. Bill had enrolled at Harvard Business School, so Lois would see him at Christmas and over the summer. Bill’s mother talked so enthusiastically about her own teaching career at Hawthorne School in Beverly Hills that Lois applied for a position there, and began teaching third grade the following year. But Lois’s romance with Bill did not last beyond the summer. The odds were against them: Bill’s father thought Lois was too short, and Lois’s father felt that Bill was unlikely to become a Mormon. Indeed, Bill married a tall, beautiful girl who lived next door. Lois finished out the school year at Hawthorne and was offered the chance to renew her contract, but decided her heart was not in teaching. She would take the next year off to tour Europe.
Lois’s European travels—with arrangements made by her family to meet and stay with many of their Rotarian friends in cities all over Europe and Scandinavia—combined two of her great passions: socializing and skiing. She met counts and barons and other titled members of Europe’s oldest families, as well as many renowned European ski racers. Somewhere between the mountains and après-ski activities, Lois came to know Stein Erickson, a Norwegian ski hero on whom she developed a crush. The relationship never developed, but Lois’s skiing did. We are all friends today, and often ski and dine together in Deer Valley, Utah.
Lois returned home after her year abroad, and with the Christmas season approaching, she and her brother, John, decided to drive to Sun Valley, Idaho, to ski. On the way, they stopped over in Salt Lake City and attended a Mormon fireside singles social event. Lois was introduced to Bryant Cannon, a handsome six-foot bachelor and a former University of Utah football star who worked for IBM. He was seven years older than Lois, and quite dapper. They talked and clicked.
Lois and her brother drove on to Sun Valley the next day, but the skiing conditions were poor, so they decided to return to Salt Lake. That night they had dinner at the home of Lois’s college friend Alice Creer. Lois was looking for someone to ski with the next day. During dinner, Bryant Cannon called Alice to confirm his date with her the following night. Alice mentioned that Lois was there, and suggested to Bryant that he take her skiing. Remembering Lois from the fireside singles event, he responded positively, possibly a bit too quickly for Alice’s liking.
Bryant picked up Lois and they skied all day together at Utah’s Alta resort. The snow glistened in the crisp winter air as they rode the chair lifts, talked, and swooshed down the hill. That night Bryant had the nerve to cancel his date with Alice and take Lois out instead. And Lois had the nerve to accept! Her friend Alice recognized that love was in the air and encouraged Lois to be cautious of this very popular Salt Lake bachelor. Disregarding the advice, Lois skied with Bryant the next two days as well. Already, their budding relationship was gathering momentum.
The following night was New Year’s Eve, and Bryant invited Lois to a party at the Fort Douglas Club. It was a gorgeous enchanting evening with mistletoe inside, and light snow falling outside as the couple danced their way out onto the porch balcony. Bryant looked at Lois adoringly and kissed her. Lois responded, and apparently bells rang for both of them. Bryant moved fast, as if he were running for a touchdown. “I think we should get married,” he said.
Amazingly, Lois found herself replying, “I think that would be perfect.”
As far as she was concerned, this was a match made in heaven. Although they had known each other for less than four days, she felt that Bryant was the man for her. He was handsome, physically appealing, highly intelligent, a great skier, and best of all, he came from one of the most prominent Mormon families in America.
They planned to marry in February, less than two months away, just in time to catch the boat to Europe for Bryant’s next assignment with IBM.
Lois and her family spent the short window of time preparing for the large wedding in Phoenix. The Cannon family arrived and everyone began to get acquainted, since few of them had met previously. Lois commented, “I am so happy to get married and raise a family, and I’m never going to teach school again.”
“Never?” Bryant asked. “What if we don’t have enough money and we need you to teach?”
“Oh, you have a good job,” Lois replied. “We’ll always have enough money.” Bryant’s concerns about money should have been a red flag to Lois, but, in the midst of her pre-wedding bliss, she ignored it.
Bryant’s brother, Mark Cannon, a Harvard Ph.D. who later developed a career as the administrative assistant to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, unwittingly provided keen insight into Bryant’s personality As he surveyed the Driggs family home, he remarked to Lois, “I guess your reputation is true. You are known as one of the richest and cutest girls in the church.”
Lois took Mark’s words as a compliment; she should have taken them as a warning.
Lois and Bryant were married in the Mormon church, though in their daily lifestyles neither of them adhered strictly to its religious standards. After a second reception in Salt Lake, they were off to Europe. Lois and Bryant remained married for twenty-seven years. For all that time, she was as happy as a lamb and never suspected that her husband was anything other than faithful and content. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
Lois and Bryant set up their home in Frankfurt, Germany, in February 1955. Ironically, at about that same time, I had just married Joan, and we were expecting our first child in September of that year. We were stationed at Bitburg, Germany, where I flew supersonic jets as part of
a nuclear strike force that could deliver atomic bombs deep into Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe.
Lois and I never met during that time, despite Bryant’s work on several military computer installations. At a reception for some military personnel for whom Bryant was setting up computer systems, Lois was her usual witty and vibrant self. Bryant, however, was not pleased. After the party, he was irate. “Lois, how could you be like that?”
“Like what?”
“You were too much. Too outgoing. You need to be more subdued.” It was the first of many instances in which Bryant attempted to squelch Lois’s lively personality. Lois tried her best to hold back and not overshadow him, but felt stifled by Bryant’s preference that she restrain her enthusiasm. She became pregnant with their first child in 1955, soon after their arrival in Frankfurt, and a daughter, Lisa, was born in November of that year. From Frankfurt, Lois and Bryant moved to England, where, nineteen months later, in June 1957, Lois gave birth to their second daughter, Brynn.
About four years into their marriage, Bryant informed Lois that he was unhappy with his job, that he had to work too hard at IBM, and that he wanted to get out. Lois was his cheerleader, so she talked with her relatives about Bryant going to work for the family business, and they all agreed that he could come anytime he was ready to join forces. When Bryant quit IBM, however, he accepted a lucrative job with ITT in Brussels, Belgium. The family business could wait.
When Lois’s father began to divide up the publicly traded shares of his enormously prosperous business with his children and grandchildren, Bryant suddenly decided he wanted another child. Unfortunately, Lois later felt that Bryant’s main motive in having a third child was to secure another batch of stock from her family’s business.
Not long after signing on with ITT, Bryant tired of the demanding position and yearned to be free of his work responsibilities. He planned to return to Arizona and join Lois’s family business. But first he wanted to take a seven-month sabbatical to travel on an unusual adventure throughout Europe. He bought a twenty-seven-foot Danish cabin cruiser in Copenhagen that he christened Explorer I, and navigated the family through the locks, waterways, and rivers of Germany and France, all the way to the Mediterranean, where they visited the ports along the French Riviera. With two young daughters and a pregnant wife, the boating expedition made for some eventful months before they returned to Arizona so Bryant could go to work for Lois’s family at Western Savings.
Throughout their marriage, Lois never asked Bryant about their finances, and trusted him completely to handle their investments. They lived well, and Lois enjoyed Phoenix’s social life. They now had three children, with the birth of their only son, Bryant Driggs Cannon in 1962. The family business continued to grow, and Lois’s father continued to bless them with more and more company stock.
Their comfortable life notwithstanding, Bryant seemed once again restless and disgruntled with his job. Lois arranged an introduction for Bryant to work as a managerial vice president overseeing the computer operations at another savings and loan, Great Western in Los Angeles. Although the company’s headquarters was in L.A., Bryant was able to set up the computer center in Santa Ana. The family moved to Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach, Lois’s favorite beach community in Southern California, a place where she had spent many a summer day as a teenager during family vacations.
The Cannon family lived in the idyllic private beach community for nearly ten years, and to Lois it seemed like heaven on earth. Eventually, however, dissension at work caused Bryant to be dissatisfied again. He wanted to quit his job, sell the beachfront home, buy a condominium in Sun Valley, Idaho, and in the meantime tour Europe with the family in a Volkswagen camper. The trip to Europe was the beginning of the end.
It was a turbulent time that caused Lois and the three children to propose with great vigor the idea of buying another home back in Emerald Bay in an attempt to regain a sense of the family life they had once known. Bryant finally acquiesced and purchased a small hillside home to appease them, but was absent much of the time with various excuses. Lois attempted to restore some normalcy. By now the children were in college. But where was Bryant? Where had he disappeared to? When she heard from him in early December, he informed her he was now in Sun Valley, preparing for Christmas with the family.
Instinctively, Lois was concerned and decided to surprise Bryant by driving to Sun Valley to find out what was going on. When she arrived and inserted her key in the door, it didn’t work. She knocked on the door, and Bryant opened it. “Lois! What are you doing here?” Bryant had no idea that Lois was coming, but then quickly changed his tune. “Come in, come in. Excuse me for a moment, while I make a phone call.” Twenty minutes later a man knocked on the door, and served Lois with divorce papers.
Lois was in shock. But Bryant was adamant. He wanted a divorce before the beginning of the new year, and it was almost Christmas.
When Lois awakened the next morning in a separate bedroom from her husband, she gathered her senses. Instead of arguing about the divorce, she decided to go skiing, determined to have one of the greatest days of her life. As she approached the ski lift, she heard a voice call out to her, “Hey, Lois, come ski with me today.” Lois turned around and saw a tall, handsome man she had met the previous year in Sun Valley. His name was Clint Eastwood.
For the next four days the famous actor picked up Lois each morning, and they skied together all day long. Clint was involved with Sondra Locke at the time, but became a great ski buddy and friend for Lois. His friendship, along with her other good ski buddies, gave a boost to Lois’s morale at this low moment in her life.
Lois and Bryant’s divorce was finalized in 1982. Divorce is difficult enough, but in the aftermath of this life-changing parting, Lois awakened to the reality that throughout the marriage, portions of her fortune and her children’s had been diverted to her former husband’s own purposes, and that he had repeatedly been unfaithful to her. She struggled to regain her confidence and her perky, stylish, enthusiastic self. It wouldn’t be easy.
Despite feeling devastated and disappointed, Lois believed in herself. She was a survivor. She kept reminding herself of the ways she had advised her girlfriends about their problems: Believe in yourself, put a smile on your face, throw away the problems, walk with your head high, and move on! Think about what a great life can be ahead.
Mustering her stamina to apply this philosophy to herself, Lois marched stalwartly forward, stylish and smiling, even though she didn’t feel that way inside. She was, however, secure in her finances following the divorce settlement; her stock and each of the children’s stock was valued in the millions of dollars, safely invested in Western Savings. She bolstered her activities and her checkbook by serving as a public-relations figure for her father’s company, and received a small stipend of about $35,000 per year to publicize Western’s real-estate developments in San Clemente and other locations in Southern California.
As her confidence rebounded, she dated frequently, but refused to get seriously involved with any of her suitors. Often she would go outside on the deck of her home in Emerald Bay, and in the peaceful quiet of a starlit night, as the waves of the Pacific lapped gently against the shore, Lois would look up at the moon and stars, and ask, “Please God, send me my Prince Charming. I know he’s out there somewhere.” Lois believed it.
Then one night she went to a party at the Bel Air Bay Club, and met a man who knew a bit about that moon.
14
NEW BEGINNINGS
WHILE LOIS WAS PLYING THE SLOPES OF SUN VALLEY, SKIING from January to the end of March, I plunged back into my regular activities, trying to promote space exploration. I had an important meeting coming up in which I planned to present my proposals for the Aldrin Mars Cycler, so it was a busy time for me. I had given my first technical paper on the subject to a handful of engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Cal Tech in October 1985, just before Lois and I went to Egypt. JPL has been at the forefront of space tech
nology since it created America’s first artificial satellite, Explorer I, in 1958. The engineers there encouraged me to develop my presentation further. Consequently, I immersed myself in the project. I never called Lois during those months, and she never called me.
Then, on January 28, 1986, I grieved along with the rest of our nation as I watched the fateful launch of the Challenger, NASA’s second space shuttle. The Challenger had already flown nine successful missions from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launches had become routine since the shuttle fleet first started flying in 1981. But this Challenger flight seemed in trouble from the beginning. It had been delayed several times, and finally lifted off at 11:38 a.m. (EDT). Friends, family, and the world watched in awe as the Challenger cleared the launch tower and streaked into the clear blue sky, but no one could see that an “O-ring” seal in the solid-fuel rocket booster on the Challengers right side had failed. The faulty design of the seal, coupled with unusually cold weather, allowed hot gases to leak through the joint. Rocket booster flames were able to pass through the failed seal, enlarging the small hole. These flames then burned through the Challengers support bracket that attached the booster to the side of the tank. That booster broke loose and collided with the tank, piercing the tank’s side. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuels from the tank were ignited by the flames of the solid rocket booster, and after being in flight a mere seventy-three seconds, the Challenger exploded right before our eyes. Few people who saw the horrific sight can ever forget it, as all seven crew members perished. The commander of the mission was astronaut Dick Scobee, who had been a student at the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base during my tenure as commandant. I had been impressed with his flying abilities then. He would be greatly missed.