On July 4, 1955, Payne met with brothers James J. and Charles H. Brown, who had owned the property since 1946, and began to negotiate the purchase. His only income was his $160 monthly Navy pension, but his wife, Harriet, a twice-married hairstylist, owned their small house in Manteca, worth about $5,000, and she came up with enough money for them to make the $5,000 down payment. Harriet, or “Hap” as she was called, wore the pants in the Payne family, and her husband took a back-seat role as she worked out the final details with the lodge owners during the next few weeks.
The Paynes agreed to pay the Browns an additional $25,000: $10,000 in six months and the remaining $15,000 six months later. Where they figured to come up with that kind of money is anyone’s guess, because the lodge had come upon hard times in recent years, and even when business had boomed it never generated the kind of cash flow necessary to make the mortgage payments, but the Paynes convinced themselves they could make a go of it.
They were dead wrong.
The impetuous Payne moved with his wife and their two sons into the tight-knit community, and many suspicious residents thought the outsiders might be running away from something back in the city. Most of the residents of Scott Bar and nearby Happy Camp (once called Murderer’s Bar) had deep roots in the area and were fiercely independent and wary of city folks. They were hardworking people who fished, hunted, logged timber, and mined for gold like their ancestors before them, back when bloody fistfights over gold claims often ended in gunfire and death.
Scott Bar was unlike any place the city-slick Paynes had ever lived, and that was part of the attraction. Thy were blind to the fact that fools had been created here ever since indigenous Karuk tribesmen had roamed the wild land thousands of years earlier, decapitating their enemies and proudly taking their heads as trophies.
The bullheaded and shortsighted William Harrison Payne was a foolhardy man and business was slow from the beginning, but it got even worse in the ensuing months. There was little cash to keep the place afloat, and a once-in-a-lifetime flood in December sent the swollen Klamath and Scott rivers over their banks. Local residents remember Payne standing with his dog on a collapsing bridge as the lodge owner snapped pictures of the swelling river and avoided death by jumping to safety moments before the structure collapsed, its supporting timbers rushing down the raging river.
Payne returned to the lodge minutes later and ignored the family’s two whinnying palomino ponies that were trapped in a small, fenced corral near the rapidly rising river. The corral was becoming a death-trap pond. They beat their hooves feverishly on the ground in an attempt to get someone’s attention, but the water continued to rise.
Payne ignored them; the horses were left to drown.
Nineteen-year-old logger Tom Crocker, who rented a small trailer from the Paynes at the back of the lodge property, came by and was incredulous at Payne’s heartless indifference. He jumped into the emerging pond and opened the gate, and the horses ran free to higher ground.
His reward for saving the horses?
“Why don’t you come inside and buy yourself a drink?” Payne told Crocker.
“A real bastard, an asshole,” Crocker recalled.
Tuesday, November 12, 1957
CIVIL AERONAUTICS BOARD
Washington, D.C.
November 12, 1957
TO: Members of the Board
FROM: Associate Director (Investigation)
Bureau of Safety
SUBJECT:Missing Aircraft—Preliminary Notification
Pan American Flight 7, Boeing 377, N 90944, en route
San Francisco to Honolulu, November 8, 1957
Pan American Flight 7, a Boeing 377, N 90944, enroute from San Francisco to Honolulu with 36 passengers and 8 crew, has been unreported since 1704 P.S.T. November 8, 1957. An extensive Search and Rescue activity has thus far been unsuccessful in locating anything that can be identified with the flight.
Flight 7 departed San Francisco at 11:31 P.S.T., estimating arrival at Honolulu 9 hours and 56 minutes later. Gross weight at departure was 147,000 pounds, the maximum allowable, and included sufficient fuel for approximately 13 hours of flight. The flight plan called for cruise at 10,000 feet, true airspeed 226 knots; the equatime point was estimated to be reached 5 hours 17 minutes out of San Francisco. Good weather was forecast for the flight. Captain Gordon H. Brown, First Officer William P. Wygant, Second Officer William H. Fortenberry, Flight Engineer Albert Pinataro, Purser Eugene Crosthwaite, Stewardesses Yvonne Alexander and Marie McGrath, and Flight Supervisor Jack King comprised the crew.
The flight made routine position reports as it progressed westward and reported over the ocean station vessel “November” (the equatime point) at 16:40 P.S.T., only one minute later than its estimated arrival there. A weather analysis was given the flight at this point reflecting substantially the same information as the original forecast out of San Francisco; the flight made no revision of flight plan or estimates.
The last contact with Flight 7 was a routine position report at 17:04 P.S.T. There was no indication of any emergency at any time and all transmissions were normal. No significant weather had been forecast and none was reported.
Search and Rescue operations began one hour after the flight was unreported and the most extensive search ever conducted in peacetime is continuing.
Air Safety Investigators from the Board’s Oakland and Santa Monica offices began an immediate check of the aircraft maintenance records and operational aspects of the flight. William S. MacNamara, Flight Operations Specialist, and Allen B. Hallman, Airworthiness Inspector of the Washington Office, are being dispatched to San Francisco today.
—Leon H. Tanguay
By now all sorts of theories are circulating about what might have happened to the airplane. A propeller tore loose and flew into the fuselage. An engine caught fire and could not be extinguished before it consumed the plane. A madman planted a time bomb. There is even talk that a mysterious “death ray” operated by enemy agents might have seized control of the plane, silenced its radios, and landed the Stratocruiser on some island. That idea is abandoned when searchers scrutinize a map of the Pacific and discover no land other than the Hawaiian Islands close enough for the plane to have reached with its fuel load.
Nothing else is being ruled out, but more important than figuring out what happened are two pressing questions: Where is the plane? Is anyone alive?
The search goes on.
It is Wednesday, November 13 — six days since Romance of the Skies departed San Francisco and there is still no sign of the missing airliner.
US Coast Guard Rear Admiral Stephen H. Evans notes that the search is the “most massive ever mounted in this ocean” and states that the huge armada of ships, planes, and submarines is “combing an ocean area much larger than the state of Texas.” Surface vessels alone have cruised more than 30,000 miles in their search for the missing plane in a carefully plotted “area of the greatest probability.”
The search is indeed massive. The Coast Guard has provided eight cutters and three long-range aircraft; the Navy, one carrier with forty-one aircraft and two destroyers, two submarines, one transport ship, and thirty-one long-range aircraft. The Air Force has put twenty-four long-range planes in the area, and Pan American has had two DC-7s and two Stratocruisers involved since the morning after the plane disappeared. Even Britain’s Royal Air Force has entered the search, with five long-range Shackleton bombers in the air.
“Seldom in all time has such a tremendous effort been made to save so small a group of people from dire distress,” the admiral tells the media.
Back in Washington, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover receives the first of what will become many confidential memos about the missing airliner. Chicago Special Agent Raymond J. Driscoll tells Hoover that Pat Tighe, retired chief of police in Aurora, Illinois, has been contacted by a local attorney who states that he has a client with information about the missing Stratocruiser.
“The unknown client
said that one of the deceased on this plane was a Soledad Mercado who operates some dress shops with (name redacted) in Phoenix as well as in the State of Colorado. According to the client, (name redacted) would have a possible reason for wanting to get rid of (name redacted) . . . According to the client (name redacted) would not necessarily cause her death for the purpose of getting insurance.”
The memo further states that the client is “acquainted with other individuals who might be able to shed light on this matter.”
Stunningly, the memo-telegram ends with this:
“No further action being taken by the Chicago Division.”
Is the attorney’s client implicating Mercado’s husband in some kind of plot to have her killed? We’ll never know the answer to that question; the FBI never follows up.
Out in the vast Pacific the sun is setting, but the searchers are not giving up. Los Angeles Times reporter Deke Houlgate, who has made friends with some of the sailor radiomen, is filing reports back to the newspaper, but there is nothing much to tell.
The ocean is large.
The search is massive.
The plane is still missing.
By 6 p.m. darkness covers the ocean and the search planes are returning to the flight deck of the Philippine Sea. By 6:15, six airplanes and four helicopters have been secured, and the carrier maneuvers are on a course to be refueled by the USS Navasota shortly before midnight.
Tomorrow will be another day. But will it be another day of finding nothing?
By 3:40 a.m. the USS Navasota has pumped 741,723 gallons of fuel into the Philippine Sea, and at 5:30 a.m. the carrier sounds flight quarters, awakening pilots and searchers for what they all hope will be a day of discovery.
Before the sun rises on Thursday, November 14, five Grumman S2F antisubmarine airplanes and four helicopters are in the air, and by the time the Philippine Sea turns off its navigational running lights, at 6:57 a.m., the airmen are methodically working their search patterns in what has become a desperate, seemingly impossible task.
At 7:35 a.m. radar operator F. T. Kingsley suddenly picks up a small and intermittent contact on his screen and immediately notifies the flight’s commanding crew, Lieutenant Commander Paul G. Cowan and Lieutenant Lee J. Gaffrey. Moments later Cowan sights something unusual floating in the water and takes his twin-engine plane down to investigate. He orbits the object twice and determines that it is a small piece of silver or white wreckage from the lost aircraft. About the same time another S2F team, this one commanded by lieutenants Earl E. Carlovsky and John N. Stanley, discovers a second piece of wreckage—and the gruesome sight of a lifeless body, arms and legs fully outstretched, floating in the sea.
The search for Romance of the Skies is no longer the search for a missing aircraft; it is now a search for survivors, wreckage, and more bodies.
Cowan circles his aircraft and keeps an eye on the wreckage while Carlovsky climbs high enough in altitude to radio the aircraft carrier about what they have found. Rear Admiral T. A. Ahroon, the search commander, immediately directs all ships to proceed to the area, and minutes later two other aircraft arrive on the scene and mark the debris and the first victim with smoke bombs to assist recovery teams.
Aboard the carrier, Los Angeles Times reporter Deke Houlgate makes a deal with Jerry Warren of The San Diego Tribune (later press secretary to presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford). Warren, who has a journalism degree from the University of Nebraska, has been a reporter for only a year, having joined the newspaper after serving as a Navy pilot for three years. What he lacks in reporting experience he more than makes up for in aviation knowledge and Navy ship smarts. The Houlgate-Warren reporting team turns out to be a perfect combination.
“Jerry, you stay on deck and let me know what’s going on and I’ll set us up sort of a bureau down below and file reports back to our papers,” he tells Warren, who quickly agrees and starts taking notes of everything he sees, smells, and hears. By the end of the day they will have filed twenty-eight takes, or story updates and revisions. Warren does what Houlgate calls the “dirty work up on deck” while Houlgate gets the dispatches out.
By 11:40 a.m. the Philippine Sea and the USS Epperson have arrived, and the search zeroes in on where the body and wreckage have been spotted. Other ships arrive and the crews lower smaller boats into the water; with the assistance of hovering helicopters they begin the grim task of recovering victims and debris.
1:53 p.m.
“HONOLULU (UPI)—The Coast Guard reported today nine bodies of victims of the downed Pan American Stratocruiser were found 75 miles west of the patrolling carrier Philippine Sea.
“One of the bodies was strapped in a plane seat, the Coast Guard said. The bodies were located approximately 128 miles northwest of the last position report from the vanished plane.
“A pilot from the carrier radioed at 7 a.m. (noon EST) ‘highly probable wreckage sighted.’ A few minutes later he sent word that nine bodies were sighted, one of them strapped in an airplane seat.”
“Damn, look at that crazy bastard! He’s ripping the body to shreds!” a sailor screams as he maneuvers the small rescue boat around a lifeless, floating body.
“If we don’t get rid of these damn sharks, we won’t have any bodies to recover,” another sailor yells as he struggles to pull the badly mangled body of a stewardess, still in her serving apron, into the boat.
The shark is not giving up easily. He opens his wide, hungry jaws, and his sharp teeth rip away more flesh, yanking it clean from the bones.
“Shoot him, dammit! Shoot him! That’s the only way we’re going to get her into the boat.”
Seconds later, the disabled shark swims away, trailing blood.
Nearby, the USS Philippine Sea has been turned into a floating morgue. Since the early morning sighting, nine bodies have been found floating on their ocean graves. Although autopsies won’t be conducted until the ship returns to port, the bodies are carefully examined for any presence of beta and gamma radiation because a package of radioactive medicine was in the plane’s cargo. No radiation is found, and the bodies are packed in ice and awaiting identification—if anyone can identify what is left of them.
Meanwhile, VS-21 aircraft spread out over a new search area, this one based on the wreckage sighting, prevailing winds, and ocean currents. They find nothing in the expanded grid, but the search-and-rescue mission, now clearly a recovery mission, continues until darkness begins to set in.
Houlgate, who has emerged from his below-deck reporters’ bureau several times during the day to collect his own observations, says that what he has seen is nothing short of “depressing and grisly.” (Houlgate later will be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the crash and search.)
Coast Guard reservist Ferguson, who used binoculars to search the night sky for flares several days ago, watches as the USS Minnetonka’s small-boat crews pile bits of wreckage on the cutter’s forward deck before they are transferred to the Philippine Sea.
One item catches his eye and will stay in his memory for the rest of his life: a little boy’s blue jacket with a baseball stitched on the left front with the words “Lil’ Slugger.”
When daylight and luck run out on November 15, nothing much remains of the once-magnificent airplane: nineteen shark-eaten bodies, 400 pounds of mail, and about 500 pounds of twisted wreckage plucked from an area that stretches eleven miles long and three miles wide.
The wreckage is carefully labeled and transported to a warehouse aboard the carrier. Included are charred foam rubber; damaged clothing; bits of luggage; food trays; scraps of cloth and pillows; a step in the stairway from the main deck to the cocktail lounge, where purser Crosthwaite had been serving drinks; and bits of cardboard and insulation.
Three metal scraps are retrieved: light, buoyant doors to lavatories and a piece of engine cowling that for some reason was stuck in a pillow. Nothing of the main airframe of the aircraft is recovered.
Not much left of a seventy-ton air
craft—and precious little for investigators to go on.
“Only small litter and chaff are known to remain,” the Coast Guard reports.
Interestingly, the only body recovered from the cockpit crew is that of Captain Brown, suggesting that he might not have in the cockpit when the tragedy occurred, or that the bodies of the other crewmen had been ravaged by sharks or trapped in wreckage at the ocean bottom.
Why would Brown leave the cockpit other than to attend to an emergency involving a passenger or a crewmember?
If a mechanical problem had developed with the plane itself, Brown would have remained in his seat, using his experience and leadership to resolve the problem and keep the plane in the air. If, however, a crewmember had become involved in an issue with another crewmember or a passenger, it would have Brown’s responsibility—as captain of the ship—to intervene.
Reporter Houlgate sends a dispatch to his newspaper before he calls it a day and turns in for the night:
“Coast Guard Capt. Donald B. MacDairmid, a search-and-rescue expert, says that the wreckage and condition of the passengers indicate that the plane definitely went into the water in a bad or uncontrolled ditching with the passengers warned of a state of emergency.”
He also says the Navy has catalogued the recovered debris, which is now laid out in a fifty-foot square on the carrier’s hangar deck under Marine guard. Among the catalogued items that will later be thoroughly investigated Houlgate notes these:
A piece of yellow sheet metal reading “944 FW-R-SIDE COCKPIT” in grease pencil
A wide seat “ravaged by flames” that is “blackened and grooved
A ladies’ washroom door with printing in English and some Asian language
An emergency-exit sign and light fixture, probably from the cabin
Pillows, some with white covers
Several gas tank floats
Flight 7 Is Missing Page 10
