Unaware sailors attending the Stanford-University of Southern California football game are alerted by loudspeakers to immediately return to the carrier, and by 8 p.m., when officers of the Shore Patrol bring two AWOL sailors aboard the ship, departure preparations are well underway.
The officers and crew of the USS Philippine Sea are about to participate in the largest air-sea search-and-rescue mission in history. It is extremely rare for a commercial airliner to just disappear, and not since the search for famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart twenty years earlier has such an effort been organized.
There is still hope for survivors. Romance of the Skies carries four twenty-man life rafts and extra life vests. Each raft has enough rations for twenty people for one day. With some conservation measures, the food can last a couple of days as stranded survivors float in the Pacific awaiting rescue. The rafts are also equipped with Victory Girl emergency radios, low-frequency transmitters that automatically emit distress signals when the manually cranked generators are actuated. They also can send automatic SOS signals as long as the crank is turned. Signals can be heard for hundreds of miles, so there is still hope, even though the odds are increasingly mounting against a successful rescue.
In Alma, Michigan, the Reverend and Mrs. Robert W. Clack wait for the phone to ring with the good news that their son, Lee, and his family have been rescued at sea. They have been waiting all day for a call that will never come.
The Reverend Clack, a Congregational minister and former YMCA missionary in China, has recently retired as a math and astronomy professor at Alma College. He conducted the wedding ceremony that united Lee and Anna in 1943.
“We just can’t believe they are gone,” he tells a newspaper reporter. “We’re praying that their plane is floating or that they are safe in rubber boats and will be rescued soon.”
It has been less than thirty-six hours since Daddy kissed her goodbye, but Mom is fighting to remember what he looked like, what he felt like, how he smelled. She still can see his smile, and that gives her some comfort.
She opens the shoebox again and reads another letter sent by Daddy when he was in Germany several years earlier:
Frankfurt, Germany
8 p.m., Friday, November 26, 1954
“Dear Mom and Boys:
“Your Dad is sitting here thinking of how much he loves you and misses you. It seems that it has been much longer than five weeks since I left you angels in the terminal.
“I’ve told everyone here about my Kenny-Bo flying our ‘Buddy-Seat’ plane. I hope he can learn to fly it one day. That’s one of the reasons I bought it, you know, so our boys could someday learn to fly like their daddy. Everyone over here thinks it’s funny that Kenny calls the plane his ‘Buddy-Seat’ plane. Today, one of the fellows saw a plane overhead and told me to wave to it because it was probably that ‘Buddy-Seat’ plane and in the right Germany, too. I thought it very funny, too, but I could see more than a laugh in such a statement. I could see the big ideas that run through that beautiful head of his and the brightness of his thinking that he wasn’t sure of where I was. This Germany is a big place as European nations go and I’m sure you can find it, Son. Some of these days your dad will show you the way here and a lot of other places, too. You just grow big and strong and care for yourself and you’ll find much happiness in this world.
“I believe Jerry is going to have little lust for any adventure, but God bless your little dickens, I love you both. I hope I can make your home so happy you won’t want to roam, but I believe the whole world is going to be Kenny’s playground, or possibly even beyond our good earth.
“In everything sweet and beautiful I see you, Dear Mom, and while I loved you as much in ’47 as anyone possibly could love anyone, I have managed somehow to love you a little bit more with each passing day. I know I fail to tell you, but I try to show it in my own clumsy way. I often wonder how I rated you in the first place.
“Love always, Dad”
Mom sequesters herself in a corner of the kitchen as neighbors field questions from reporters. She is an emotional woman, but speaks publicly just once:
“Why do they want his picture? He isn’t dead. My God, he isn’t dead!”
Later that evening I am facedown on my bed, my pillow literally soaked in tears, crying, begging for Daddy to come home.
“Oh, please, Daddy, don’t be dead. Please, God, bring my daddy home!”
Jerry sits up his bed and glances over at me. He seems annoyed by my crying, but he is really angry with God. How could God let his daddy die? How could he?
In an adjoining bedroom. Craig is sound asleep in his crib, unaware of the unfolding tragedy that is consuming his family, unaware that his daddy will never hold him again, unaware of almost everything, as two-year-olds are when they clutch their favorite blankies in sleep.
There is still some daylight left over the Pacific, and dozens of planes and ships continue to look for any sign of the missing plane. As the Philippine Sea makes its way from port, two knife-nosed Navy submarines—the Cusk and the Carbonero—join two Gearing-class destroyers—the John R. Craig and the Orleck. Before the night ends, freighters, tankers, a troop ship, numerous Coast Guard vessels, and a luxury passenger liner are in on the hunt. It is the largest fleet ever assembled for a peacetime search. At least thirty planes, fourteen surface vessels, and two subs are now involved.
A Coast Guard spokesman remarks that the search “includes everything that’ll float or fly that we can put our hands on.”
Overhead, commercial airliners are diverted from their normal courses to fly low over the ocean; military bombers and transport planes fly as low as they safely can while crew and passengers peer out the windows.
Each plane and ship has an assigned search sector, but they are looking for a needle in a haystack. The search area is more than 150,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean loneliness, but even as night falls, the searchers don’t give up hope, looking for a light, a flare, anything that will lead them to the missing plane.
Les Snipes, a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, has spent the day skimming the whitecapped Pacific aboard the Pan American DC-7 flying at 600 feet. He and other newsmen are joined by Pan American employees who are stationed along each side of the plane, peering out the windows in a dawn-to-dusk quest.
“Everyone is wondering. Everyone is waiting. Everyone is hoping,” he reports to his newspaper. “The whitecaps, the cloud shadows, the birds, even flying fish confuse searchers. We can see thirty miles in any direction—thirty miles of sky and water.”
The searchers report seeing some yellow square objects that may be lifejackets, but it is impossible to tell at 600 feet above the water. The plane makes numerous passes above the objects, but they can’t be identified, appearing as small as postage stamps in the wide Pacific.
An Air Force pilot radios the location—28 degrees 11 minutes north latitude 142 degrees and 45 minutes west longitude. Nearby ships will be asked to check out the objects, but they will not be found.
Another glimpse of hope fades.
Reporter William Mackey of the San Francisco Examiner is also doing double duty as a searcher. He stares at the sea for hours. Always hoping. Rubbing his burning eyes, he looks for what is not there. From time to time he sees things floating on the water and he shouts to the crew. The locations are plotted and transmitted to other searchers, including veteran pilot Kinkel. Mackey is flying aboard a Boeing Stratocruiser, a sister ship of the missing Romance of the Skies. He notes that for Kinkel, this is more than just a search for a missing plane; he has friends on the crew of the missing airliner.
At 11:51 a.m.—more than six hours after the search plane left Honolulu — Kinkel’s voice is heard over the intercom:
“That smoke curl to the port . . . another aircraft has sighted debris and dropped a flare. . . . There goes the weather ship towards it!”
Fifteen minutes later his voice crackles on the speakers again:
“A mirror flash—a possible mirror
flash to the port! Focus as we circle.”
It turns out to be sunlight reflecting off an oil slick, likely from a passing ship.
At 12:27 Captain Kinkel again alerts the searchers:
“An object under the starboard wing. Please scan there with your binoculars.”
Everyone moves to a starboard window and focuses binoculars on the ocean below.
“There it is again. It’s very bright orange. Get a sighting on it, somebody!” Kinkel orders.
The sightings are radioed to surface ships, along with those from other aircraft. The vessels speed to where they are directed to hunt. A Coast Guard cutter arrives fifteen minutes later.
But again, nothing.
At 2:11 p.m. Kinkel gets back on the intercom:
“We’ve sighted a white object. Try and keep it in view. We need it. Bad!”
Nothing.
Reporter Mackey is dead tired, as is everyone else aboard the Stratocruiser, when, in late afternoon, a discouraged and weary Kinkel walks into the cabin.
“Sorry, but we have to call it quits, folks. We’re heading home,” he grimly announces, then heads back to the cockpit. The Stratocruiser’s huge wings dip gently toward the ocean—seemingly in tribute to its missing sister plane—and seconds later the DC-7 joins the Strat in the long trip back to San Francisco.
The first full, heartbreaking day of searching is coming to an end.
Strange things flash through reporter Mackey’s mind. Things he wishes he hasn’t seen. Things like a bright orange strip of some kind of material floating on the water. Things like a mail sack. Things that resemble an aircraft hatch door.
In the morning, Mackey will board the same plane and repeat the process. Hopefully tomorrow’s search will have better results.
University of Southern California grad student Douglas Clack has been trying to study but is feeling nothing short of miserable. It’s just been confirmed that his big brother Lee is aboard the missing Stratocruiser. By now the entire Clack family has heard the heartbreaking news and is trying to come to grips with what is happening midway across the Pacific.
Douglas decides to take a bath before bed, and just as he settles into the bathwater the missing Lee is suddenly in the room with him. He has appeared from out of nowhere, with no sound, no words, but he is there.
“It is all right,” he tells Douglas in a positive, reassuring voice, and a feeling of comfort surrounds him.
No matter what has happened to Lee and his family, Lee has reassured him that they are all right, out there somewhere.
As commercial and military aircraft continue to crisscross the Pacific on Sunday morning, November 10, all eyes not actively involved in operating the aircraft are directed on the seas below, and all ears are focused on monitoring the radios for any hint of the missing airliner.
US Air Force Lt. Donald Lang of Pocomoke City, Maryland, is copiloting a Military Air Transport Service flight from Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco to Hickam Field at Pearl Harbor when the first sign of hope appears in the form of an SOS signal. Lang reports a “clear and strong SOS signal” in about the same position as the last radio report from Romance of the Skies.
For at least forty-five minutes the SOS signal is heard loud and clear by the Air Force search flight crew, and Lang says it is definitely from a “Gibson Girl” hand-operated radio, the kind that is standard equipment on all the missing airliner’s life rafts.
“The SOS was followed by a series of numbers. I could not make out all of them clearly, but I do know definitely the last number was four, and I think the next-to-last number was four,” he later recalls.
The missing Stratocruiser was number was N90944, and Lang says he had no idea about the plane’s number when he heard the distress call.
Halfway across the world, in Sydney, Australia, Ruth Halliday has not yet told her four children — Lindsay, nine; Julia, six; James, five; and Margaret, three months — that their father’s plane is missing. Weeping and red-eyed, she is holding out hope that her husband, Robert, a thirty-six-year-old executive with a Sydney printing company en route home after a four-week business trip to England, Canada, and the United States, will be found alive.
“He’s been on two previous overseas trips, both to Europe,” she tells a reporter. “I have been listening to the radio and been in touch with Pan American ever since I first heard the plane was missing.
“Until something definite is found, I will never give up hope.”
There is a sharp rap on the front door, and a telegram is delivered to 1338 Loyola Drive shortly after noon. It is sent with love, but the message is clear: There is really no hope; Bill Fortenberry is dead.
“Dearest Ronnie. Sorry about Bill. Wish we could be with you. With love, Hazel, O’Neal, Wayne.”
The telegram from her siblings in far, far away South Carolina is a reality check. My mother faces the cold, hard truth that she may now be alone—a young widow with three little boys and her closest family members thousands of miles away. If Daddy is gone, what in the world will she do now? Sell everything and move back to South Carolina, a place where my father did not want his children raised? Move back to Miami, the place they both dearly loved but still far away from family support? Stay where she is, in Santa Clara, and somehow cope with the agony of loneliness, and memories of him in every corner of the house?
She folds the telegram and takes it to her bedroom, where she places it in a dresser drawer, sits on the edge of their bed—her bed now—and cries.
“Bill is still alive.” She says it over and over in a feeble attempt to convince herself, but in her heart she knows he is gone.
While the search for the missing plane continues throughout the afternoon and evening, the world goes on as if nothing happened. At Honolulu Stadium, 15,000 frenetic and screaming fans are showing the world why Elvis Presley is the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. The crowd, mostly teenage girls, is oohing, bouncing, and shrieking to his beat and soulful Southern sound, and is enthusiastically joined by the mothers in the audience in idol worship. A missing plane out there in the ocean is the furthest thing from their minds.
On Monday morning the phone rings in Pan American’s San Francisco office. An anonymous caller has a simple question:
“Was William Payne of Scott Bar on that missing plane?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, he was. Are you a relative?
“No. Just curious.”
“Why is that?”
“Because it couldn’t have happened to anyone more deserving,” the caller replies, and then hangs up.
Fortune seekers have panned for gold and mined for precious metals in the granite mountains and swift-moving streams of Northern California’s Siskiyou County for nearly 200 years, and it was here in the summer of 1955 that William Harrison Payne went to strike it rich, first as a lodge owner, then as a miner.
He was an unlikely prospector, a recently retired Navy machinist’s mate with no experience in either mining or his new career—owning and operating a hunting-and-fishing lodge—but he was a hardheaded man and determined to make a go of it. The odds were stacked against him, but after two decades in the military following orders that he often thought were stupid, Payne was eager to be his own boss, to determine his own destiny, and to order others around for a change.
His risky first venture into the business world was poorly financed and not very well developed. But the Paynes managed to make the down payment and swung the deal to buy the Roxbury Lodge and the 200 acres it was situated on, about three miles upstream from the tiny gold- mining ghost town of Scott Bar.
The lodge had been built in the early 1900s on a bluff near the confluence of the Scott and Klamath rivers, close to the site where huge amounts of gold were discovered during the California Gold Rush. Wealthy Boston capitalist H. P. Nawn constructed it as a guesthouse for friends, family, and business associates and had nicknamed it The Bungalow, but it was much more than that. It featured sixteen rooms with all the modern conveniences
of the time, and guests lounged in comfortable high-back rocking chairs on a spacious veranda while enjoying a panoramic view of the river rushing over boulders and bright-red coho salmon jumping and splashing before their eyes. Their dinners were prepared by a seasoned gourmet chef and served in rustic elegance surrounded by a vast, rugged, but stunningly beautiful wilderness. Diners enjoyed fresh fruit and vegetables from Roxbury’s own gardens and orchards, and fresh dairy products were delivered from neighboring farms.
This outdoorsman’s paradise had once attracted notables from far and wide, including Herbert Hoover prior his inauguration as president of the United States. But that was long ago, and Roxbury Lodge’s glory days had long since passed by the time the Paynes took it over.
Unrestrained post-World War II logging was causing massive soil erosion, and the rivers were filling with silt. Local mills were cutting more than 40,000 board feet of timber every day, and fishing was on the decline. Even deer hunting was becoming less popular, as more farms were being carved out of the valley and newcomers moved in.
Payne’s only civilian employment since retiring from the Navy on June 3, 1955, had been as a coremaker for Augustine Brass Casting of Stockton. He found the work—creating molds to produce metal castings in a ship-building foundry—not only boring and beneath his dignity, but even worse distracting from his real goal: owning a resort lodge. One of his former supervisors at Augustine recalled that Payne was not at all interested in his work and talked frequently about consummating a deal to buy Roxbury Lodge. His job at Augustine lasted less than two months.
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