"Southern Flight 242: Bringing My Father Home"
Truly moving story -- a radio piece that aired Friday night on KCRW -- by my friend Will Coley about his father's death in a plane crash when he was a little boy and his trying to understand it as an adult:
Worth hearing. I didn't post this because he's my friend but because it's so moving.
A bit about the story from KCRW:
Will lost his father when he was seven years old, he has only some photographs and a few audio tapes to remember him by. Will knew that his father died in a commercial plane crash in 1977 along with 71 other people, including nine on the ground. It's an event still memorialized in New Hope, Georgia, where the DC-9 attempted an emergency landing on a highway through town. For most of his life, Will was reluctant to learn too many details about the crash that took his father. In fact, it took 35 years until he was ready to make this radio story.
I especially loved hearing his dad's audio taped "letter" about Halloween. It's so easy to take for granted audio we have of people we love. But after they die, it can mean a whole lot.
That flight originated from Huntsville, AL, which is where I live, and it contained a number of people from the tech community here. A few months ago the Redstone Arsenal employee newspaper carried an interview with a project manager who survived the crash. He was sitting in a row together with two of his employees, both of whom died. He described the details of the crash and the aftermath in that engineer-precise way. Which, to me, makes it even more chilling.
Cousin Dave at January 27, 2014 7:21 AM
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