Relics of Daddy
By Suellen E. Dean | Staff Writer
suellen.dean@shj.com
Gina Boyd often wonders what her life would be like today had she known her father. On the morning of Oct. 29, 1957, Staff Sgt. James Elton Hicks and 15 other men -- many of them young fathers -- left Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, N.M., on a training flight. The clouds were thick and getting thicker as the powerful Boeing KC-97 Stratofreighter left the runway. Two hours later, the aircraft crashed into an Arizona mountainside near the town of Gray Mountain. Gina was only 5 months old. Her father was 26.

Forty-seven birthdays and fatherless Father's Days later, Gina has only a plastic box filled with a few of her father's things.

A set of turquoise pottery her father gave her mother sits on a shelf in her Spartanburg living room. She inherited six wooden egg cups he made on a lathe and a handmade shirt and a bow tie he bought in New Mexico.

Photographs. His death certificate. A telegram describing the removal of her father's remains to his home in Abilene, Texas. An American flag. His medals. A notebook with handwritten notes that he kept as he trained to be a radio operator.

She has her parents' wedding album and her mother's wedding band.

Four years ago, she and an older sister went to the Internet for help. They posted inquiries about their father's crew, hoping to find someone who knew their father or the other 15 men who were assigned to the Strategic Air Command with the 15th Air Force and 509th Bomb Wing and Aerial Refueling Squadron.

She applied and received the military findings about the crash. The inch-thick crash report gives some details about that fateful day, but entire sentences are blacked out with a pen to prevent some information from being made public.

Gina received several e-mails from people who gave her bits of information. Then, one day, she got a telephone call from Trey Brandt, a 34-year-old Phoenix investment broker who for the past 10 years has chased military airplane crashes in the mountains of Arizona, combining his love of hiking and camping with his fascination with military aircraft.

He stumbled upon his first wreckage of a World War II bomber in Tucson and with a few letters was able to get the crash report. That's all it took to get him going, looking for more.

He had just hiked the site of Gina's father's crash when he saw her Internet posting.

"He found me. Tracked me down. He went through the telephone book until he found me," the single mother of four said.

Immediately after the crash, investigators removed larger parts, such as the intact tail section, leaving behind the engine, landing gear and smaller pieces of debris.

At the base of the boulder, Brandt found a tattered Air Force jacket that he believes belonged to one of the investigators. Inside one of the pockets he found a handful of dog tags the investigator had gathered at the site. And a Catholic pendant of Saint Anthony -- the Patron Saint of Safe Travel.

In all, Brandt found eight dog tags belonging to six airmen who were with Gina's father. He's been able to return five of them to the men's next of kin.

One went to Doris Dees, the wife of 26-year-old co-pilot Charles Dees from North Carolina.

Doris had a 21-month-old daughter and was pregnant with their son the morning she said her final goodbyes to her husband. "I had no idea they would mean so much to me," Doris wrote in a letter to Brandt after receiving the dog tags from him. "But seeing them, touching them, and realizing I was touching something that had been so close to his heart during the last moments of his life gave me a feeling that words will never be able to describe."

Doris never remarried. She had lost the love of her life, she wrote.

There were more stories like this one.

Brandt has hiked more than 150 crash sites and tells the stories of 20 of them in a recently published book, "Faded Contrails: Last Flights Over Arizona -- True accounts of crashed military aircraft in Arizona from 1942-1977." (Acacia Publishing, $21.95.) He also has a Web site, which he is constantly updating as he hikes more mountains, www.fadedcontrails.com.

Two weeks after Brandt found Gina living in Chesnee, he called her again to say that he hiked to the crash site a second time and thought he had found something that had belonged to her father.

A few days later a package came in the mail.

Inside was Gina's father's radio headset. He had scratched his name into the side of one of the earpieces.

"It was a cross between excitement and sadness," Gina said, as she held the headset in her hands a few days ago.

"I have collected things from my mother that he had when he was alive. But this meant a connection to him that I had never had before."

In all of his searches, Brandt had never found a headset intact. "It was eerie because I had just met Gina. I think there were other forces there."

Brandt has offered to take her to the site if and when she decides to visit Gray Mountain. Gina's goal is to make that trip this fall or next spring.

A few years ago, Brandt accompanied one family from the 509th to the site and that family placed a plaque as a memorial to their father, Wilbur Abney, who had five children.

Of all the crashes that Brandt has explored so far, this one, he said, affected the most children because of the number of fathers aboard, he said.

"I'm a father of a 7-year-old son, so I can see how important it is to have something to remember as much as you can," Brandt said. "I feel honored and privileged to be able to make this connection."

So on June 20, Father's Day, the memories will resurface again. What would life have been like?

"What I think about the most is what it would have been like to have had a father to go to during the bad times," Boyd said. "A father who could have put me on his lap and given me a big hug and tell me things in life are going to be OK."
 

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