by D. W. Carter
At first, he offered his condolences again and handed her a check for around $3,000. He explained it was to help pay her bills and make any adjustments that she needed to after the loss of her husband. But just before walking out the door, the colonel said quietly, “Don’t even think about suing.”400 She never saw him again. Jeanine, as she remembered, was certainly not thinking about suing the air force at the time. Her world had just come crashing down, and as a widow with small children, she had much more pressing concerns. Forty-eight years later, however, she recalled how she thought it was a military rule that she could not sue the air force for her husband’s death, so she never tried. Even worse, her husband’s death remained an open wound in her life. Jeanine never remarried.
Irene Huber (Kenenski) came to loathe the insufferable memories of January 16, 1965, and the deafening silence afterward. She was nine years old when her brother, A1C Daniel E. Kenenski, assistant crew chief, died aboard Raggy 42. She recalled coming inside their house in Rhode Island after shoveling snow with her father that morning. As soon as she entered, she found her mother crouched down on the floor sobbing with the telephone in her hand. While the wet snow falling from her coat began to form melted puddles on the kitchen floor, she stood in shock, helplessly watching her mother cry over the news that Danny was dead. A Western Union Telegram from the air force carried the shattering news.
They were never told why the plane crashed and had “no information at all,” said Irene.401 And like Jeanine, their family was instructed that a lawsuit would not be an option.
The Kenenski family was notified of Danny’s death via this Western Union wire sent by the air force. Irene Hubar (Kenenski).
Neither Jeanine nor Irene (and it can only be assumed, the other families), for reasons unknown, was ever given the Collateral Board Investigation Report that explained what happened to their loved ones—further proof that the tragedy, grief and dissatisfaction with the outcome of the Piatt Street crash extended far beyond Wichita. Families across the United States, divided by race, socioeconomic status and location, still mourn every January 16, as they have done for nearly half a century. Their afflictions were, and remain, many.
17
THE LONG-AWAITED MEMORIAL
The only people it will die with will be the ones who watched it on the news.
—Survivor, January 16, 1985402
The victims of the Piatt Street crash would wait forty-two years before a memorial was named in their honor. In this case, justice took longer than the biblical account of the Children of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, as they sojourned in the wilderness of the Sinai desert for forty years before entering into the Promised Land.403 It took longer than the time needed to build the great Panama Canal, uniting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which, after several attempts, was completed in nearly thirty-five years.404 It even took longer than the decades needed for policies on race and equality to begin shifting in the U.S. following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When chatter began about the possibility of a memorial, blacks remained second-class citizens, and most U.S. establishments were still segregated. When the rhetoric finally ended, forty-two years later, an African American was preparing a successful run for the presidency of the United States. Time had certainly passed.
MORE TALK
There was talk of a memorial in the Wichita Eagle two days after the crash. A decade later, in 1975, people were still talking. On the twentieth anniversary in 1985, people were still talking. And another ten years after that, people were still talking about the absence of a memorial. Frustration and separation between the races were perpetuated in the Wichita community as years passed, with no activity or efforts made by the city to create a memorial. Ron Thomas, who witnessed the crash, explained in a 1996 interview the general feeling of isolation and separation after the KC-135 fell in Wichita’s black community:
It seems to me the city did not show much remorse, or enough remorse, outside of the black community. After the crash, and maybe because of the responses of whites, a lot of people in the black community really closed up. It became a black/white thing. People asked, “Why did all those people die here?” and the city never even put up a memorial or anything to acknowledge the loss of life.405
Others in the community suggested possible reasons for this: “I think that because of where it was,” said Brenda Gray, a longtime Wichita resident, “it was definitely not so important to the rest of Wichita.”406 The lingering silence and stagnation after such a tragedy had insidious effects: African Americans felt further excluded from the rest of the community; the crash seemed insignificant, easily forgotten; and the longer it took to do something, the more embedded the perception became. “…[I]t would be nice to see some kind of memorial over there,” said a survivor five years after the crash. “It would be a good thing just to have any kind of marker to recognize all those deaths.”407 They would have to wait. Meanwhile, a seething undercurrent of anger and acrimony boiled just below the surface.
THE FIRST MEMORIAL
Thirty-six years passed before the first collective memorial service took place. The service was held at the McConnell Base Chapel on June 9, 2001. The relatives of Capt. Gary J. Widseth (copilot), 2nd Lt. Arthur Sullivan (navigator) and several others helped establish a stone marker and organize a memorial service to honor the memories of those lost. While bagpipes bellowed “Amazing Grace,” the victims’ family members and airmen in attendance carried stargazer lilies, each representing a victim, down the aisle in an orderly fashion. It was a truly touching service, and there was scarcely a dry eye visible. Mrs. Widseth described the service as “beautiful” and “orderly”—as only a military service could be.408
A McConnell Senior Airman lays a flower during the memorial service and monument dedication ceremony held in June 2001. 22nd ARW History Office.
Erna Starnes-Winter lost members of her family in the 1965 crash. She is seen here with the memorial monument commemorating crash victims at its dedication ceremony. 22nd ARW History Office.
It was long overdue in the eyes of many in attendance, but it finally marked the beginnings of acknowledgement and a bit of closure. On that day, the McConnell officials promised, “no one would be denied entrance to see the monument dedicated to the crew and civilians.”409 But that was a promise they could not keep.
A NEW MEMORIAL
With the worst act of terrorism our nation has ever seen on U.S. soil occurring just three months later, on September 11, public access to the memorial via McConnell was limited. The relaxed security and open gates the public once enjoyed on military installations throughout the country vanished. Thus, a complaint in the years following the McConnell memorial was that its location was not readily accessible. Once again, it seemed the memory of those lost on Piatt Street would soon fade from public view under the shadows of larger events affecting the nation.
John Polson searched for a way to stop history from repeating itself. Polson, a white male in his sixties with no connection to the victims, was an unlikely candidate to generate interest in a disaster affecting Wichita’s black community. Nevertheless, Polson was a lifetime resident of Wichita and a community activist who was always troubled by the fact that there was no memorial on Piatt Street to honor the victims. According to Polson, “In the middle part of 2005, things got going on the memorial.”410 He approached Oletha Faust-Goudeau, now a Kansas senator, in 2004 and made recommendations to erect a memorial at the location of the crash site. As Polson lamented, “No memorial and public recognition had taken place,” and something needed to be done. For Polson, the realities of what had happened back in 1965 and how much worse it could have been still bothered him. “When that plane went down, if it had been three hours later and two to three miles due east,” he remembered, “it would have struck the Field House killing ten thousand people.”411
The Field House, which opened a decade prior to the crash on December 3, 1955, was a large, circular sports arena
located on the campus of WSU. Polson, a senior in high school during 1965, had plans to attend a basketball game there that afternoon. The WSU Shockers were playing against St. Louis University, and fortunately for the university and Wichita itself, a greater disaster did not occur. Just a few hours after the crash—with jet fuel still dripping from the roof of the arena and weary firemen soaking the wreckage of Raggy 42 only blocks away—the WSU Shockers won the Missouri Valley outright for the first time in history. They didn’t cancel the game.
THE WSU TRAGEDY
Polson cited several reasons why he felt the Piatt Street memorial had remained stagnant for so long. Among these were race, the social climate of the 1960s and the relatively small city of Wichita at the time. But he also recounted confusion over the years concerning another great tragedy involving yet another plane crash and the Wichita community. On October 2, 1970, on their way to a football game with Utah State University in Logan, Utah, several members of the WSU football team were killed when their plane collided with a mountain just outside Silver Plume, Colorado.412 Of the forty people on board, only eight survived. A memorial fund was established for the WSU plane crash the day after the accident. Two weeks later, there was over $11,000 in donations to build a memorial. One year later, a memorial was erected on the WSU campus, and an annual ceremony has been held there ever since.413
Years after the WSU plane crash, many in the community muddled it with the Piatt Street crash of five years earlier due to the relatively close time frame of each occurrence. Even in 2013, a young airman stationed at McConnell, who grew up on Piatt Street, remembered being told by his grandfather that it was the WSU football team that had crashed on Piatt. Only years later did he discover that the Piatt tragedy involved a plane he now knows intimately as a new KC-135 crew chief.414 In truth, many Wichitans today still confuse the WSU plane crash with the Piatt Street plane crash. Therefore, as Polson and countless others knew, establishing a memorial could respectfully distinguish the memories of those lost in both catastrophes.
REFLECTION AT LAST
It was not that Polson’s recommendation was somehow new or revolutionary. Clearly, there had been grumblings in the Wichita community for decades regarding the lack of a memorial at the crash site. But in 2004, the right people in the right places at the right time were assembled to put forth the energy and effort. A committee composed of various members of the Wichita community, city council, military and local businesses worked tirelessly to generate revenue for the memorial. Much work was required. Hundreds of letters were sent out for donations, fundraisers were established, grants were sought after and grass-roots campaigning continued for nearly two years to gather the funds needed to erect a memorial.415
Planes soar above Piatt Street memorial. Richard Harris, Kansas Aviation Centennial.
At last, six years after the first memorial service at McConnell and at a cost of well over $100,000, a large granite memorial was raised just south of 20th and Piatt Street. It was called a “venture of public and private work.”416 The tenacity and generosity of all involved was finally on display.
The memorial stands approximately thirty feet from the intersection that was the point of impact and rests on the west side of the street, where, nearly half a century earlier, homes were consumed by fiery jet fuel. Leading visitors to the massive memorial are 1,171 bricks, purchased by individual donors from the community.417 Twenty-two feet in length at its base and equipped with reflection benches and a donor-engraved brick plaza, the towering memorial is crowned with a fifteen-foot-high archway inscribed with the scripture “…A Time To Heal…” Located at 2037 North Piatt on 1.45 acres of park grounds set aside in 1971, the lofty granite and brick structure serves as a testament to those who perished.418 The base of the memorial contains the names of all the victims, both military and civilian. At its unveiling in July 2007, it seemed that closure might take place at last. Thirty lives, taken much too soon, are yet remembered, and the dreadful silence—lasting nearly half a century—has at least been broken. Let it never return.
Several members of the Piatt Street memorial committee stand together on January 16, 2012. From left to right: Colonel Herb Duncan with the Commemorative AirForce-JayHawk Wing, Dr. Carla Lee, Mr. John Polson, Kansas Senator Oletha Faust-Goudeau, Ms. Sonya M. House and Darryl Woodard. Richard Harris, Kansas Aviation Centennial.
EPILOGUE
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and indifference of the good people.
—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., January 27, 1965419
Giants roamed the earth in 1965. Their immense girth, strength and influence pressed heavily upon the masses, and their thundering voices swallowed up headlines for an entire decade. They went by the names of Kennedy, King, Johnson, Chavez, Hoffa and McNamara. They cleared paths, making resonating waves in many areas—politics, civil rights, domestic programs, workers’ rights, labor unions and Vietnam. These giants, it seemed, were invincible, and their weighty, panoptic shadows cast on American society like a thick blanket.
In the midst of these heavyweights, beneath their towering stature, was the burgeoning city in Kansas named Wichita, which was experiencing its own social upheaval and turmoil as race relations worsened in 1965. And at sixteen days, nine hours and thirty-one minutes into the New Year, disaster struck. Yet, in such a tumultuous, volatile and protean time, the Piatt Street tragedy was but a ripple.
Four days after the crash, President Lyndon B. Johnson was inaugurated, beginning his quest to achieve the Great Society. Four days after that, suffering from a stroke, Winston Churchill passed away in England, and a month later, Malcolm X was gunned down in New York City. In 1965, black churches burned in the South; murders were rampant in Mississippi; the Vietnam War escalated; race riots broke out in Watts, California; thousands marched in Selma, Alabama; thousands more protested the Vietnam War; and thousands stood up or sat down for equality. No shorter span of time so greatly influenced the course of social America as did the 1960s.
Meanwhile, as publicity waned and the ’60s grew louder and increasingly violent, the roar over the Piatt Street crash was reduced to a small chatter. Then, with the 1970s bringing its own grief involving plane crashes—the WSU plane crash in October, the Marshall University plane crash in November and another KC-135 crash in Wichita four years later, on March 5, 1974—Piatt Street faded from view.
Why it took nearly half a century to fully acknowledge the Raggy 42 disaster, why most remained idle while bitterness festered, why hardly any Kansans (in truth, hardly any Wichitans) have knowledge of its occurrence and why so many did so little for so long is a mystery. The seven men serving their nation that morning, and the twenty-three civilians on the ground, deserved more—their lives no less important than any other.
Perhaps, then, a combination of its location in northeast Wichita, declining race relations, civil unrest, social turmoil, apathy, disinterest, resentment, discord, separatism and a multitude of defining events simultaneously occurring in the compact and strife-filled 1960s is to blame. Whatever the reason, the Piatt Street plane crash was quickly and shamefully forgotten.
But thankfully, that time has passed. The city has since grown, and race relations have bettered from their once intolerable state. Laws were enacted to expedite settlements and aid victims of such calamities. Wichita’s disaster plan worked and was further enhanced. New families moved into new homes constructed on Piatt Street, and children now frolic on a beautiful playground, where green grass covers the scar of what was once a horrible scene. Off in the distance, a memorial watches over them, ensuring that those who were lost and those who suffered privately for far too long are no longer hidden.
The giants of that era have ceased to roam the earth. They are extinct. The axioms they lived by and left behind are not. As they discovered, it is only by understanding and confronting an unsettled
past, no matter how traumatic or ugly it might be, that mankind can take hold of the peaceful present. Clyde G. Stevens, now in his fifties, is headed toward that peaceful present. Clyde was six years old when his father, Dewy Stevens, perished inside of 2037 North Piatt. His father gone and his mother abusive, Clyde was placed in a boys’ home for abused and neglected children in Los Angeles, California. He grew up bitter, angry and confused, never knowing who his father was; he bounced in and out of jail as an adult, abused drugs and alcohol, attempted suicide, but eventually—through God’s grace, as he declares—received his life back.420
In 2013, forty-eight years later, Clyde returned to the boys’ home and learned for the first time how his father died. He had never heard of any Piatt Street crash. No one ever told him. He was not alone.
Without warning and without question, a montage of pain and intertwining fates fixed together by a defining moment of time on January 16, 1965, bequeathed many with grief. But Clyde now believes that the choice to learn from it and move forward or to remain captive is in his hands. He is no longer hidden by giant shadows or ominous clouds; his existence is no longer defined by tragedy. Faced with the vicissitudes of life, Clyde—among others—has gleaned from the value of forgiveness. The skies, for the first time in his life, are clear. And in Wichita, the forecast, too, is sunnier.
NOTES
1. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 1.
CHAPTER 1
2. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 142.