Flight 7 Is Missing

by Ken H. Fortenberry

  We talked about her days as a Russian-speaking Pan Am child in Hong Kong before the Crosthwaites returned to California.

  “I learned how to speak real good English while I was going to the British school in Hong Kong, and I had their accent, their way of speaking. I remember one night we were eating dinner together, which was rare, and after dinner I said, ‘OK, I’m going to go next door to see somebody.’ I said, ‘Cheerio,’ and I could hear him saying, ‘Why is she talking like that? She sounds just like a Brit,’ and a bomb goes off! He gets real mad and my mama says, ‘What do you expect? She’s going to a British school and she’s learned to speak their way.’ It was always something with him. It was like there was always something wrong with me, so I never really felt loved. Really. I always felt there was something wrong with me, and I believed it.”

  The Crosthwaites returned to California in September 1955 and the fifteen-year-old Tania enrolled as a junior at Holy Cross High School.

  “You know, I never had parents come to any school events. I was always so alone, and I felt so alone, and all he did was reprimand me for something.”

  Her mother worked at various locations as a waitress and saleslady at a department store and, for a time, cut vegetables at Birds Eye with Tania’s grandmother, Katherina.

  Tania mentioned several times that in spite of her stepfather’s meanness, she was extremely appreciative of the fact that he had worked so hard to bring her mother, Julia, and her to their new lives in the United States, and for convincing authorities on two continents to allow grandmother Katherina, a Chinese concentration camp survivor, to emigrate from China and ultimately become a US citizen.

  “We were very grateful to him, because our entire lives depended on that man. All I know is that I was a little girl and there were bombs going off, roofs being blown down. Dead people. Grandma running and me getting hurt with blood all over me.

  “And then to have this man bring us from China, from all that terror and horror, to America. We were grateful and we felt we owed him everything. Everything.”

  Tania’s next statements about her childhood and her relationship with her stepfather were somewhat contradictory.

  “I would hear stories about stepfathers doing the ‘dad thing’ and maybe sexually hurting girls and stuff like that, and I always thought I had a great stepfather. I mean after all, we had it pretty good. A nice house, you know, pretty things. We traveled. So I felt I had a very happy childhood. But as I grew older and began to be around families and see fathers hugging on children and girls running to their fathers I would just stare because it was so unusual for me, and even in my senior year there was no relationship. There was nothing kind from him to me.”

  What she said is that her stepfather provided the necessities of life and plenty of material things, but no love.

  She admitted that she wasn’t perfect.

  “In my senior year we kids decided that every time we would go to a hamburger place we would start saving the salt or pepper shaker with the name of the place, and I would take them home and put them in a drawer. We never talked about what we did or anything, ’cuz nobody was interested, nobody cared. Anyway, one day he went through my drawers and I guess he found the salt and pepper shakers. I had a big reprimand from Dad on the Ten Commandments and I shalt not steal and everything. I just felt miserable, but for some reason something snapped in me and I called him an old goat.

  “I said, ‘You’re just an old goat,’ because I felt like he just didn’t understand kids. My friends did the same things and they never got in trouble and I always did. I called him an old goat and that was the only time he hit me, and he hit me in the face. He just hauled off and hit me right here, real hard. It shocked me and I shut up.

  “You know what? I knew I deserved it because I called him an old goat, and then after that, boy, let me tell you, there was quietness when he was home, and it got worse. I mean, I was in my room and he was in his room and it was that way until graduation.

  “You know, Mom was already sick then. We didn’t know she had cancer, but she was really sick, and she got out of bed and actually came to my graduation. They were both coming to my graduation.”

  And then Gene stabbed her in the heart on graduation day.

  “My dad called me and said very sternly: ‘We need to have a conversation’ and I said, ‘Oh, no! What have I done now?’ So, we go into my bedroom and he closes the door and I’m sitting on the bed and he says real sternly, ‘I’m not your father. I want you to know that. I adopted you and I’m your stepfather, but you’re not my blood child.’ I just went ‘OK,’ and he just stared at me. I didn’t know what else to say. I was afraid if I did.”

  “Did you not know that you were adopted?” I asked.

  “I remember seeing Mom and him at the church where they had their wedding, but you know, I thought in my mind that maybe he wasn’t my dad, but when he said that to me it hit me in the heart and it shocked me. I mean, did he have to do that now, on my graduation day?

  “And ’cuz I was always told, ‘If anybody asks you, he is your American father, so you are half-American and half-Russian,’ that’s what my parents and Grandma said and so that’s what I did.

  “Anyway, it took the excitement of my graduation away, because his attitude was like he was finally glad to get rid of me. That was what I felt, ’cuz it was like very harsh: ‘I’m not your dad!’ And so we went on to the graduation and I was like, things were kind of like a blur to me, ’cuz it left me emotionally drained.

  “And I was afraid to ask him any questions, because I grew up as a little girl in war and I was in situations that we don’t need to go into. There were so many secrets. I even got spanked harshly for one time speaking out saying something true, and I learned really fast that you had to keep your mouth shut during the war because your life depended on it. My whole family was always fearful for their lives, and so when he said that, plus his attitude to me and everything, I was just afraid.”

  Getting rid of Tania may have been exactly what he had in mind when Gene ruined her graduation day. She didn’t know it, but on the day of her mother’s funeral he told two friends that he was planning to sell his house in Felton, give the in-laws some of the proceeds, and move closer to San Francisco.

  Tania would not be in the purser’s plans for his new life; she would have to find a place of her own and fend for herself.

  The graduation-day slap in the face wasn’t the first or the last time Crosthwaite would break the girl’s heart.

  “A week or two after that Mama was throwing up and losing weight. She went to the doctor, who said she had ulcers.”

  Tania was in Los Angeles at the time, having been sent there to live with one of her mother’s friends after she had no luck finding a job in the San Francisco Bay Area.

  “She wanted me to find a job, maybe to get on with my career as a ballet dancer. I was looking for a job, maybe five or six weeks, and there were a few things that were happening with my ballet dancing, but then I got a call that Mom was terribly sick. That panicked me, and I came back. I walked into a home that I didn’t even know. My mother was just staring at me. My dad was not happy I came home. I remember my dad saying, ‘What are you doing home?’ I said, ‘Well, Mom was sick, and I came home.’ It scared me that things were so bad. It was the spirit of the thing. I just went into my bedroom and cried. I was so stressed.”

  As it turns out, the thirty-two-year-old Julia Crosthwaite didn’t have ulcers; she had terminal cancer, and a few days later was lying in a hospital bed.

  “They were going to do an exploratory and we all went. Grandma, her husband, Peter at the time, and me and my dad. And we were all waiting ’cuz they said that once they got in there, they could tell us more, and they’ll probably be an hour. So four hours later, you know, I was a nervous wreck. My grandma was in a panic and my dad was pacing. And then they tell us that she has thirty days to live and that she was ate up with cancer!

  “And I mean all I
know is my dad’s face was white. I just stared at him and Grandma said, ‘She’s dying, Tania! She’s only going to live thirty days,’ and we were just so broke up. I think all of us needed some special care at that moment in time.”

  Gene virtually disappeared from Tania’s life after Julia’s fatal diagnosis.

  “I don’t know where he was staying, where he went. I didn’t know nothing, and all I knew is that my mom’s going to be dead in thirty days and I want to see my mom.”

  A few days later, completely out of the blue, the absent Gene called home.

  “I said, ‘Daddy, I want to see Mama. I want to see Mama,’ and he goes, ‘Well, she don’t want to see you. So you stay away. She don’t want to see you! You tell your grandma that.’ And he hung up.

  “So I had, you know, I had some friends and this kid Jack, which is kind of my first boyfriend sort of, and he wanted to know, ‘How is your mama doing?’ ’cuz everybody in Felton by then had heard that she had cancer, and so they asked me, ‘When you going to see your mom?’ and I say that I can’t see my mom and they go why and I go, ‘Daddy won’t let me go.’

  “And they said, ‘What do you want to do? Go see her?’ And I go yeah, and she [Jack’s mother] says, ‘I’ll tell you what, honey. I’ll buy you a round-trip Greyhound bus ticket for you to go to where you mom is if you promise you won’t tell your dad where you got the money.’ And they bought me the ticket. And so they gave me the ticket and I got ready to go. I didn’t even tell my grandma. I just went on that bus to the hospital and found out what room Mama was in.

  “I went up there and opened the door and my mom is sitting up in bed and she’s looking at me and she goes, ‘Who’s there?’ I covered my face and she goes, ‘Is somebody there?’ and I just froze on the spot. And then I started backing up real slow and went out and I realized Mama couldn’t see. She couldn’t see! So apparently that cancer got all up all over her and she couldn’t even see. I got a hold of myself and I went back in. This time, I knocked on the door, made some noise, and went in and I go, ‘Mama?’ and she goes, ‘Oh, baby!’ I said, ‘How are you, Mom?’ and she hugged me. ‘Oh, I’m so glad to see you,’ I said, and ‘How are you doing?’ And she said, ‘Honey, well, I’m doing good. I probably look bad and I need my makeup and everything,’ but she says, ‘I’m feeling good,’ and then my dad walks in.

  “It was like the Devil showed up. I literally froze, and he looked at me. He goes ‘Tania! Come out here!’ in that terrible voice of his, and I said ‘OK.’ Then I told mom, ‘I’ll see you later,’ and she says, ‘OK, honey.”

  So I walk out of there and he takes me to the hall and says, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I came to see Mama,’ and he says, ‘How did you get here?’ I said, 'I took the Greyhound bus and he says, ‘Where did you get the money?’ I said, ‘I just did.’ He said, ‘Who bought you the ticket?’ and I never told him. I figured with his attitude he’d go find them and tell them off. He says, ‘You go home! Get out of here! Get on that bus and you go home!’

  “Well, I was scared, so I got on the bus, and that’s the last time I ever saw my mom.

  “Eight days later I’m upstairs and I hear a scream. I mean a bloodcurdling scream from downstairs and I knew. Then Grandma says, ‘She died, Tania. She died.’”

  Things went from bad to worse after Julia’s death. Gene became even angrier and more hateful toward Tania.

  “You know he blamed you for your mama’s death,” I told her. “He said that you worried her to death.”

  Instantly, I realized that I shouldn’t have said that, but I wanted to learn what was going on in Crosthwaite’s mind in the months before the plane crash, and I remembered that the Santa Cruz deputy had told authorities that Crosthwaite was “psycho” when he had tried to have Tania detained.

  Tania bent her head down, and I could tell the interview was wearing on her. It was wearing on me, too, but I knew that this was likely to be my one and only chance of getting her to talk.

  I wasn’t about to walk away now and call it a night; she might never talk to me again.

  And after that evening, she never really did.

  The afternoon was getting late, and although I was learning some interesting things, she still hadn’t given me what I was really looking for: the secrets she had been hiding for six decades. Was she going to take those secrets to her grave?

  I continued to listen as Tania rambled on. She shared lots of interesting tidbits but nothing earthshaking. I decided to take her to dinner at a seafood restaurant nearby, and we talked about nothing in particular before returning to her apartment for round two of the interview.

  She told me that Gene had been deeply in love with Julia and that Tania had adored her mother as well. She and Julia both loved ballet, liked the same clothing styles, and enjoyed occasional girl talk—they even looked alike—but Gene was king of the house, and when he was home her mother’s attention was solely on him.

  I decided that it was time to steer the conversation back to the days before Julia became ill, thinking that maybe Tania would work herself to the place I really wanted to be.

  “Did you ever hear him say anything bad about Pan Am?”

  “OK, before the incident [TB], he loved his job, but he, he, griped about everybody. I don’t know why, but he didn’t seem to get along with anybody.”

  “Did you ever hear your mama and him talking about Pan Am and them not wanting him to fly again?”

  “Yeah, right after he got home from the hospital and stuff like that, and I know Mama always tried to coax him into feeling better and saying, ‘Well, you know, they’re just worried about your health’ and, you know, ‘You will be alright,’ you know. I remember her coaxing him, trying to mellow him out, but it didn’t work. He just kept us all in a dither.”

  Tania recalled that when she was a child in Hong Kong the Crosthwaites rarely intermingled with other Pan Am employees and their families, although the other families seemed to enjoy one another’s company. She said she once asked her mother why that was.

  “She said, ‘I don’t know. Your dad is so fussy. He doesn’t, he doesn’t like most of the people in Pan Am.’”

  “Did Gene drink a lot?”

  “Him and Mama had a lot of arguments about his drinking. She would get after him. He drank at home. I don’t know about what he did anywhere else, but he drank a lot of whiskey.”

  “Did he ever get drunk?”

  “I never saw them both drunk, but I don’t know, ’cuz I would go to my room, and who knows? He might have kept on drinking, though, but I know there’s times Mother tells me, ‘You go downstairs and spend the night with Grandma.’ I never ask why, but they would fight, and Grandma would say, ‘Don’t worry. Your dad’s drinking too much and your mom is just saying he can’t do that.’”

  “Did he ever hit your mom?”

  “I don’t know if he ever hit her, but I know that one time she hit him. I don’t know if it was in retaliation or what. But they were fighting very bad because of his drinking. She just couldn’t stop him from drinking.”

  Tania said she and her grandmother “could hear them fussing up there. They had to take him to the doctor for stitches ’cause she picked up a vase and she hit him over the head. I think he got two or three stitches. It must have had an effect, because after that he wasn’t drinking as much.”

  “Did Gene gamble or anything like that? It seems to me that you all may have lived beyond your means.”

  “He really liked to gamble, and apparently he did a lot of it. He really loved to play cards, and apparently he played real well, because he was always boasting that he won. He would say that he was real good at cribbage.”

  He must not have always won.

  “I know that when they arrived here my mom had $5,000 in what they called US gold that was left to me for my inheritance and education. But he [Gene] was so much in debt. He owed back payments to his first wife for child support that he couldn’t pay, and my mom bailed him out
with that.”

  I had verified that earlier; court records in California proved that Crosthwaite had been late in child support and alimony and had been ordered by a judge to pay up immediately or face jail time. He came up with the money. Julia’s money.

  Tania said that her grandmother always turned over her paycheck from Birds Eye to Gene, and that her stepfather even kept all of her own earnings when she worked at an ice cream and coffee shop the summer before her senior year in high school.

  “Mama got me a job in the coffee shop, and I rode the bus from Felton. I made $300 that summer and Gene took it. Grandma was so thankful to Dad that when she was working at Birds Eye she gave him her paychecks that helped build the house. Peter did all the cement work for free.”

  We moved on to the last three months of the purser’s life, a time when he was increasingly moody and angry, struggling with the loss of Julia, worried about his future with Pan Am, and for whatever reasons always at odds with Tania.

  There was at least one occasion when his relationship with Tania triggered something particularly strange.

  “That’s when I had that episode, for whatever it’s worth. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it’s bad or good. I didn’t feel good about it, ’cuz I was afraid of him. One night when he was there, and I was in bed and the lights are all off and I thought he was in bed, all of sudden he comes in my bedroom, and I was just lying there acting like I was asleep. And then he sits on the bed and he put his hand on my back right here and he just sat there. Years later I thought maybe he was trying to tell me he was sorry or maybe he needed some kind of comfort or something, but I wasn’t mature enough to do it, you know. I was only sixteen, and I was afraid of him. I didn’t know what he wanted. He never hugged me or did anything, and I just pretended I was asleep. That’s all he did, and he left. And that was all.”

  The next day he was just as weird.