Crash Miscellany

On the day of the T-34 crash, I was shooting with a Yashica-Mat twin-lens, medium-format camera, a Japanese version of the German Rolleiflex. It was the first of several high-quality cameras I was to own.

I had bought the Yashica-Mat only a few weeks before, and at my father's suggestion I insured it. Good call! After the crash, and after I had decided that we were still — miraculously — alive and couldn't do much except wait for someone to rescue us, if they were going to rescue us, I went looking for my camera, which had been in a case with a strap around my neck. I found it at the foot of a large ponderosa pine tree, which it had hit at high velocity. The strap was broken. The focussing hood, screen, and reflex mirror were gone. The back was gone, the sides of the camera were caved in, and the crank which both wound the shutter and advanced the film was bent into a "U." When I picked the camera up, the ruined film fell out of it.

The insurance policy paid for a new camera — I chose a Nikon SP rangefinder camera. A year later I was in the U.S. Navy and had received orders to report for duty at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Yokosuka, Japan. I took the wreckage of the Yashica-Mat with me, and at my first opportunity took it to a camera store. They sent it to the Yashica factory in Tokyo, which completely rebuilt the camera for $20. I used the camera for several more years and eventually traded it in on another camera. Another 20 years passed, and the camera came back into my possession, but that's another story….

At the left, my born-again Yashica-Mat camera.

I found my glasses

As I wandered in a daze about the wreck site, I also found my glasses, which I wore primarily for astigmatism. To me, they seemed undamaged, so I picked them up and put them on. Only later did someone point out that they didn't have any lenses in them!

At Hillcrest Hospital

I was at Hillcrest General Hospital for about a week following the crash. I could scarcely move for the first two or three days, but I nevertheless enjoyed my sudden — fleeting — fame. I had many visitors, all of whom wanted to know the details, especially why the crash occurred. Curiously, one of the other patients in the hospital at that time, recovering from surgery, was Mrs. Donald (Josephine) Overturf, mother of my best friend, Gary Overturf. I would have been astonished at that time if someone had told me that she would be my mother-in-law when I married her youngest daughter, Susan, on December 7, 1966.

In the news

The Silver City Daily Press and the El Paso Times newspapers published stories that my father, a newspaperman, wrote. In a way it was practice for other stories he would write only four years later, when I was seriously wounded in Vietnam, a tale which I relate in "A Navy corpsman goes to war — With 3/1 in Vietnam". (For a transcription of my dad's stories, click on the image.)

After being released from the hospital, I slowly got back into my routines, and continued to work on the feature story about fire fighting in the Gila Forest. I even climbed back into aircraft without fear, and had some memorable moments, even flying in the same type of stormy conditions that brought about the destruction of Forest Service Aircraft #N145Z.

I had one more encounter with a T-34. It was the sister ship to #N145Z. I didn't fly in it, but I decided I needed a photograph of it for posterity. Carol Schmidt, my girlfriend, and I drove out to the airport, and she took this photo:

Another T-34 — the sister ship of Forest Service Aircraft #N145Z — was one of nine aircraft used against fires in the Gila National Forest in the summer of 1962. Following my recovery from the injuries I received in the crash, my girlfriend, Carol Schmidt, and I went to take this photo. The stormy sky is typical of summer days in the Gila Forest, and is much like it was the day that #N145Z crashed in the Black Range.

— Photo by Carol Schmidt Overturf.

My full-page feature story was published in the El Paso Times on Sunday, July 22, 1962, and was even mentioned on that edition's editorial page.

In the news again

A year later, the crash of the T-34 was in the news again when smokejumpers Dick Tracy and Kirk Samsel received a joint "Superior Service Award" for "heroic actions in parachuting under extremely hazardous conditions". The story notes that the two smokejumpers had earlier received $300 performance rewards from the Southwest Region of the U.S. Forest Service, and that Vice President Lyndon Johnson spoke at the ceremony in Washington. It also incorrectly gives the name of the passenger as "Robert M. Ingraham, Jr." That's my father! (For a more readable transcription of the newspaper clipping, as well as photos of Dick Tracy and Kirk Samsel, click on the image.)

The crash of F.S. #N145Z, although it was headline news at the time and helped to redefine my sense of mortality, was trivial in a greater historical context. Today, except for my own artifacts and the handful of newspaper stories which are still, presumably, hidden away in newspaper morgues or perhaps recorded on various media, there is virtually no record of the crash in existence. U.S. Forest Service records go back only to 1974; in Young Men and Fire — The True Story of the Man Gulch Fire, author Norman Maclean writes of the frustrations he had in trying to obtain information about the tragic deaths of 12 smokejumpers that occurred in 1949 in Montana. The U.S. Forest Service, he writes, "…is a fairly unhistorical outfit, sometimes even antihistorical." I have been stymied in my own attempts to learn the precise location of my crash. Using the following Google map, I have tried to show the approximate flight path to the Black Range fire, and the general area where the T-34 went down: