Thirty years is a long time—long enough for one generation to grow into adulthood and another to begin.
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With time, great public tragedies pass into history. Dates remain. Photographs endure. The language used to describe them becomes familiar through repetition.
The people themselves are more easily lost.
So it has been with TWA Flight 800. The flight number remains familiar, as do the arguments surrounding its destruction. But aboard that aircraft were 230 individual lives—people with histories and hopes, private disappointments and family stories, things accomplished and things still waiting to be done.
Lamar Allen was forty-nine when he died. He had already served in the Army, raised a family, and pursued a succession of ambitious ventures, but much of what he hoped to accomplish still lay ahead of him. Ashton was fifteen. Nearly everything lay ahead of him.
This is, in some small measure, an attempt to remember them.
Lamar was the second of my grandparents’ sons, born after my father, and the first in the family to graduate from college. He grew up an Army brat, accustomed to movement, adjustment, and the wider world beyond any one hometown. Ambition came naturally to him, but so did imagination. He possessed an entrepreneurial spirit that never seemed to exhaust itself.
He served as an Army medic, and the experience stayed with him. He saw that medical care could be delivered more quickly, practically, and directly than many civilians had come to expect. He carried lessons from military medicine into his later work. He helped imagine a different consumer medical experience—one reflected today in the urgent-care centers that have become part of ordinary American life.
Yet medicine was only one expression of a much larger impulse.
Lamar became a venture capitalist, though wealth for its own sake was never the full point. He believed capital could do more than enrich investors. Properly directed, it could create jobs, improve daily life, and make the world itself a little better.
Lamar’s interest in sustainable construction eventually took him around the world. He was always looking for a better way to build—one that used fewer resources and could improve the lives of the people who lived and worked there. He believed private enterprise could fix problems that governments and large institutions found intractable.
He embodied the best entrepreneurial spirit of his generation. Long before spreadsheets, pitch decks, and polished presentations became the language of modern venture capital, Lamar carried much of his work in his mind. He had the rare ability to see possibilities before others saw them and to imagine connections that were invisible to most people.
The Allens are an unapologetically competitive family, and that trait has not always served us well. Lamar certainly liked to win. But his ambition was joined to daring, generosity, and an instinct to build something larger than himself.
Part of Lamar’s vision found expression in Georgia Tech.
Lamar was not a Georgia Tech graduate. His alma mater was the University of South Carolina. But Ashton dreamed of attending Tech and becoming an engineer, and Lamar embraced that dream as fathers often embrace the hopes of their children. He brought his entrepreneurial energy, his global perspective, and his gift for imagining large things to bear on the institution his son hoped one day to call home.
Neither father nor son lived to see where that vision would lead. Ashton never enrolled at Georgia Tech. Lamar never saw the building that would eventually bear his name.
Yet something of the dream they shared still stands on the campus in the O. Lamar Allen Sustainable Education Building.
The building became part of Lamar’s legacy, but Ashton’s dream of Georgia Tech remained at its heart.
Lamar also bears some responsibility for my own existence.
As teenagers, my mother and Lamar once went to a high school prom together. By all accounts, the evening did not go especially well. At one point, my mother dumped ice cream on him. Later, the Allen family found itself discussing how Lamar might hand over the prom photographs to her. My father asked to see the pictures, flipped through them, and volunteered to make the delivery himself.
For him, at least, it was love at first sight.
So one of Lamar’s ventures succeeded in a way he never intended. Without that awkward prom, the spilled ice cream, and the photographs that needed returning, my parents might never have met.
And I would not be here.
Lives are made not only from great accomplishments but from awkward evenings, family stories, private jokes, and consequences no one could foresee. Lamar was a medic, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, father, brother, and visionary. He was also the unfortunate prom date whose failed evening helped bring another branch of the family into being.
Ashton was fifteen.
His life had barely begun to declare itself.
He was, in some ways, a late bloomer, much as his father had been. He had only recently started his first job at Chick-fil-A. He had not yet earned his driver’s license. He had not yet fallen in love, had a first kiss, enrolled at Georgia Tech, or begun the long journey toward becoming the engineer he hoped to be.
He never became a Ramblin’ Wreck—or the hell of an engineer his family imagined he might become.
He never knew the satisfaction of professional accomplishment, the disappointment of failure, or the quiet confidence that comes only after surviving hardship. He never married, never became a father, and never experienced the profound joy and responsibility of raising a family of his own.
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He was the same age as the woman I would later marry. She has now lived through the full middle passage of adulthood—education, career, marriage, parenthood, success, disappointment, perseverance.
Ashton remains fifteen.
That may be the cruelest fact of all.
The rest of us continued forward through the years he was denied. We grew older, changed careers, buried our grandparents and welcomed children, celebrated victories, endured failures, and gradually learned that life is richer, harder, and more beautiful than we imagined when we ourselves were fifteen.
Ashton never had the chance to discover any of it.
His life left fewer accomplishments to recount than Lamar’s, but no less meaning. What Ashton left behind was possibility—the unwritten life in its purest form.
Perhaps that is why the building at Georgia Tech matters so much.
It cannot replace the life Ashton was denied. It cannot answer why a father and son were taken together.
But it stands as evidence that their shared hopes once existed.
Students now walk through a place born, in part, from the imagination of a father and the dream of a son who never reached the campus.
There are losses that time softens.
This is not one of them.
Thirty years have brought perspective, but they have not diminished the absence. Lamar should have lived to see grandchildren, new ventures, and the changing world he always seemed eager to greet. Ashton should have attended Georgia Tech, become the engineer he imagined, fallen in love, raised a family, and discovered for himself that life is rarely what we expect and often richer than we could have imagined at fifteen.
Neither was given that chance.
I will never comprehend the loss of my uncle and my cousin. There are some things in this life that I cannot understand.
But I have come to believe something else.
I cannot imagine that they would have wanted those who loved them to remain forever imprisoned by grief—or to remember them chiefly through the day they died rather than the lives they lived.
The best way I know to honor their memory is remarkably simple—and I believe it is what Lamar and Ashton would ask of us today:
Remember them with love.
Speak of them with kindness.
Then live a life marked by more grace, more kindness, and more peace because they were part of it.
My Christian faith does not explain their deaths. It does not require me to understand why they were taken together on that summer evening, now long ago.
Saint Paul wrote that in this life we know only in part and see as though through a glass, darkly. Thirty years have not made the mystery clear, much less revealed why it happened. Faith asks something different of me: to trust that what I cannot now understand may one day be known more fully, and that death is not the end of their story.
Both Lamar and Ashton embraced that faith during their lives. Their deaths came far too soon, but not beyond the reach of God’s grace.
That does not lessen the grief. It does not transform tragedy into something good or necessary. It means only that grief is not the whole story.
The world remembers TWA Flight 800.
Our family remembers Lamar and Ashton: the father who built boldly, and the son who dreamed of building.
Thirty years later, much else has passed away. Their plans were left unfinished. The lives we imagined for them were never lived. Our understanding remains incomplete.
But faith remains. Hope remains.
Love remains.
And on the campus of the university Ashton never attended, the building still stands.
Charlton Allen is an attorney and former public servant who writes on policy, culture, and history. He is the nominee of President Donald J. Trump to serve as General Counsel of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, pending Senate confirmation. The views expressed are solely his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the President or his administration.
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