Tucson Region

Bonnie Henry: The Boy Scouts who 'did time'

It was a brand-new plane with a combat-ready crew, on its way to England and the wartime bombing runs beyond.

But this B-24 and its crew of 10 never made it past the Santa Catalinas.

Sixty-one years ago today - March 18, 1944 - a B-24 Liberator crashed in the Catalinas, not far from the old prison camp.

There were no survivors.

En route from California to Texas, the plane ran into weather so bad near Tucson that it was denied an emergency landing at Davis-Monthan Field.

As the plane veered northward, its left vertical stabilizer hit the top of a peak, says plane crash researcher Trey Brandt.

With its right wing snapped off, the bomber struck another peak, then spun into the terrain four miles away.

And there it still rests today - at least what's left of it.

The rest, as you might expect, has been hauled off by scavengers over the years, including at least one Boy Scout troop.

"It's the only time I've ever been to prison," says Vern Pall, one of the scouts who in May of 1955 hauled their salvaged aluminum through the federal prison camp near Molino Basin.

Though the camp, which over the years housed everyone from conscientious objectors to troubled youth, was not exactly in the same league as say, Alcatraz, it still was off-limits - especially to this Air Scout Explorer troop.

"The only way to make any money was to take the salvage out through the prison camp," says Pall, whose troop had earlier scouted out the crash site by foot on a trail out of Sabino Canyon.

But when a Scout leader asked the warden for permission to allow a truck up the Catalina Highway and into the camp to haul out the salvage, the response, says Pall, was along the lines of: "Hell, no. We're not allowing a bunch of Boy Scouts in a prison camp."

Not one to take "no" for an answer, Pall, then 17, wrote to the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C.

"I figured someone had to be in charge at the national level," says Pall, who enlisted his mother to do the typing.

Weeks went by. "And then we got a letter telling us we should contact the warden and set up a date and time for access of one hour," says Pall.

When all was arranged, the boys hiked back up the trail and spent several days collecting the aluminum and piling it up at the back gate of the prison.

At the appointed time, the truck went through the camp to the back gate and was quickly loaded up.

It went out the front gate, with us all following through the prison camp," says Pall.

Their reward: "It must have been a couple of hundred bucks," says Pall, who came to Tucson in the fall of '45 with his sister and widowed mother.

Born in Connecticut, he quickly learned to love the desert, especially after his mother took a housekeeping job with Randolph Jenks, who lived at the mouth of Sabino Canyon.

"We had room to roam, we rode horses," says Pall. Even today, he remembers Jenks clutching a megaphone and climbing to the top of a ridge during hunting season, hollering out, "No hunting!"

But after a year, the family moved back to town, where Pall went on to graduate from the University of Arizona in 1960.

A day past graduation, he was commissioned in the U.S. Air Force, vowing to leave Tucson and its heat and never return.

Like so many others who've made that vow, he's back. Has been since 2001.

"I've hiked every trail in the Catalinas and even did a couple of rescues," says Pall, about his earlier exploits. But only one hike, he says, ever earned him any money.

Incidentally, the prison camp closed in 1973, its remnants bulldozed away - save for memory.

Copyright © 2003 Arizona Aircraft Archaeology