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 The weather report was outdated.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.
