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A story about life, memories of the dead

On a beautiful, warm day in a quiet little unincorporated community to the northwest of Atlanta they gather to remember a horrifically stormy day 35 years ago. It would be the last, fatal flight of Southern 242.

It is thought to be one of the largest and longest running survivor group memorials of its kind. The older gentleman there is running the show. He’s a local boy, growing up literally just down the road from this place in a time when the only thing modern eyes would recognize was the cemetery. When he was a boy the church across the street was different. There were two sawmills, a log cabin school and a general store his family ran.

This place was important because it is a crossroads, but then this place had always been important. The place and the people there grew up knowing about loss and tragic death. Long before even the old man was born this was the site of one of the last battles before Sherman marched on Atlanta. More than 2,000 soldiers died only a stone’s throw away from this place.

But on this day they gathered to recall something that “seems like only a few months ago.”

A violent storm, part of a system that killed at least two dozen in Alabama, knocked a plane out of the sky. In the official analysis there was a long list of problems. The weather report was outdated. The storm rendered the plane’s weather radar useless. The pilot, an Army Air Corps veteran, reported baseball-sized hail cracked his cockpit windows. A bad command from air traffic contributed to ruining the plane’s engines. The pilots made a costly detour. Finally the DC-9, with 85 souls on board, was reduced to a glider for seven minutes. They would try to land on this sleepy road in rural Georgia.

It doesn’t look much like it did back then, the old man tells you. The intersection of the vital crossroad has been reshaped. There was a bit of a commercial boom at the turn of the century bringing in pharmacies, a grocery store and other strip mall inhabitants. In the 1970s it was just this road, that school, a gas station and the barbecue restaurant.

The pilots of the plane found this long stretch of road and hoped for the best. The co-pilot was a naval aviator. He’d put fighter planes on the pitching deck of blacked out aircraft carriers in the South China Sea, but this was a different kind of challenge. He got the plane on the road, with the wheels on the center line as the locals recall, but his wings clipped power poles, a fence and trees. The plane careened out of control. It crushed a car with seven people — three mothers and their four children, in an instant, a family lost two daughters and all of their grandchildren — and killed two other locals. The fuselage sliced through the gas station. Then the explosions started.

It came to rest in this lady’s yard:

Ms. Sadie had just called her children inside because of the coming storm. Now there was a fireball where her kids so often played.

Because it is a crossroads, and was even smaller back then, the emergency help had to come from all over the region. They found they could get close, but could not get to the scene because the wreck itself had damaged so much of the roadway. The community, neighbors and friends and normal folks, found themselves trying to bring order to unholy chaos. The scene looked liked this some time later:

The people at the memorial remembered how they carried people out “the back way,” meaning through Ms. Sadie’s house. The people who could walk or be carried went through her front door, out the back and through the woods at Hell Hole, where that Civil War battle was fought, and to the neighboring street.

Everyone that made it into the house survived. The locals tell stories of getting the victims out using doors as stretchers and cutting people free of their seats with their pocketknives. They recall covering bodies in curtains and sheets and finding tubs of ice and water for burn victims.

Some of the survivors that have made the trip back stand to talk, remember, thank and grieve a bit.

He was on row 19, the next-to-last row of seats on the plane. He was an 18-year-old soldier when the plane crashed. Now he works in Customs. He’s got a wife, a young daughter intent on picking every flower at the cemetery where this memorial is held and a story to tell:

They all do. Twenty-two people on the plane lived, but their numbers are starting to dwindle. There were Guardsmen, lawyers and homemakers. At least three of the survivors died recently. One of whom survived near-fatal injuries in World War II and this crash and died just last year, at 86. Another survivor was also a World War II veteran who worked in forestry and construction. He lost a leg in the crash, but it never kept him off his motorcycle. He died last year at 96. Another had been in and out of hospitals every year since the crash, but she raised a huge family, too. She died last year at 71, leaving 17 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Her family asked for memorial donations to be made to the burn unit in Atlanta that treated her decades ago.

At least two books have been written about the disaster. One by one of the flight attendants, who began helping train the airline liaison officers who work with the families of crash victims and survivors.

“Nobody should have to go through that alone,” she said.

Back then, they say, people were just told to return to their lives. Even the locals who ran toward the smell of smoke and the crackle of the flames found that a difficult task. One man said he didn’t eat for a week. Another said he could only eat in darkness for a long time after the accident. Another man who dug through the debris didn’t sleep for days. There didn’t seem to be much of a normal thing to return to for a long while. It would be a long time before they could hear the sound of a plane and not look up.

But in grief there is joy. In pain, there is growth. The flight attendant marvels at how they found themselves in a place called “New Hope … New … Hope.”

The survivors single her out as a hero. All of 24 years old at the time, she’s struggled with that day for years, but on this point she is adamant: New Hope.

The people of the community who remember that day understand her meaning in their bones. Over the years they’ve found themselves bonded with total strangers in the aftermath. That’s been part of their healing, seen in part by the Southern 242 Memorial Committee, which is raising money to install a proper memorial.

The people there learned firsthand how things like this change a person, can change an entire community. One man worked at a bank at the time. He’s now a preacher. Another worked on the railroad. He now owns an ambulance company. The local pharmacist changed careers and became a doctor after tending to the injured. One of the survivors from the plane crash left the budding software industry and devoted his life to counseling.

The lady that found a plane in her yard raised her kids and, now a senior citizen, will graduate in May with her degree in psychology. Inspired by that stormy day in 1977, she’s still trying to give help and hope to others.

Now to be personal about it: my grandfather is one of the names on that plaque, just another person that had probably never even heard of New Hope. The plane crashed just a few months after I was born, so this story has always been casting ripples in our family life, but this was the first time I’ve been to the site and placed scenery with the details.

They said he was killed instantly, still just the smallest of comforts for the family of a man struck down at 42.

He was a new grandfather, but an old preacher. I have the Bible from which he gave his first sermon, at the age of 16. As a newborn I was there for one of his last sermons.

Ms. Sadie, the homeowner, has become a lifetime friend for my mother, who lost her father as she tended an infant. Ms. Sadie says they pulled his last Bible from the debris in a place where everything surrounding it had been destroyed by the flames. The book, they figured, should have been, too. But it was only scorched on the margins.

They found it opened to Psalm 23.

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22
Mar 12

Much better now, thanks

I woke up hungry this morning, which is how I knew things were looking up. Let’s call whatever moved in on Tuesday night and dominated Wednesday a minor, temporary inconvenience and move on.

There is this, though:

When I was in the third grade I came down with chicken pox during my spring break. I was at my grandparents. They were out in the country enough that a trip into town to see the pharmacist was good enough to verify the pox unto me. The druggist suggested I not travel. I was staying with my grandparents for a few days longer.

This would ordinarily not be a problem, but I’d had perfect attendance in the second grade and made it all the way to spring break in the third grade without missing any school. This was upsetting.

And then the itching really began.

After a while it all became miserable, one of the more painful being a spot right on a biceps tendon, irritated each time I walked. But I was fairly well covered in the horrible little blotches.

The only thing that made me feel better was the custom-ordered and custom-heated chicken noodle soup with crumbled up crackers and tea in the red plastic cup.

My grandmother has always been amused by me, and she’s spoiled me with all of her precious heart. (I was her first grandchild.) And so this silly, pathetic little request was honored for almost every meal for the week or so I fought off the chicken pox. My grandmother has a very giving spirit.

That picture is probably a few years before they realized they’d have to buy me that nasty, soothing lotion.

Some years later, probably when I was in undergrad, I asked my grandmother if she could spare one of those cups. Because I’ve always amused her, and because I am her favorite (and only!) grandson, and because she is very giving, she offered me two of her red plastic cups, which secret a cure-all elixir from their pores when you are feeling bad. They’ve always held a place of honor in my cabinets.

What, your cabinets don’t have places of honor?

They’ve been in use around here the last few days. I still can’t make chicken soup like she can, even though she just pours it out of a can as I do. Also, she is a better cracker crumbler than I. That’s even more absurd sounding, I know, but it is a truth of life: your grandmother is way better than you are at a lot of things. It’s science.

These days a similar cup is called a Koziol Rio Tumbler. I doubt that’s what these cups are. That name suggests a carefully calibrated focus group that was meant to impart sophistication. My grandparents were hardworking country people. My grandfather was a truck driver, my grandmother worked in the textiles. Their red plastic cups have no name or logo on them. Who knows how long they’ve had them, but it is an easy 30 years at least. They probably bought them because they needed cups, and red brings out her eyes. Or maybe they were a gift from an aunt or someone. What matters is that the magic curative powers within these cups are still working.

(And now, some several decades later, during another spring break, this bit of unpleasantness caught up with me. Parallels!)

Elsewhere: I did a few small things around the house to feel productive. I read a bit and wrote about nine pages worth of things. There’s also the new marker entry.

I’ve recently added some posts to the work blog:

The age of mobile has been here awhile, actually

Lots of links — visual edition

The 1940 Census infographic

Changes in advertising trends

Publishing with WordPress?

That last one, even if you aren’t interested in anything to do with the general journalism theme on the other blog, could be useful.

Finally, I’ve tweaked the front page to the section on my grandfather’s textbooks. That portion of the site is complete, but it was missing something. And then I found that something — a photograph, the one I have of him as a school boy, even if it is a transfer and his bright young face is in a bit of shadow — tonight while working through a box of things in the office closet.

Yes. As midnight approached I was cleaning off a desktop and working through a box of photographs. I am feeling better, thanks. The red plastic cups do the trick.

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5
Mar 12

Mom’s birthday

A favorite family song …

In a version she might have known as a child, just 29 short years ago. 😉

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20
Jan 12

So I’m Dutch

An email conversation spent me on a late evening genealogy search. My known family tree only goes back so far, it seems. Some people aren’t interested in doing the research. We have common names. We are from a typically inconspicuous rural lifestyle, so there aren’t a lot of newspaper mentions.

I haven’t done any real genealogy research, the extent of my primary searches have come from old digitized newspaper copy, but I do enjoy digging through the hard, good work of others.

So in this conversation today I realized there were names I’d forgotten and names I couldn’t recall ever knowing. I started searching. I got back an extra generation and found two new surnames. I also found the obituary of my great-great grandfather. He was a World War I draftee, and died in his home. He was survived by his wife and four children, including my great-grandmother.

(Update, from several years later … In digging this up to search out one key point, I now think I was wrong about the people in the family tree. I can’t find the original thread anymore, and later clicking and surfing has given me other names. So I’ve put a strike through the parts below that now seem erroneous. Still, one side of my family was Dutch, though.)

These were the ads on the obituary page of The Alabama Courier (Athens, Ala.) on Thursday, February 28, 1946. (The Courier was established in 1892 and merged with the Limestone Democrat in 1969. They’ve been publishing as the News Courier since.)

Miss your loved ones? Bury yourself in work! The nuts and bolts of the Army Air Corps will see you through! The coveralls are free, but you’ll earn the stripes.

This is from the Ads You Don’t See Anymore department of the newspaper:

I couldn’t find any mention of the Clem Brothers Gin, but I’ll ask around. The closest thing I can find is a lumber concern over in Georgia.

Ahhh, a glamorous night out on the town. You’ve put on your best coat, your wife is wearing that beautiful dress. And the maitre’ de can set you up at the best table! “We’ll take the milk. Christopher’s.”

“Garçon! This is from a different dairy. Please take it back.”

I can’t figure out if this was the local logo or something that died out before the muscle car era, but here’s the Dodge ad:

A man named Robert Mills had worked at Draper Motor Company for about a year when this ad came out. After a decade on the lot he bought the dealership in 1955. It stayed open at least until he retired, in 1979. Can’t find anything about the place after that.

The Plaza Theater was on the square in neighboring Athens:

The movie, West of Pinto Basin, was released six years before, in 1940. My how the world changed in between. The IMDB blurb for the movie: “Three cowboys fight a saloon owner who is trying to grab up all the local land by engineering stagecoach robberies so an irrigation dam can’t be built.”

Can’t miss, right? It is a durable plot. Shows up in a lot of westerns.

Here’s the Zorro serial, in full:

Three people are killed and a stagecoach crashes off a cliff into a creek in the story’s first two minutes, before the first word is spoken. They do a great cliffhanger at the end of the episode, too. (You can watch the entire story at the Internet Archive.

And, yes, the title says Zorro, but the character is Black Whip. Released in 1944, the serial was meant to capitalize off of a 20th Century Fox remake of The Mark of Zorro. Republic couldn’t get Zorro, and so this was how they solved the problem. (See? Hollywood has been out of ideas before.) The serial is set in Idaho and the main theme is a fight to prevent and ensure statehood by the villains and heroes respectively. You wonder if other territories had other Zorro spinoff franchisees. A different color, a different weapon and some hero could pay a few royalties to the Big Z and save the day, and probably a few Hollywood production companies, too.

One last thing on the Zorro serial: James Lileks has a theory that projects from this period always have a Star Trek tie. So I ran the entire cast and crew through the Star Trek filter — it zooms along at warp speed don’t ya know … — and found exactly one match. Tom Steele was a stuntman on Black Whip. He started in 1932 and worked until the mid-1980s. He appeared in Bread and Circuses as Slave #2. He has the best stuntman bio ever:

Stuntmen are often selected because of their resemblance to the star they are doubling for. In contrast to this, many of Republic Pictures’ western stars in the 1940s and early 1950s, such as Allan Lane, Bill Elliot, Rex Allen and Monte Hale, were selected in part due to their resemblance to Steele, who would do their stunts.

The Added Joy? It was a cartoon short from 1937, back when Mel Blanc was uncredited.

But I digress. The Plaza opened in 1939 and sat 340 people. (The city itself had about 4,300 at the time.) In 1954 a newspaper ad said the theatre would be closed temporarily starting in June, but it never reopened.

Here’s where the theater stood:

Last year, the Courier reported that a non-profit community organization that prettifies the downtown area asked the current owner of the building, a pharmacist, to improve the façade of the old theater. The dilapidated stucco came down, the brick underneath was still in good condition.

BABY CHICKS – The KIND THAT LIVE. As opposed to the chicks that, you know, die.

It verily screams out at you on the obits page.

Anyway. In my paternal grandfather’s family I gained an extra generation — Smith’s are tough to trace at a casual glance — dating back to my great-great-grandfather.

Now, my paternal grandfather’s mother? She told me when I was very young about some uncles who fought in the Civil War. I was young enough to be enthralled by this, but not smart enough yet to ask if she knew any details. If she were still here I might be able to tell her a few things after this bit of reading.

It was her father’s obituary we started discussing here. I picked up a thread on rootsweb that allows me to go back 13 more generations. Assuming these various people’s hard work is correct (I see a few logic errors in chronology in some peripheral details, but let’s assume the big stuff is accurate) we can go back to a man named Eltekens, in 16th century Midwolda, Groningen, Netherlands.

The Hendricks family, again I didn’t even know this name until today, came over to the New World in 1662. (In my mother’s family a young man came over on the Mayflower, so my roots are fairly deep, it seems.) Albertus Hendrickssen became Albert Hendricks. He was a house carpenter, owned land in Pennsylvania and was a constable and a juror.

This would have been his land around the turn of the 18th century:

Albert’s particular son that matters to this story, Johannes (or John), was a shipbuilder. His second wife extends the chain a bit closer to my family. He had two children in Philadelphia before dying in 1709. It was John’s son, James, that moved the family south. He found himself in North Carolina in the early 1740s. He had nine sons and “several unknown daughters as he left no will.”

James Jr. changed Hendricks to Hendrix. He is believed to have fought in the Revolutionary War. James Jr.’s son, Larkin, moved the family to Alabama in 1830 or earlier.

Larkin’s son, William, and grandson, Joseph, lived through the Civil War — though I don’t know if they fought. Joseph also read about World War I and the Great Depression in the local paper. He was a farmer, and he died in 1933 at the age of 88. His son was James, the World War I draftee, my great-great-grandfather at the beginning of this post.

At least one branch of my family tree has been in that county for nine generations and 180 years. It’s only been a county for 196 years. (They should really own more property don’t you think?)

All of this is more than you wanted, of course. But when you do this sort of thing it is good to write it down and make good sense of it all. That way you can bore your friends endlessly at parties.

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27
Dec 11

The day after the day after Christmas

Went to the mall. That’s safe, right?

Santa’s gothic stand is still in place, but no one has any more use for it.

It is as if we’ve said: The season has passed you by, old man. We’re here to return things, not ask for more from you. And why did you bring me this awful thing anyway?

We were not returning things, however. We’d ventured into the cold and damp for a visit to the Apple Store. No longer do people wish to see Saint Nick. Now they are looking for Saint Steve.

We were there to look at iPads for my father-in-law. He wanted something a bit more new than his hulking desktop. He’d told us what he wanted to do and we decided that this might be the way to go. We just had to put one into his hands.

This being his first Apple Store experience, it was a bit eye-opening. We showed him the basics in the crowded store, he didn’t seem especially into it at first, but ended up buying one. We snagged a salesman pretty quickly. He went through the data-mining procedure. Told my father-in-law to sign his device. He looked around in vain for a pen, a stylus, anything. The kid was concerned with his lunch break.

“What? Am I supposed to use my finger?” he asked, if a bit sarcastically.

“Oh yeah. Just use your finger. I see it every day and have gotten used to it. Sorry,” he said.

This was the first thing my father-in-law had ever signed for with his fingertips. We live in an age of wonders.

Got him home and opened the box. The Yankee signed him up for iTunes. I threw way too much information at him at once. He logged in, found his home network, registered and started playing with it. One little hiccup later and he was suddenly a professional.

My mother-in-law came in and said “Is this how it is going to be from now on?”

“Huh?”

She said, “Finally I can have control of the remote. For the first time since we’ve had a remote!”

They’re on a cable system that has an app which acts as a remote control.

Had dinner with The Yankee’s collegiate diving coach. They were comparing dives they threw a decade ago. They seemed to recall teammates technique with alarming clarity. Let that be a lesson for all of us.

We had dinner at a place called The Black Duck. It is an old ship that is tied to the bank under an interstate. It looks like it is falling into the river. It was featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. Guy Fieri pointed out on the show that it looked like the place was falling into the river.

It could be that the place is falling into the river.

I wondered if it was happening on a trip to the restroom, where the floor is at a severe tilt. Turns out you’re OK as long as you notice the tilt. It is when you don’t feel the angle, I was told, that you should call a cab.

The steamed clams were a big feature on the show, but the burgers were the quintessential calling card. I had the stuffed bleu cheese burger. It was pretty good. You would think places featured on a show like that would blow you away, but this was perfectly acceptable. It was a bit pricey, but that could be the regional thing, too. As with the few other places featured on that show, this one gets some bad reviews online, but that could be two trolls with an axe to grind against the Food Network for all anyone knows.

The stuffed procedure involves tearing apart 12 ounces, putting the cheese in the middle and then putting one part of the patty on top of the other, closing up the seams so there’s no leakage. I was surprised to learn from the segment that these were 12-ounce patties. I do believe they cooked them down. Judge for yourself:

By the time we got back the in-laws were asleep. The iPad was nowhere to be found.