Air Force Secretary James Douglas congratulates Bradley C. Hosmer, the top-honor man in the first graduating class at the Air Force Academy. Hosmer will go to England this summer as a Rhodes Scholar. Hosmer would later in 1991 become the very first graduate to serve as USAFA Superintendent.
Photo from the Rocky Mountain News, June 4, 1959 and restored with Ai.
Written over 800 years ago by Saint Francis of Assisi
and read by Colonel C. E. Zielinski, the Catholic Chaplain
GRADUATION BENEDICTION
Lord, make me a channel of thy peace,
That where there is hatred I may bring love,
That where there is wrong I may bring the spirit of forgiveness,
That where there is discord I may bring harmony,
That where there is error I may bring truth,
That were there is doubt I may bring faith,
That where there is despair I may bring hope,
That where there are shadows I may bring Thy light,
That where there is sadness I may bring joy,
Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted,
To understand than to be understood,
To love than to be loved,
For
It is by giving that one receives,
It is by self-forgetting that one finds,
It is by forgiving that one is forgiven,
It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.