Mortimer Mertz Lawrence was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin on August 9, 1890. He attended local schools and, upon graduating from high school, spent one year at Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana. He took classes in civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and also joined the R.O.T.C., but did not graduate. When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, Lawrence was working in the civil engineering department at the Western Malleables Company in Chicago. He enrolled in Officer's Training School in Fort Sheridan, Illinois in May 1917 but was discharged in July because he did not meet the weight requirements of the program. Lawrence almost immediately enlisted into the regular Army in Chicago. Assigned to the 41st Infantry he spent a brief time at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis before going to quarantine at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. There he acted as a drill master while the Army discerned whether any of the men in the unit had communicable diseases.
Lawrence impressed his superior officers, who chose him to go to aerial observer school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma at the beginning of September. There he received training on how to photograph enemy positions from the air and direct artillery. He took his first flight on October 28. He went to Garden City, New York to await shipment to Europe in November 1917. On January 4, 1918 he was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant and one week later sailed across the Atlantic. In March he was promoted to 1st Lieutenant and in August he was assigned to the 104th Aero Squadron where he did a lot of administrative work and also flew missions as an observer. He earned a silver star for bravery on an October 30 mission. On November 10, he went out on an observation mission with two other planes and encountered some enemy aircraft. Using his plane's rear machine gun, he fired upon the German planes and is credited with shooting one down that turned out to be the final German plane shot down during the war.
He returned to the United States in May 1919 and was discharged in June. He returned to Beaver Dam, where he remained for the rest of his life with his wife Lenore. Lawrence passed away on December 19, 1960 in Beaver Dam.
