Through a Glass, Darkly

An elegy for Lamar and Ashton Allen, thirty years after TWA Flight 800.

Charlton Allen | August 1, 2026

Thirty years is a long time—long enough for one generation to grow into adulthood and another to begin.

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........

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