Soaring Above the Tragedy : Santa Ana Author Who Lost 2 Children in Hang-Gliding Accidents Recounts Her Family’s Disasters and Triumphs

Maralys Wills, a Lemon Heights mother of six, never thought she’d lose a son to hang gliding. Certainly not Eric, her “affable, non-daring” third son.

So Wills was all the more stunned when the phone rang that March morning in 1974 and one of her son’s friends informed her in a hoarse and strained voice that 20-year-old Eric, a hang-gliding novice, had been in an accident--that, in fact, he was “D.O.A.”

“I stood rooted to the spot,” Wills writes. “Uncomprehending. Refusing to understand. He’d used police jargon. A code. Mothers don’t know police talk. Yet I knew full well.”

So opens “Higher Than Eagles: The Tragedy and Triumph of an American Family” (Longstreet Press; $19.95), a captivating family memoir by Wills and her son Chris, the 1973 U.S. hang-gliding champion and now a Santa Ana orthopedic surgeon.

Eric’s death after attempting a dangerous 360-degree loop that sent him spiraling to the ground was not the only tragedy to befall Maralys Wills and her attorney husband, Rob, whose sons Chris and Bobby were internationally renowned pioneers in the sport of hang gliding.

Three years later, the Wills’ phone would ring again.

This time Maralys Wills would be informed that 26-year-old Bobby had been in a hang-gliding accident. Bobby Wills, who had won the U.S., Canadian and British hang-gliding championships and was considered a legend in the sport, would die within hours of being accidentally blown down by a helicopter while he was filming a commercial.

It’s Bobby Wills--he can still be seen soaring through the air in the IMAX film “To Fly” at the Smithsonian Institution--who serves as the book’s focal point: Bobby, the stubborn and rebellious son who built elaborate underground forts as a child and designed 11-foot-high bicycles and motorcycles with wings.

It was Bobby, Wills writes, who “lived on the edge of disaster,” driving his truck “as though pursued by hit-men,” riding his Bultaco motorcycle “full-bore down dirt roads at night,” and flying his hang glider off unfamiliar mountains, “playing the odds like an eagle.”

“I thought he was the most dynamic and dramatic character in our family and also the one who had undergone the most change,” said Wills, speaking as both writer and mother. “When he was a boy he was so full of aggression and so irritable. He bedeviled his brothers constantly when he was young.”

But as Bobby grew older, Wills said, “he became very generous-spirited. He reached out to people so fully toward the end.”

Wills began writing “Higher Than Eagles” in 1978, a year after Bobby’s death.

Thirteen years, 40 rejections from both literary agents and publishers and four complete revisions later, Wills sold the book last year to Longstreet Press, a small Atlanta-based publisher.

Longstreet has launched the book, which Kirkus Reviews calls “a gripping tale of transformation and redemption,” with a 10-city publicity tour.

“They’ve given me more attention than I could ever expect to get from a big (publishing) house. They’ve made feel like the Queen of Books,” said Wills, whose family saga is already generating interest from Hollywood.

For Wills, sitting down to write a book about her family’s triumphs and tragedies was an obvious decision.

“I always considered my life a book, and every part of it was subject to articles and stories,” said Wills, 62, who had accumulated 127 rejection slips for books, articles, stories, plays and poems before earning her first writing paycheck--$350 for an article sold to an airline magazine in the mid-’70s.

During the 13 years it took her to write and sell “Higher Than Eagles” Wills also wrote and sold six other books--four romance novels, a nonfiction book on hang gliding and a party game book.

Her method of operation was this: She’d write a book, sell it, and then go back to rewriting and trying to sell “Higher Than Eagles.”

“I guess I never really knew how competitive I was until I got into the field of writing,” said Wills, who wrote at least 50 beginnings for the book and was determined “to make it irresistible.”

Wills said she didn’t have any trouble writing scenes dealing with Eric and Bobby’s deaths.

“They’re so fraught with emotion and drama, I just poured my soul out,” she said. “Of course, I cried every time I looked at it or wrote those portions.”

Wills is often asked how she managed to overcome the loss of two sons. Indeed, she said, Eric’s death only magnified the “horror and grief” over Bobby’s death three years later.

“I thought I’d die from the pain” she said, adding that “it really helped having four other children. They don’t substitute for your lost kids, but you do have other lives and other concerns and you can focus on the other children that are alive.”

Writing “Higher Than Eagles” also helped.

“What it did was it kept the children alive longer for me and for everyone else because I kept re-creating scenes in which they were alive and I kept feeling like they were sitting at the next desk,” she said. “I really lived with them constantly over these 13 years, and each time I finished the book I felt like I was saying goodby to them for the last time.”

If there’s a message in her book, said Wills, who now has 10 grandchildren, it is this:

“With difficult kids, there really isn’t much you can do except hang in there with them,” she said, referring to Bobby as a child. “You can help to support your kids’ dreams and that can be very satisfying. If you don’t hang in there and help them along, they’re going to do what they want anyway.”

And, she said, “I think there is another message too: That families can be torn apart by conflict and unhappiness, but with the right attitude they can work their way back together again and it doesn’t have to be a permanent rift.”

A year after Bobby died, the family sold Wills Wing, a successful hang glider manufacturing business in Santa Ana. It is now the world’s largest.

Wills said son Chris no longer hang glides, but he does fly ultra-light aircraft.

“I’d rather he didn’t, but there is nothing I can do to make him stop,” she said. “After Eric’s death I don’t think I could have kept Bobby out of their air either. By then it was his whole life.”

Despite the loss of two sons, Wills maintains her enthusiasm for hang gliding.

“I should hate it, but I can’t,” she said. “I can’t help but thinking it’s beautiful. Even my husband will say, ‘Look, there’s hang gliding on TV,’ and we turn and watch it. We’re still struck by its beauty and its poetry.”