Flight 7 Is Missing

by Ken H. Fortenberry

  The FBI agents patiently listen to his request, but they understand what Hoover has directed: do not under any circumstances let the FBI get dragged into this case.

  Durfee says that the only suspicious circumstances they have uncovered concern purser Crosthwaite, whom the CAB had asked the FBI to conduct a full background check on several weeks earlier. Durfee points out once again that Crosthwaite’s wife had recently died, he had suffered from tuberculosis, was having difficulty controlling his teenage stepdaughter, had recently changed his will, and was having job difficulties with Pan Am. Durfee also notes that a law enforcement officer in Santa Cruz County had described Crosthwaite as a “psycho.”

  His pleas are falling on deaf ears.

  Durfee formally renews his request for the FBI to investigate Crosthwaite, adding that the CAB doesn’t have any investigators qualified to handle a case of this magnitude and mystery.

  One of the senior FBI men tells Durfee that all the facts have been reviewed and evaluated by the Bureau and that Hoover himself is fully aware of the details.

  The FBI will not get involved.

  CAB executive director Robert Lowe Kunzig has been listening quietly as Durfee and the FBI men play a game of political chess, and he’s had enough. A respected lawyer and former prosecutor of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, Kunzig understands politics and knows what it takes to build a case—politically or criminally. He is a former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania, and he doesn’t mince words. He tells the FBI men that it is absolutely critical that the agency enter the probe. He drops names, including that of powerful US Senator Mike Monroney, an Oklahoma Democrat and former crime reporter who, Kunzig says, has been reading in the press about the FBI “doing this and that,” but nothing about what the CAB has been doing. Monroney is chairman of the Senate Aviation Subcommittee and is known by his colleagues as Mr. Aviation.

  Kunzig says the CAB does not want to be in a position to publicly admit that it cannot solve the case and cannot convince the FBI to assist in the investigation.

  He gets nowhere.

  Durfee tries again, this time becoming argumentative.

  “Gentlemen, the Civil Aeronautics Board has charged me with the responsibility of persuading the FBI to enter the investigation,” he implores. “I have been instructed several times to talk with Mr. Hoover personally, but for some reason I have been unable to even get a meeting with him. As you know, the FBI has made an exception to its own rule about plane crash investigations in the past, including the crash of the planes over the Grand Canyon a while back. Your agency’s work in that case proved to be very helpful, and we just don’t understand why you can’t—or won’t—help us now.”

  “Mr. Durfee, our jurisdiction in that case arose from the fact that lawsuits were being threatened against the government because of claims that government radio operators had been negligent,” one of the FBI agents responds.

  Back and forth. Back and forth. Neither side gives in.

  Finally, Kunzig suggests a compromise: Will the FBI “loan” one or more investigators to the CAB to conduct a background check of Crosthwaite?

  “We have an extremely heavy investigative burden, Mr. Kunzig. We don’t have any surplus personnel to offer.”

  “Well, will you please—at the very least—pass our request personally on to director Hoover for a decision?” Durfee asks.

  Immediately upon his return to FBI headquarters, agent Sizoo dictates a memo about the meeting to his boss, Alan H. Belmont:

  “It was very apparent from the outset of the discussion that the CAB is most anxious to drag the FBI into this investigation. They have been unable to solve it. They do not want to admit they are unable to solve it. They want to be able to shift the responsibility to the FBI.

  “It is also believed that the FBI should not loan investigative personnel to the CAB to conduct this investigation. This would set a bad precedent,” he advises.

  Sizoo recommends that the CAB “be advised by liaison that because of heavy investigative commitments, we are unable to loan investigative personnel to CAB.”

  The following day, his memo is read and approved.

  “I concur,” J. Edgar Hoover scrawls in the margin of the memo.

  Hoover then dictates a letter to Attorney General Rogers, once again explaining his decision, and notes that the CAB is “under much pressure from the radio, press and Congress,” but the FBI will not get involved until the agency’s jurisdiction is made clear by “evidence” of sabotage.

  How that evidence will be secured is anyone’s guess. Nearly all of the plane is at the bottom of the ocean, and the FBI won’t lift a finger to investigate a primary suspect.

  Two days later Hoover dictates a letter to CAB chairman Durfee explaining again why his agency won’t get involved in the case, but he promises to reconsider if the FBI obtains information that proves a criminal act.

  He follows that letter with a note to the FBI in San Francisco, directing his agents there to stay out of the investigation:

  “The CAB has been attempting to draw the FBI into the investigation into this matter. CAB officials have indicated that it now appears that the cause of the crash of this airplane will not be determined.”

  This is the first acknowledgment by the CAB—more than a year before it holds public hearings—that a cause for the plane crash may never be determined.

  “If we are drawn into this investigation, we will undoubtedly be charged along with the CAB for the failure to solve this case. You should be most cautious in your contacts with the CAB in order that we are not drawn into this investigation,” Hoover warns.

  While the CAB’s investigation continues, senior Pan American executives already are taking care of other business, namely the bottom line. They have hired a professional company to assess the value of people’s lives—the financial value of those who perished on Flight 7.

  In an attempt to determine what the company’s potential financial liabilities might be for those who died, the company checks court records, interviews neighbors and coworkers, and examines credit reports. The company then prepares confidential reports that include such things as each deceased’s net worth, educational background, physical health, habits, reputation, future income potential, life expectancy, even their social standing.

  The report on the Lee Clack family, returning to Tokyo from a vacation in Michigan, is especially detailed, even including separate entries on each of the four children. The report on Lee Clack states that his future with Dow Chemical was “unlimited and his business standing was such that he would have been in line for a much bigger job in managership or presidency of the company entirely. He had the type of imagination and qualities that would have taken him far.”

  The report states that his reputation was of “very high standards” and even delves into his medical history, noting that while vacationing in Michigan he had a “small operation on his nose for removal of a bump but there was no malignancy there.”

  Of his wife, Ann, the report states that the Alma College graduate was “highly regarded socially and was in good standing personally and very happy with the foreign climate of her husband’s job.” It states that she tutored her school-age children for the two months before they returned to school in Tokyo.

  The Clacks were known to live on a “high scale,” and Dow Chemical provided them with a nice house rent free for their vacation in Midland.

  The report on Navy Commander Gordon Cole tells much more about the man than a few paragraphs in the many newspaper accounts about those who died.

  “He was a very religious man, a total abstainer, superintendent of his Sunday school at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Falls Church, Va. His social standing in the community was excellent.”

  The report describes him as a “model family man, devoted to his wife and son,” who “spent much of his leisure time with his family and in church work.”

  As reports are being developed on the American passengers, Pan Am i
s eager to ensure that its lucrative Asian market is not jeopardized by the crash and that its important relationships with governmental leaders in Japan don’t suffer as a result of how the company responds to requests for financial settlements.

  The answer? Pay the surviving families of two Japanese passengers something immediately for their losses. Pan Am authorities order that the Kubota and Tanaka families each receive $1,600 in “mimaikin,” or condolence money, and $277 in “koden,” or obituary gift money, two weeks after the crash.

  Nothing similar is paid to any other passengers or crew members; they ultimately will have to hire lawyers and sue Pan Am for negligence before they get a penny, and even then, what they will receive is minimal.

  Passenger William Deck’s mother, Lois Deck of Radford, Virginia, is so incensed with Pan Am’s pre-lawsuit settlement offer of $5,000 that she writes letters not only to Pan American president Juan Trippe but also to her congressman to complain.

  She is seeking only $8,300.

  “Certainly this is not too much to ask when the plane itself was insured for several million,” she states in a letter to Pan Am.

  “No one can ever realize just what that crash, killing my son, did to me. My whole life was wrapped up in him, and we were unusually close. If you will recall, he waited more than a year to go back to marry his Japanese sweetheart because he said he could not go until I approved,” she writes.

  She tells Pan Am that she doesn’t want to sue the airline because a

  lawsuit would drag on for years and every time she thinks about it “I just go all to pieces.”

  She ends up settling for $5,164.

  St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church on Orange Avenue in South San Francisco is filled to overflowing on Saturday, November 30, as more than 500 family members, friends, and colleagues gather in the sanctuary where he had often sung in the choir to celebrate the life of John Elvins “Jack” King.

  King’s wife, Virginia, and their four children—Joan, twenty-one; Jean, nineteen; Richard, sixteen; and Melissa, six—are seated in the front pew as he is remembered as a loving husband and father and a cherished friend who delighted everyone with detail-filled stories about his trips around the world with Pan Am. He was chief steward to many world leaders, including Indonesian president Sukarno, who had requested that King accompany him on a trip around the world several years earlier. When the trip ended back in Indonesia, King stayed at the president’s palace for more than a week and brought home gifts for his family from Sukarno.

  Meanwhile, in an orphanage near Tokyo there is also sadness today; the tenderhearted King had supplied the children with clothing for years. His love and generosity will be missed.

  The funerals and memorial services have now ended for everyone who perished aboard Romance of the Skies except one: William Harrison Payne. Strangely, there has been no obituary, no service, no public remembrance whatsoever for the retired World War II Navy veteran and Northern California businessman. His family has secluded itself and is speaking with no one. It’s as if his death never happened.

  My recently widowed mother is all business as she gathers her “three little boys,” as Daddy used to call us, and helps us board a Sunday evening Pan Am flight from San Francisco to Mexico City. We are served a delicious dinner an hour or so into the flight and then try to fall asleep to the hypnotizing hum of the DC-7’s engines. I am not afraid, but my mind is full of thoughts about the flight my father had taken just two months earlier. Is he still alive out there somewhere? Is he on an island awaiting rescue? When will I see him again?

  We are seated on the right side near the cockpit, and I occasionally sneak a glance at the calm, professional crew in the dark, gauge-filled command center and imagine Daddy seated there with them. I am comforted and finally drift off to sleep.

  In the morning we board another plane, land in San Salvador, and then take another flight, to Brownsville, Texas. It’s a long, circuitous, several-day journey because Pan Am has few domestic routes, but eventually we arrive at a little airport in Spartanburg, South Carolina—a place that seems as foreign to me as those places in Latin America we have just passed through.

  It is a bitterly cold January morning and I can see my breath, something I have never seen before, but it is just the first of many new things I will learn and see in the coming weeks. I have never been to a place like this, a place where the people speak English but the words sound far different from anything I had ever heard back in California. My Aunt Hazel, whom I had never met, has twinkling eyes and a sweet and a tender smile. She hugs all of us, and her voice sounds like the whisper of an angel. We pile into her Chevrolet with something she proudly calls moon hubcaps, and she drives us to her little, two-bedroom house in rural Boiling Springs, about nine miles away. Along the way I learn that her house is just two doors down from the house my mother and father had lived in when first married. Daddy built it with his own hands, and my mother still owns it, but for some reason we will not live there.

  It is a new world. A world with a broken family, but with new family members, including two cousins, Roger and Larry, who will become like brothers to us. I am full of questions. I learn that Jerry and I will stay with Aunt Hazel and Uncle Rich while Mom and Craig fly back to California to wrap things up, list our house for sale, and get ready for a final move somewhere back east, but not anywhere near here.

  Jerry and I will rise before dawn the next day, wrap ourselves in warm clothes and goofy-looking earmuffs, board a big yellow school bus, and walk into an old elementary school where our new classmates will look at us if we are from another planet.

  Eventually, we will end up in Miami and start yet another chapter in our lives.

  February 1958

  One of my mother’s biggest prayers has been answered. We are now living in our new stucco house in North Miami, and Jerry and I are enrolled at Crestview Elementary, a brand-new school within walking distance. No more buses. No more frosty mornings. No more goofy earmuffs.

  We have new friends—Latino friends, Jewish friends, Asian friends. This seems almost like home, back in California.

  All our belongings have arrived from Santa Clara—Daddy’s oversized, thick-cushioned chair, the handcrafted blond-wood, high-fidelity cabinet speaker he had meticulously created, his carpentry tools, and most of his camping gear. But our car and camping trailer are still in California. In desperation before leaving, my mother had posted a note on a Pan Am bulletin board asking if someone would drive our 1955 Ford and tiny Shasta camper—the one we had camped in from California to Canada—all the way cross-country to Miami. She doesn’t expect anyone to take on a challenge of that magnitude, but one day she receives a call from Pan Am purser Fred Sohn, a man she has never met, but who had flown trans-Pacific flights with my father and had worked with stewardesses Alexander and McGrath.

  Fred tells her Daddy was a “real gentleman who always treated flight service crew in a friendly manner,” and he has some vacation time on his hands and wants to do something to help us. Yes, he would be happy to drive our car and camper to Miami.

  He is the answer to Mom’s prayers.

  Fred gets only as far as Fresno before he is stopped by a California highway patrolman because a taillight on the trailer has gone out. Fred explains his mission to the understanding patrolman, who has read newspaper accounts of the crash. He doesn’t issue Fred a citation but tells him he can’t drive anymore that first night, so Fred sleeps in the Ford.

  He drives like mad the entire next day and by late evening reaches El Paso, Texas, where he pulls into a service station and once again explains his mission. The mechanic installs a new taillight free of charge. Not only that, but he allows Fred to park the car and trailer at the service station for free that night. It is bitterly cold, dropping to sixteen degrees before dawn, but Fred is reluctant to use the trailer’s heater, not knowing whether it’s safe.

  At sunlight he is on the road again, for the three-day trip across the vast Lone Star State.
The rear axle of the Ford breaks along US Highway 80 as he nears the Louisiana border, but he manages to nurse the vehicle into the tiny town of Waskom, where he barely makes it into Waskom Motors, a Ford dealership on the west side of town. Again, he explains his mission for the widow Fortenberry, and owner-manager Sam Cooke also remembers hearing and reading about the crash. Cooke instructs his team to unhitch the trailer, tells Fred to get some sleep, then orders his three mechanics to immediately stop what they are doing and get right to work on that axle. Fred rests until midafternoon, wakes up, and while the mechanics are still working on our car, Cooke, the incoming president of the Waskom Chamber of Commerce, proudly takes Fred on a tour of his tiny town and buys him a late lunch. When they return to the dealership our car has been repaired, the trailer rehitched and ready to go.

  “How much do I owe you?” Fred asks, expecting a hefty bill.

  “Nothing. Not a single penny. It was our pleasure to help,” Cooke replies, and Fred is soon on his way again.

  “There are some pretty nice people in Texas,” he says to himself as he enters Louisiana for what will be an uneventful remainder of the trip to Miami. “Yes, some pretty nice people.”

  And some pretty nice Pan Am people, too, I might add.

  It is nothing but an old push-to-talk airplane microphone with a long cord, but to my brother and me it is much more than that. It’s our way to connect with the most important event in our lives and to change the outcome of what happened on November 8,1957—if only in our dreams and in our playtime.

  The bedroom closet that Jerry and I share in our new Miami home is easily transformed from a simple place to hang clothes and store items into the spacious cockpit of a Boeing Stratocruiser. A couple of small cereal boxes creatively marked with crayons become airplane gauges and controls, and the old microphone that Daddy used when flying our “Buddy-Seat” plane crackles to life in our imaginations.