David Williams passed away on February 12th in Rockford, Illinois, where he has lived for some time. David's son, Steven, said that he passed peacefully after several weeks of decline. Both of David’s sons, Kenneth and Steven, had been with him at the hospital over the past weeks.
David Frank Williams is the son of Howard and Ruth Williams. In 1935, he was born in a house in a small Wisconsin town called Viroqua where the family sold merchandise and extracted maple syrup from the family farm. During the Great Depression, David and his family moved to North Hollywood, California, where he attended public school through junior college. During this period, he left college to serve in the U.S. Army in the project to rebuild Germany and to prepare for possible war with the Soviet Union.
After he returned from Europe, he used his G.I. Bill to fund the rest of his college education at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he completed a degree in Mathematics. While at Reno, he met his first wife, Marlene, with whom he would have two beautiful children, Steven and Kenneth.
With degree and family in hand, he made his way to Los Angeles in the early 1960s where he worked in a variety of jobs within the aerospace-engineering industry including Hughes Aircraft, Autonetics and Parsons Engineering. His projects include the Apollo moon flights, ICBM development and various satellite projects..
He later married Lois, with whom he would live during his years at NASA in Houston, Texas. There he worked on a number of live missions including the Space Shuttle. He and Lois would eventually settle in Rockford, Illinois, where he enjoyed family and friends during his retirement years.
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