Sidebar to Part 3

'Atlas' embraced life
with courage, passsion

The young pilot was born with wings for adventure, according to his family

By Russell Carollo
Dayton Daily News

Rand McNally, nicknamed "Atlas" after the map publisher, piloted his first vehicle atop the carpeted stairs of a rented house in Wilmette, Ill. He was not yet 3 years old, and a half dozen of his siblings put him in a cardboard box and pushed it down the stairs.

"Rand, or course, ran smack into the wall," recalled his brother, Edward, now an attorney in Chicago.

ONE PILOT'S STORY 'And proudly wearing his mother's red hair and his father's esteemed name, Randall Edward McNally II charged through life with all the energy and enthusiasm of America itself.' -- Edward McNally MCNALLY FAMILY PHOTO THE MCNALLYS POSED for this family photo on St. Patrick's Day in 1968. Seven-year-old Rand is the fourth child from the bottom of the steps.

Twenty-five years later, Lt. Cmdr. Randall E. McNally II was preparing to crash land an A-6 with a broken landing gear on the deck of the U.S.S. Ranger, bouncing in the fog and darkness in heavy seas.

"It's so risky that the skipper gave Atlas the option of simply pulling up, ditching the plane and ejecting to safety," Edward McNally said.

Rand McNally landed the plane, only to be involved in another accident six years later when his Navy jet crashed into San Francisco Bay.

But until the crash, McNally lived a storybook life.

The son of a prominent Chicago plastic surgeon, the red-haired McNally was an extraordinary man from an extraordinary Irish-Catholic family of 10 children. His brother Edward wrote speeches for President Bush. Another brother is an orthopedic surgical resident. One sister is a producer for the Oprah Winfrey show; another, a Los Angeles-based actress, who appeared in commercials and TV shows such as Ally McBeal, Seinfeld and L.A. Law.

"He was born in Texas, in the first year of the Kennedy era. It was the cockiest state at the cockiest time in the cockiest country on earth," Edward McNally once wrote. "And proudly wearing his mother's red hair and his father's esteemed name, Randall Edward McNally II charged through life with all the energy and enthusiasm of America itself.

"And Rand spent the rest of his life brilliantly piloting America's jeeps, America's Corvettes and America's jet airplanes."

Rand McNally, a popular track star in high school, followed his brother, Edward, into Notre Dame, where he roomed with a former Marine. It was that relationship, his mother suspects, that led her son to join the Marines and become an A-6 pilot.

While in the Marines, Edward McNally said, his brother helped rescue two American pilots who ejected in the Persian Gulf, and he saved the life of another Marine in the western Pacific.

In 1989, he left the Marines, got a job as a full-time Delta Air Lines pilot, started a novel about Navy pilots entitled Night Landings, joined the Navy Reserves and applied to Stanford Law School.

MCNALLY FAMILY PHOTO RAND MCNALLY WAS a popular track star in high school,

McNally had been out of school for eight years. The university didn't accept him immediately, putting him instead on a waiting list. But McNally wouldn't accept no, so, without an appointment, he got into his Corvette and drove 200 miles to speak with the dean.

After waiting hours for the dean, McNally walked into his office and played a tape of his emergency landing on the U.S.S. Ranger from 1988.

"He plays that two-minute tape and says to the dean: 'I think I can handle the stress.' He was admitted," Edward McNally said.

As his professional life soared, so did his personal life. One day the wife of his best friend from high school introduced him to her sister, former Ice Capades skater P.J. McShane, who also spent five years working as a model.

The two met again at a wedding and began dating. Months later, the couple went on a ski trip in Gaylord, Mich., with dozens of friends, and McNally hired a saxophone player to walk into the restaurant where the group was eating.

The saxophone player stood by McShane and played the Frank Sinatra song, All of me.

"And then he knelt down and asked her to be his wife," McNally's sister, Sheila McNally-Hoy recalled. "And, or course, all of us old married people started to cry."

The wedding was set for June.

COMING WEDNESDAY: The crash