The rural Tonica native had been a shy girl. Kathy (Ott) Lawyer kept such a low profile that one of her brothers once was asked, “Oh, you have a sister?”

That was one reason she surprised her family when she announced she was enlisting in the U.S. Navy. Nobody in her family had served in the military. She’d never left home or been on an airplane, let alone a ship. Where had this come from?

Kathy Lawyer, now of Oglesby, said she simply found the idea alluring and thought Navy uniforms rather sharp. After she had a few consultations with a recruiter in Ottawa, she signed with Uncle Sam after graduating from Tonica High School in 1973.

“I just thought it was cool, something I wanted to do,” Lawyer said. “It was the time of my life. I enjoyed it.”

Her Navy career had an inauspicious start, however. She boarded her first flight from Chicago in December 1973, bound for Orlando, Florida. She arrived in the morning hours and tiptoed through the barracks, trying not to wake her new comrades.

If she went in thinking basic training during a Florida winter would be balmy, she was quickly disabused of the notion.

“You get up in the morning and go to the chow hall and it’s freezing cold,” Lawyer said. “And then by the mid-afternoon, you’re sweating.”

She later learned the Navy’s nursing school didn’t have an opening. Lawyer had long dreamed of being a military nurse, and now that door was at least temporarily closed.

So she went off to Puerto Rico, where she clerked at the post exchange to board a truck and visit the PXs to make cash pickups. Nineteen months later, she was accepted into schooling at Great Lakes and into the medical corps.

Lawyer then requested a transfer to an air base in Meridian, Mississippi, where she had followed a handsome Navy man who caught her eye. The relationship didn’t work, however, and Lawyer still missed her family. When her three-year enlistment drew to a close, she opted not to re-up.

“I was supposed to sign a six-month extension, but they never made me sign it,” she said. “I was really homesick. I’d never been on an airplane until boot camp, and I wanted to come home. There are many times I kick myself for not staying in.”

She was honorably discharged as a hospital corpsman in 1976, but that wasn’t quite the end of her military service, so to speak.

Two years after her discharge, she married Dale Lawyer, whom she met at a bowling league before settling in Oglesby. She spent her career in medicine, working at hospitals and nursing homes in La Salle County. She started out as a nurses’ aide and finished her career as an endoscopy technician.

When Dale suddenly passed away in 2014, Lawyer was overcome with grief and found herself in need of a diversion. She gravitated to the Oglesby American Legion and the La Salle-Oglesby Veterans Memorial Group, becoming the first woman to participate in the group’s honor guard.

Lawyer might well have needed the American Legion to manage her grief, but the post needed her, too. Jim Ebner, an Army veteran of the Vietnam War, remembered being overextended as adjutant and being grateful when Lawyer came in ready and willing to do whatever was asked.

“It was a welcome thing,” Ebner said. “It’s a difficult, time-consuming job and she took it over and did very well with it.”

Lawyer didn’t stop there. She built up membership and persuaded existing members to put in more volunteer hours, particularly in the kitchen to prepare fundraiser dinners.

“She’s just a positive force,” Ebner said.

Her peers eventually elected her post commander – the first woman so named in Oglesby.

Syl Janusick, an Army combat veteran of the Vietnam war, said Lawyer quickly impressed her comrades with her work ethic. No task was beneath Lawyer, her integrity and honesty impressing others.

“There’s no baloney about her,” Janusick said. “She’s got a sense of humor and she’s personal, but there’s no BS. She does a ton-and-a-half of work and you never hear her complain.”

When the time came to select a new post commander, Janusick said, Lawyer’s talents made the decision an easy one. Gender didn’t creep into the discussion at all.

“We’ve had some male commanders who couldn’t polish Kathy’s shoes,” he said.

Lawyer now is in her second term as commander.

“They haven’t impeached me yet,” she said with a laugh, adding that she appreciated the confidence of her peers.

What would she say to a young woman thinking of a military career?

“I’d say do it. It’s a growing-up experience. I would say to spread your wings.”