b'aviators earned their wings at NAS Corpus Christi during World WarDriscoll Childrens Hospital today, which serves over 100,000 II, and today it is home to the headquarters of U.S. Navy Air Trainingchildren per year, many from Mexico and Central America.Command and the immense Corpus Christi Army Depot.While the Driscoll clan, whose origins trace back to Cork County, Ireland, in the 1830s, was gifted with intelligence, discipline and a strict work ethic, longevity was not among their blessings. Claras grandparents both died in their fifties, her grandmother of an un-known disease and her grandfather in a horse carriage accident. Her mother died at age 56, her uncle at 52 and her brother at age 57. Only Claras father, Robert, Sr., lived into his seventies.Sadly, on July 17, 1945, Clara suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died suddenly in Corpus Christi at age 64. Her body laid in state at the chapel of the Alamo Mission that she was credited with saving, and she was buried alongside her family members at the Masonic Cemetery in San Antonio.Making news to the very end, Clara Driscoll, who died with no direct heirs, willed most of her vast family fortune to build and operate a free clinic and hospital for crippled, maimed, and diseased children that, under the direction of her personal physician, Dr. McIver Fur-man, opened as Driscoll Foundation Childrens Hospital in 1953. Over the 69 years since, Driscoll has lovingly cared for millions of kids from across Texas and Mexico, was the first facility at which an organ transplant was performed in the Coastal Bend, and is where conjoined twins have been successfully separated. Having always lived with a mission and purpose, Clara Driscolls benevolent legacy places her at the very top of the Legends of the Coastal Bend.TheCoastalBend.com THE COASTAL BEND GUIDE73'