Marine Colonel Robert F. Overmyer, born in Lorain on July 14, 1936, regarded Westlake as his hometown because his family had lived there since 1941. A 1954 graduate of Westlake High School, he earned a physics degree from Baldwin Wallace College in 1957, entered active duty in the Marine Corps in 1958, completed Navy flight training, and joined Marine Attack Squadron 214 in 1959. He logged more than 7,500 flight hours, including over 6,000 in jet aircraft, earned a master’s degree in aeronautics from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in 1964, and was chosen for the USAF Manned Orbiting Laboratory Program in 1966. Selected as a NASA astronaut in 1969, he served on the Apollo 17 support crew in 1972, piloted the space shuttle Columbia on STS-5, the first fully-functional flight of the Shuttle Transportation System, launched from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on November 11, 1982, and commanded the shuttle Challenger on the Spacelab-3 mission, STS 51-B, in 1985. He later served on the team investigating the cause of the 1986 Challenger disaster, then retired from NASA and the Marines. He died on March 22, 1996, in the crash of an experimental aircraft he was testing near Duluth, Minnesota, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.