Forty years ago last December, 6-year-old Christopher
Knuth and his 11-year-old sister scrambled down the steps inside their New
England home, hoping school would be canceled due to the heavy snow that
coated their front lawn.
"Me and my older sister shared a room and we came running down, thinking
we didn't have school. We were all happy," Knuth recalls.
Knuth and his three older sisters learned from their mother that morning that
they would not have school that day, but for a much more dire reason: their
father was dead.
At 8:59 p.m. the night before, their father, George F. Knuth, was in the
cockpit of a Pan American World Airways Boeing 707, flying in a holding
pattern above Cecil County due to stormy weather when the plane was struck by
lightning.
Among pilot George Knuth's last words were "Mayday, Mayday."
Then the plane exploded.
More than 40 years later, the airline crash will be featured in a documentary
which a British film crew is producing and will air on British television
this spring. The film will explore lightning and its cause for several
worldwide air disasters, said David Monaghan, whose five-member film crew was
in Elkton Friday and Saturday.
Monaghan and his crew interviewed locals and shot scenes of the crash site
under a dreary sky not unlike that which hung over Elkton the day of that
flight.
Nearly 600 of its fiery fragments fell onto the lawns of locals. Witnesses
said the tumbling pieces of the plane resembled fireballs, piercing the
Elkton sky that night of Dec. 8, 1963.
All of the crew and passengers aboard Flight 214, en route from Baltimore to
Philadelphia, were killed.
This past Saturday, Christopher Knuth, now 46 and a resident of Princeton,
Mass., visited the Elkton site where his father's final flight came to rest.
Knuth, a director of public health for the city of Leominster, Mass., was
joined by several locals who played key roles in the aftermath of the
disaster that claimed the lives of his father and 80 others on board.
The town took on a somber mood over the weekend as locals recalled the
disaster that 40 years ago made headlines around the world.
"It was a night I'm sure I'll never forget," said Rosemary Culley,
who sat in the Cecil County Historical Society talking to the film crew
Saturday.
Culley, who still lives in Elkton, was the only emergency services dispatcher
on duty the night of the crash. Shortly before 9 p.m. that night, she was on
the phone with her husband, Henry, making small talk about the strange storm
brewing outside.
"It was an odd storm - rain, snow, sleet, thunder and lightning,"
she recalled.
Henry was looking out the back window of their home, and suddenly saw a
streak of lightning zigzag through the sky. Then he told Rosemary over the
phone, "Oh my God, a plane's been hit by lightning."
"He said he could see the outline of the whole plane," Culley said.
"I told him, 'I better hang up cause it's gonna get real busy.'"
In the hours that followed, Culley's job was to dispatch police, firefighters
and ambulance crews to the site of the crash. She also had to answer "a
gazillion" phone calls from locals who had seen the plane plummet to the
ground. The first hurdle was trying to pinpoint exactly where the plane had
gone down.
"People were calling and saying, 'There's a plane on fire, there's a
plane going down,' but nobody had the location," she said. Fire
companies from Elkton, Newark, Chesapeake City, North East, Charlestown,
Perryville, Port Deposit and beyond were summoned to the scene.
All these years, Culley has kept a duplicate of the dispatch tapes from that
night. On the tape, a busy Culley maintains her composure as the tragedy
unfolds.
The tape produced shudders across the room as Edgar Slaughter, police chief
at that time, says, "Apparently it's a civilian plane. We have one ID
from a wallet of an engineer from the Radio Corporation of America,
Haddenfield, New Jersey. We also have a terrible amount of women's
clothing."
About one hour into the tape, the chief informs Culley that they had
"more than sufficient ambulances on the scene." Rescue personnel
had realized there were no survivors.
"I still get goosebumps when I hear that," Culley said Saturday.
She recalled, "The hardest part was when the families (of victims)
started calling, wanting to know what was going on." She said a family
member of one of the victims had been driving on the Delaware Memorial Bridge
and had seen the plane get struck by lightning.
As Culley spoke of the victims' families, Knuth sat across the table, nodding
with his eyes closed, remembering the night he lost his father. In the years
that followed, his mother, Elizabeth, left to raise four young children
alone, would never be quite the same.
"The biggest part of it was that my mother never recovered," he
said. "She never remarried. She and my father were very much in
love."
Saturday was the second time Knuth had come to Elkton. The first was in 1996
after a monument honoring the victims was erected near the crash site. He
said he's the only one in his family who has come to see the place where his
father died.
"My sisters, they can't even talk about it without getting choked up, so
I'm kind of on my own here," he said.
He has slowly come to grips with the loss of his father.
"Back then, therapy was not yet a widespread thing, so I had no psychological
support; I never grieved properly," he said.
Coming to Elkton has helped him grow closer to the father he never knew.
"You learn that there were so many people affected by this - you're not
the only one who lost someone, that you're not alone."
Reprinted here through the Courtesy of the Cecil Whig, Cecil
County’s daily newspaper.
