A snapshot of a man
A cabinet that might have been used to hold glasses or paper cups
A woman’s wool suit
A paper sack marked “Rubber Gloves”
A white toy dog made of fabric with a ribbon around its neck
Three cases for thirty-five-millimeter slides
An orange squeezer
A gray-and-black-checked wool suit
Three oil-splotched serving trays
Half of a blue suitcase and one side of another
Two leather, fur-lined gloves
A woman’s white purse and a green one, both smudged with oil
Several pieces of a cigarette flip box
A Christmas card reading “Greetings from our house to your house” with a picture of a baby (likely a card my father had recently made in his garage darkroom with a picture of my baby brother, Craig)
A notebook charred on the edges, with Asian writing in pencil.
There are several packets of mail that later will be dried out and sent on to the recipients.
Also found floating in the sea is a paperback version of James Agee’s best-selling book A Death in the Family, the tragic tale of his alcoholic father’s death in a car accident shortly before Agee’s sixth birthday.
At 5:18 p.m. Friday, November 15, Ensign H. T. Lawson posts this on the deck log of the USS Philippine Sea: “Completed search operations, having recovered 19 bodies and various mail and debris from Pan Am Stratocruiser 944. Underway for Long Beach, California.”
As the carrier begins the return trip to its home dock in Long Beach, the FBI already has assembled a team in California to help identify the bodies, and has put together a log of all available facts on each person that might aid in the process. The team has gathered available fingerprint records, medical and dental reports, military records, information about special body markings, even information from relatives about the clothing and accessories the victims were wearing and what they might have had in their pockets when the plane went down.
The recovered bodies have already been identified, simply as Victims 1 through 19.
When plucked from the sea, Victim 1 was wearing a sweater by Pringle of Scotland; a suit by Bonwit Teller, tailored by Sloat & Company of New York; a St. Christopher bracelet and three others; and a pearl necklace. She is identified as Nicole Lamaison.
Victim 2 is described as an Asian woman wearing a Japanese obi, an aqua-colored sash for the red print skirt she was wearing when the flight went down. She is still wearing her wedding ring. Victim 2 is identified as Cassiqua Soehertijah VanDer Bijl.
Victim 3 is a white male wearing a blue shirt, a bow tie and red-checkered underwear. He is shoeless, but has on black-and-white argyle socks, and is also wearing his wedding ring. He has gold fillings in his teeth and is identified as vacationing pilot Robert Alexander.
Victims 4 through 19 are identified by clothing and personal items. A red sweater and gray skirt. A bra, size 36B. A female wearing a suit from the Town Shop in Saginaw, Michigan, and a bracelet with jeweled balls. A little boy in a blue-and-brown plaid shirt. A male adult in a gray suit with a black tie and gold-filled teeth.
The remains of Victim 5, identified as Australian businessman Robert Halliday, are among the easiest to identify. Inside his suit are his Pan Am ticket, his British passport, his driver’s license, a pocket comb, an auto club card, traveler’s checks issued in his name, and his personal exercise notebook. His watch - stopped at 2:20 - is still on his wrist. Investigators also find a business card in the name of Edward T. Ellis, the corporate executive who sat next to him on the flight.
Another passenger whose identity will be easy to confirm is that of Commander Gordon R. Cole. Among the items recovered with him are his US Armed Forces identification card, his swimming-pool pass, his Virginia driver’s license, a District of Columbia library card, his Pan Am ticket, and his brown leather wallet with a gold initial “C.” Inside the wallet are four one-dollar bills, seven twenty-dollar bills, and three blank checks from his account at Union National Bank in Muskegon, Michigan.
My father’s body is not among those recovered from the sea.
When this day ends, the search will be over. There will be no survivors of the crash of Romance of the Skies.
PART TWO
At 6:28 a.m. on Monday, November 18, the sun rises on the California coast and the navigational lights on the USS Philippine Sea are turned off as the giant carrier moors portside to Pier E at the Long Beach Naval Air Station. As the carrier/funeral ship docks, a section of its deck is covered with what is left of the giant airliner now packed in fourteen cardboard cartons, two small wooden crates, and eight half-filled sacks of airmail that searchers fished from the ocean.
At 7:40 a.m. officials from the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. and Pan American are permitted to board the carrier to begin their investigation of the bodies and debris recovered from the salvage area. Ten minutes later reporters and newsreel photographers board the carrier for a press conference on the flight deck.
Shortly before 8 a.m. the first of the white-shrouded bodies is removed from the refrigerated locker where they have all been kept since being plucked from the sea a few days earlier, and are sent above deck. Ship bells announce the arrival of the first elevator, with three bodies in basket stretchers—one of them a child’s.
A Marine honor guard stands in tribute as the bodies are removed one by one from the carrier and placed into ambulances and hearses, then escorted by police vehicles to Mottell’s and Peek Mortuary, where dozens of experts await. The USS Haven, a Navy hospital ship, has loaned a portable X-ray machine to the effort, and special telephones have been installed in the mortuary so that the team can communicate with sources anywhere in the world.
The mortuary, known as one of the five most beautiful in the world, with its old Spanish architecture and park-like gardens, has been transformed into an efficient, modern investigative unit, where authorities will attempt to determine not only the identifications of the victims, but also how they died and what may have led to the mysterious crash.
Security people lock down the mortuary area and are under strict orders to let no one in while the grim work is underway. FBI men wear white coveralls and white caps with the agency’s emblem, while everyone else has paper signs pinned on their backs that identify what jobs they are there to perform. They take fingerprints and record all of the belongings, and anything else they see. They X-ray the bodies from head to toe, and then pathologists and medical examiners conduct detailed investigations, hoping they may learn more about the accident. No definite evidence of burning is found in any of the bodies, and they agree that the minimal external injuries suffered by the victims may have been the result of the “cushioning effect” of the water. They also note a “significant finding” concerning what they believe might be seatbelt marks on the bodies of purser Crosthwaite and Captain Brown, meaning that both may have had seatbelts on at the time of the crash, or the marks may have been caused by something else. If Brown had his seatbelt on, that might negate the speculation that he was not in the cockpit when the plane went down. They also determine that there is no indication that many others whose bodies were recovered were wearing seatbelts. Why were some passengers ready for ditching and others not? That is a question that will never be answered, but the fact that most of the recovered wreckage and most of the recovered bodies were from the rear of the plane might indicate that the forward section was where an explosion or some other incident occurred to bring the plane down.
A few miles away, in Los Angeles, family members gather at the luxurious Biltmore and Wilton hotels and await news from the mortuary about whether their assistance will be necessary to help identify the bodies.
New York City
Philip Deutsch, co-owner of the renowned Hotel Lexington in Manhattan and fourteen other hotels on the East Coast, tells his secretary that he feels a little si
lly dictating a letter to FBI director Hoover this morning but that after having talked with Pan Am he feels it necessary to share his thoughts with the agency. The forty-three-year-old hotelier and world traveler tells his secretary that he’s willing to risk personal embarrassment on the slim chance that what he has to say might be helpful in determining why the plane went down.
His letter reiterates what is already publicly known: the plane was on schedule and having no problems at the time of its last radio contact, but something catastrophic happened suddenly thereafter, within minutes of reaching the point of no return.
“My guess is that there was an explosive on board which put the plane out of commission,” he states. “Furthermore, I would surmise that the explosive was so placed strategically that it would knock the radio equipment out at once, making it impossible for the pilot or copilot to report the difficulty. It seems to me that if such a bomb was placed aboard it could not have been placed aboard haphazardly, and must have been placed aboard by someone who was familiar with: 1) flight schedule; 2) approximate time of reaching the point-of-no-return; 3) knowledge of time bombs and detonators; 4) knowledge of radio equipment aboard the plane; and 5) access to the plane before flight time.”
Deutsch speculates that a disgruntled employee or perhaps one needing psychiatric treatment might be the culprit, and suggests that a search of the homes, cars, and garages of all employees connected with the crash might lead to a solution.
Hoover sends a polite thank-you letter to Deutsch a few days later and, after having Deutsch checked out as “clean” in the agency’s records, dispatches a memo to his staff dismissing the suggestions as simply information for background.
Seventeen-year-old high school senior Dave Kaiser is at his home in Manila, the Philippines, where his parents work for the US State Department. He considers himself to be a very lucky young man today. Less than a week ago, as he and his family had been flying from San Francisco to Honolulu aboard Romance of the Skies, he was invited to visit the cockpit when the crew learned that he was interested in aviation and a possible appointment to the US Air Force Academy. Kaiser quickly noticed that both wings of the Stratocruiser were thickly coated with engine oil and wondered why.
“The flight engineer admitted there was a lot of oil and looked in an aircraft maintenance manual onboard the plane. He said the engines had a lot of hours on them and that the aircraft was due for a major maintenance period, perhaps when it returned to Honolulu. We were shocked to learn on our arrival in Manila that the plane had been lost between the mainland and Honolulu as we were flying on to Manila,” Kaiser said years later in an interview.
The slim remains of N90944 and the shark-ravaged bodies of nineteen humans have barely been plucked from the sea when a skeptical media and angry members of Transportation Workers Union 505 in San Francisco pounce on the safety record of Boeing Stratocruisers and the maintenance standards of Pan American.
A column in the Tuesday, November 19, 1957, morning edition of the Redlands Daily Facts newspaper raises the question of whether Stratocruisers are even fit to fly, and a union newspaper claims a few days later that Pan Am has been gambling with human lives by curtailing critical inspections.
“When the Civil Aeronautics Board attempts to learn why the Pan American Stratocruiser tragically crashed into the Pacific Ocean enroute to Honolulu they won’t go back far enough in their inquiry,” the Redlands newspaper columnist stated. “They will try to determine, merely, if a propeller came off. Or was there was a fire, followed by an explosion? Or was there was some immediate cause of disaster?
“But we think the question goes much further back than that. The real question is: Was the Stratocruiser ever fit to fly across oceans?
“For years this column has been saying that anyone who sets out across the ocean in this particular kind of an airplane does so at his own risk. The Stratocruiser’s record has been too poor. There have been too many engine fires, too many engine failures, too many forced turn-backs short of the point-of-no-return.
“Pan American will gloss it over with the frosting of beautiful statistics. They will tell you that the airplane has flown a certain number of miles without a fatality and in the very same statement omit an explanation that one Stratocruiser did go down at sea before. It was not the dependability of the aircraft to which these passengers owed their lives. It was a skillful crew and a prompt rescue.
“It is doubtful that the CAB will ever reach a finding that the Stratocruiser was unfit for cross-ocean flying. After all, they have been licensing these craft for years. There is, however, no rule that a person buying an airline ticket has to agree with them. There are more dependable aircraft in the sky.”
On November 25, an article published in Organized Labor and circulated to 15,000 readers in the San Francisco Bay Area suggests that mechanical failure resulting from Pan Am’s decision to reduce the number and quality of inspections may have caused the crash. The double whammy of bad publicity is quickly met with the expected counterattacks and denials from Pan Am’s massive PR apparatus, but the articles have struck a nerve.
Organized Labor reporter Jeff Boehm points out that his newspaper began documenting and publishing charges of dangerous inspection economies more than a year ago and that mechanics have been complaining that the planes are not adequately inspected and therefore “the planes cannot be guaranteed safe.”
“Two weeks ago this Friday 44 people were dozing, reading, ordering cocktails in a Pan American Stratocruiser over the Pacific Ocean, simply waiting to take the next big or little step in their lives when they should land.
“The next step for all of them was fighting with the fear of death and trying, by taking their shoes off and donning life jackets, to stay alive.
“And then death.
“The force of the crash shattered their bodies and disintegrated the plane. The sharks came, but the passengers couldn’t have known it.
“The Navy found 19 bodies of the 44 and bits of debris which showed some evidence of fire. The Civil Aeronautics Board is investigating. The board will note the condition of the debris and the bodies. It will note that no distress signal was sent and that there was time, however, for partial preparations for ditching. But it will never recover the engines or likely the propellers. It may discover there was an explosion or fire, but it will doubtless never know why.
“Speculation among those who fly, however, does not stray far from mechanical failure.
“Will the CAA give serious consideration to charges by the Transportation Workers Union 505 that Pan American World Airways is gambling with human lives by curtailing vital inspection services?”
The article claims that while Pan American’s San Francisco base has one inspector for every fifty-one maintenance employees, United Airlines and American Airlines have a ratio of one to thirteen. The union had complained to Pan American, the Civil Aeronautics Board, and lawmakers, but its pleas about what it calls “an extremely serious situation” have been futile. The newspaper says Pan Am is not only cutting back on the number of inspectors, but also eliminating some inspections altogether.
Union president Phil Ice had detailed some of his organization’s concerns in a copyrighted story a year earlier. Among them:
“Propeller changes are no longer checked by an inspector, although in the past the inspector had to sign that the propeller was secured and airworthy.
“Formerly, an engine which had ‘conked out’ was pulled apart under the eye of an inspector who also checked re-assembly. Now, the inspector is not permitted to inspect the engine until it is completely re-assembled, when he can only inspect it externally.
“If the fire detection system or fire control system is found to have faulty wiring or if it has been improperly installed, the inspector is not required to see that it is properly repaired. He does not check the fire detection system to see if it functions properly.”
Ice also said that Pan Am frequently sends experienced and qualified inspect
ors home before completing inspections to avoid paying them overtime, and then assigns inspection authority to assistant foremen, people who are not qualified to certify that the plane’s mechanical systems are safe and operating properly.
The article also mentions that the crash of Romance of the Skies is the third major accident in Pan Am’s Pacific-Alaska division in two years and complains that the politically motivated CAB published “discrepancies, omissions and inaccuracies in its whitewashed” report of the ditching of N90944’s sister ship, Sovereign of the Skies, a year earlier.
The California Labor News Service follows its report with a letter to US Rep. Charles M. Teague, a first-term congressman from Ventura County, and includes copies of its stories.
“For more than a year we have been calling attention to the fact that Pan American Airways, which enjoys a considerable amount of federal assistance, has had faulty inspection services and we are convinced that this may very well be the cause of their accidents,” writes executive editor Langdon Post, a Harvard grad and former New York assemblyman with a long and distinguished record in politics and the federal government.
Post encourages the congressman to “call to task” those responsible for a “woeful lack of interest” and says the congressman and his colleagues should be aware of the facts, which the newspaper believes are “being deliberately hidden.”
Post laments what he calls a “curious lack of interest” by the CAB and an equal indifference in the daily press. He doesn’t point out that Pan Am aggressively cultivates important editors and publishers and routinely takes them on expense-free junkets. (A year earlier, one of the nation’s most popular newspaper columnists, Drew Pearson, reported to millions of readers that Pan Am had lied about its air-safety record in response to the 1956 crash of a Boeing Stratocruiser off the coast of Oregon and that the CAB had found that the Pacific-Alaska Division had been using rusty or corroded propeller blades in more than 13 percent of its planes.)
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