The NTSB, in its findings, reported that when the plane hit the woods, “Two passengers were not wearing their lapbelts.” Neither passenger was identified by name. One, of course, was Jonathan Ealy, who had been thrown through the cockpit on impact. I’d known that within a couple of days of the crash, advised of it by the federal investigators who visited me in the hospital. The other was Brian McCann, the passenger lying in the aisle beneath the seat to which I was strapped when the plane came to rest. I wouldn’t know that until almost thirty years later.
Tracking down my fellow survivors, I took advantage of contemporary information technology. One might say that the task would have been nearly impossible before development of the Internet search engine, but to believe that is to believe in fairies.
My first job, right out of college, was as a reporter for a now defunct Scripps-Howard newspaper, the Washington Daily News, an afternoon tabloid that competed for circulation with two broadsheets in the nation’s capital, the Washington Post, which is still in business, and the Evening Star, which is not. The News will forever be famous for having been home to the legendary Ernie Pyle, the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent who lost his life on Okinawa. When I went to work at the News, almost a quarter of a century after he died, Pyle’s desk was still in the newsroom and little had changed since he’d last used it.
Stories at the News were generated in a city room that even then was a primitive artifact of American industry. Lifted intact and hauled away, it could have been placed on exhibit in a wing of the Museum of History and Technology at the Smithsonian. Copy, composed on manual typewriters, was edited with pencil, paste pot, and scissors. Rolled and stuffed into cylinders, it was delivered by pneumatic tube from the city desk to keyboard operators downstairs, whose clattering typesetting machines spit out lines of justified type in the form of hot slugs of cast lead.
It was a place where a young reporter could follow a story’s physical transformation as it went from the pages of his notebook to the pages of a newspaper leaving the building in the back of a truck. The story, within a couple of hours of the time it was written, would appear under his byline alongside a cup of coffee on Capitol Hill, or a beer and a shot across the street. Deadline for the city edition was seven A.M. The paper, rumbling off the web-fed presses, hit the street at nine. It was a time when, unless you arrived in handcuffs, you needed a necktie to get into court. Some of the old-timers still owned fedoras, and even the female reporters wore trench coats. A cigarette habit, though not required, was a pretty big part of the deal.
All a reporter needed in the way of a search engine back then was a phone, a cross-directory, and a morgue. After that it was just a combination of shoe leather and no shame. A newspaper morgue is an archive of stories clipped from previous editions of the paper. The morgue at the News was a small room behind the city desk choked with file cabinets containing ages worth of yellowing newsprint and original black-and-white glossies. A cross-directory is a listing, arranged alphanumerically by street, showing the name and phone number of the current resident at any given address. (And the names and numbers of that resident’s neighbors.) A telephone . . . Well, the newer telephones at the News were the rotary-dial phones that weren’t black. With these tools, a standard phone book, and the right number at the Department of Motor Vehicles, a reporter at any newspaper, like all the private eyes in pulp fiction, could find any person he wanted to talk to. Today the same reporter would type the name of that person and click “Search.”
In finding people who were present that night in 1979, I started with a morgue that was no more sophisticated than the one I’d used at the News. It consisted of the stories I’d clipped from the newspaper while I was confined to the hospital in the days after the crash. The clips, yellow with age and few in number, contained the names of numerous people I would eventually talk to, but they were of no practical value to me in tracking down the survivors themselves. The names of the survivors, where they were from, their ages, their occupations, the schools that some were attending, the simple biographical bullet points by which they were identified in the newspaper—over the years I had forgotten none of it. I could repeat the information in my sleep. Sometimes I did.
Brian McCann was eighteen years old, a student at Boston College. He was from New Rochelle, New York. He broke his collarbone in the crash. That’s what the newspaper had said, and all of it had remained with me. I knew more about him than that. I knew what his nightmares were like. I remembered things he would never forget. But to find him I had only what I knew from the newspaper, and it was all I needed to know.
To say that McCann is a common name—and granted, I grew up in Boston—is to my mind akin to suggesting that Marie Antoinette liked to shop. It’s certainly more common than my name. And few are the McCanns, I would submit, who have not at one time or another considered the name Brian for that bundle of joy on the way. The Catholicism of the Irish, I think, tends to hasten the inevitable. With six or seven trips to the maternity ward . . . Sean, Michael, Patrick . . . sooner or later, it’s going to be Brian.
(As I would discover, the Brian McCann I was looking for was one of eleven children in his family, ten of whom were boys, an accomplishment that even my parents, who ushered five children of their own into the insatiate bosom of the Catholic Church, might have perceived as showing off.)
In trying to find the Brian McCann who that night had mistaken his broken collarbone for a dislocated shoulder, I launched a preliminary electronic search, prepared for battle in a war of attrition with all the Brian McCanns of the world. I never anticipated being overwhelmed by just one of their legion’s number: Atlanta Braves catcher Brian Michael McCann, a 2006 National League all-star , who in 242 at bats that year went .333, with 34 doubles, 24 homers, and 93 runs batted in. There was no escaping the guy. Or his stats. In the time that it would have taken me to extract from the search enough data to narrow its parameters, in the time required to circumnavigate that single entry, only to reach the virtual armada of Brian McCanns certain to lie beyond, I could have driven to New Rochelle.
By coupling today’s technology with the old-fashioned skills I had picked up as a reporter, I saved myself the drive. The alumni associations of most universities, Boston College being one of them, are accessible on the World Wide Web. But in almost every case they are accessible exclusively to the alumni themselves. An investigator, any police detective will tell you, is only as good as his informants, and over the years, I have managed to cultivate some excellent confidential sources. It’s not how I usually think of my dental hygienist, Sue, but her son, as luck would have it, attended Boston College. Within twenty-four hours, I had the addresses of more than one Jesuit-educated Brian McCann, and among them was a student who had graduated three years after the crash. He lived in Connecticut.
He recognized my name, with no reference to the crash, when I introduced myself over the phone. Sparing me the burden of an awkward preamble, for which I was grateful, he made a joke about airplanes. He agreed to meet me to discuss what he called “a life-changing event,” but rather than open up time in his schedule in Connecticut or in Manhattan, where he worked as a currency trader, he preferred to meet on the Cape.
That he still remained somehow attached to the Cape came as no surprise. Cape Cod is not really a moveable feast. It does not stay with you that way. It is not like Paris so much as like Lourdes. Being there is the important thing. It is more like a reliable dope connection: People keep coming back. Guessing that Brian’s family, like Suzanne’s, had probably had a summer place on the Cape at the time, I asked where he had been going when the plane crashed.
“I was going to see my sister,” he said, explaining that she still had a home in Brewster, that he continued to visit her there, and that he was planning to do so soon, at which point he and I could meet. He asked if I knew Brewster. I told him I did.
He said, “You know the general store?”
It was where everyone met.
“I know it well,” I said.
The Brewster Store, built as a church in 1852 by members of the Universalist Society, was converted to a general store in 1866, and through a succession of five owners, it has been operated as such in the mid-Cape town for which it is named for almost a century and a half. General stores are a common feature of Cape Cod, which remains, in its own way, rural, but few match the store in Brewster for atmosphere and charm, and none succeeds so well in preserving a feeling of never having changed. The sense of continuity is reflected in the assortment of merchandise available and in numerous antique appointments, many of which are in everyday function, including a peanut roaster, a turn-of-the-century nickelodeon, and an old coal stove in the middle of the store around which patrons sit and warm themselves in winter. The wide steps of the front porch, which are perfect for loitering, and the painted benches outside, which were installed by the current owners to extend the capacity for same, give the two-story, wood-frame structure on Main Street a center-of-town flavor in a town that has no discernable center.
Owners George and Missy Boyd bought the store in 1986—they have owned another Brewster business longer—and it was just a few years before they bought it that they and I became acquainted. We met in New York through mutual friends, Robert Billingsley and his wife, Janice. Bob Billingsley and I will have known each other for half a century soon, and our friendship, which runs deep, is of a rare and special character, one of “the kinds of friendships,” says Hillary Clinton, who is married to another of my college classmates, “that have to be rooted in the common experiences of one’s youth.” I’ve known Janice almost as long.
The Boyds and the Billingsleys, whose daughters attended the same school in Manhattan, are more than friends, they are the kinds of friends who spend family holidays together. My acquaintance with the Boyds, springing as it does from my long friendship with Bob and Janice, is such that when I see them, it usually happens in New York rather than on the Cape, where I now spend most of my time. A typical example of our getting together was a small birthday party the Billingsleys hosted in their Upper West Side apartment to which the three of us were invited.
Ghosts, once laid to rest, will remain there undisturbed, effectively forgotten, neglecting to reveal themselves even over the extended course of the most intimate friendships. I had known the Boyds casually for some twenty-five years, had seen and talked to them on almost as many occasions, and had talked to the Billingsleys over that time almost as often as I’d talked to the members of my family, before I learned that Missy Boyd’s maiden name was McCann and that the young man I’d helped to his feet that night as I rose to my own in the wreckage of the aircraft was her brother.
“Your sister owns the Brewster Store?”
“She didn’t own it then.”
“Missy Boyd is your sister?”
And that is just one of the synapses across which the signal had never been transmitted.
The eleven McCann children had grown up in New Rochelle within a block of another, equally energetic family of Irish Catholics, one of whose twelve children, Brian informed me, lived in Wellfleet and owned a business there. Brian asked if I knew him. “Pretty well, in fact,” I said. Older than Brian, younger than I, he was someone I had met and become friendly with two years after the crash. I had known him for twenty-five years, Brian had known him since childhood, and never in all that time, on either side of the mutual acquaintance, did the connection the two of us shared reveal itself.
Again, it’s as if these were not the kinds of things one talked about in polite company.
“It’s a small world,” observes comedian Steven Wright, “but I wouldn’t want to paint it.”
Well, he needn’t bother. The phenomenon that sociologists and mathematicians refer to as the small-world problem has driven enough academic dissertations to wallpaper it. A hypothesis of social networks that has been around for almost a century, small-world conjecture puts forward the idea that any two randomly selected people will exhibit a connection to each other through a chain of associations that includes six other people, on average. The idea took hold in popular culture under the label “six degrees of separation,” after the 1990 play of that name by John Guare.
I’m naturally skeptical of this kind of gibberish, but then I was never very good at math. Given my connection to Missy Boyd by way of her brother Brian, Paul’s connection to Parmenter by way of a shared relationship to both Wendy and Grover Farrish, Suzanne’s connection to Jim Bernier by way of an acquaintance with me, and yet another, similar connection, revealed to me later, between an alarm technician and a caretaker who crossed paths at a summerhouse in the town of Chatham—all of whom had been present on the night of the tragedy, separated in each case by a single degree—I was becoming something of a believer. And my susceptibility was exacerbated by the nagging realization that I was likewise separated from Guare himself, the dramatist who popularized the phenomenon and gave it a name, only by the professor under whom we both studied playwriting in college.
When I finally reached Jonathan Ealy in Anchorage, he confirmed that he had graduated from the Duke University School of Law in 1985. That they might not have recognized each other is understandable, considering the circumstances of their original meeting, but it’s a good bet that Ealy, crossing the Durham campus, occasionally nodded hello to Paul Boepple, who was doing his pediatric residency there at the same time.
More than four months passed between the evening Brian and I talked on the phone and the day we finally got together. He and his family—his wife, a fashion consultant, and two daughters, ages eleven and fourteen—were visiting Missy in Brewster, and he took a morning out of his vacation to keep an appointment with me. We met at the general store on a Monday in early July. It was eight A.M., and the place was busy. It was the start of the tourist season on Cape Cod. Everything was picking up. The sun was shining, and along with several of the Boyds’ other patrons, Brian and I sat on the benches out front sipping carryout coffee.
Clean-cut, athletically built, he still had a youthful air about him. He was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and Top-Siders, but he’s one of those people who can wear anything—he would have looked just as laid-back in a suit. He appeared to be a guy who took care of himself, and everything else about him told me he was probably pretty well fixed, something I’d first suspected when I came across his address. His hair had grayed, but he had all of it, and his haircut cost more than mine. In addition to the sense of humor I’d first picked up from him over the phone, he had all the confidence and sophistication you’d expect to find in an educated guy who negotiated the international currency markets out of an office in midtown Manhattan. It says something about me, not about him, that a part of me reacted as one might to a younger brother who’d gone out and done well for himself. My arithmetic put him at forty-seven years old.
He was the third survivor I talked to, and he was the first to express curiosity about the injuries I’d sustained in the crash.
“I didn’t realize you were hurt that bad,” he said.
His memory was that I’d been pretty active.
“Not for long,” I assured him.
He was treated that night at the emergency room and released with a broken collarbone. Thirty-six hours later, he was carried from his sister’s house on a stretcher and taken back to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a hip pointer, which is a contusion of the iliac crest, the bony prominence that can be felt along the waistline. Following X-rays, he was released with pain pills. (I don’t know who initially treated him, but I’m guessing we shared an orthopedist, who, while undoubtedly having attended medical school, was apparently absent the day they covered the pelvis.)
He remembered the moment of impact in detail.
“It was a long ten minutes,” he said, of the interval between the landing announcement and the plane’s ultimate contact with the trees. “I heard stuff hitting the bottom of the plane. . . . The lights blinked. I remembe
r thinking, I’m about to die.”
Then came the sound of the crash.
“I just let go. I said, This is it.”
Thrown into the aisle, facedown on the deck (he was the first thing I saw when my vision cleared), he continued his inner monologue as the plane came to rest.
“I remember asking myself, Am I dead?”
He had his answer within seconds:
“I tested my limbs. . . . I’m still alive.”
And the first voice he heard was not that of God.
I remember asking him if he was OK and helping him up off the floor. As soon as it was clear he could walk, the evacuation began.
Brian confirmed that it was he who had helped carry the eldest sister from the plane. “She was a mess,” he said, and he remembered that “her legs caught on the door” as he carried her through. “Yes,” he verified, “she was unconscious. We didn’t take her far.”
It was unquestionably Suzanne with whom Brian had carried the young woman to the rear of the cabin—Suzanne remembers her being hot to the touch—and whether it was Suzanne or the middle sister with whom he carried her off the plane, he remembered that he and the middle sister walked away from the craft together. He stayed with her, not the eldest, as we settled in, waiting to be rescued, her head leaning against his chest as we huddled in the dark. Her injuries were not visible either to Brian or to me, but being extremely talkative, she exhibited sufficient distress to indicate that she was suffering from shock. In fact, her injuries were such that upon arrival at the hospital, she was admitted.
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