Uncle Sonny's Final Flight

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"His plane went down in bad weather somewhere in Texas," my dad always told me about his brother, who died seven years before I was born.

In my childhood imagination, my Uncle Sonny owned the cockpit - part James Bond, part Arnold Palmer, suave and confident.  Suddenly a giant dark funnel cloud appeared out of nowhere, chasing him like a devil. Uncle Sonny dodged and ducked. But the tornado always won, sucking his plane down into a giant fireball in the Texas wilderness, where tumbleweeds were the only things moving for miles - just like a movie.

I held onto that myth until summer 2009, when a package arrived from the U.S. Air Force archives.

At 46, I had begun to question the legends in my father's family. These stories, for many Hiskey men, were blueprints for success. My dad and his two brothers had worked their way from Depression poverty to national fame in the world of golf. Their children-- including me - had earned college golf scholarships.

In the shadows of that bootstrap culture, some of our women - including myself -- had battled depression and insanity. Were those tangled threads of success and mental illness related to, even dependent on, each other?

I needed first to find out how much of the legends were true. Starting with Uncle Sonny.

***

Sonny was the first son, named after his father, Peter "Pete" Marion Hiskey. The family survived in a landscape of extremes: the hot summers and cold winters of the high desert in southern Idaho. Pete Hiskey's Depression stimulus job was building golf courses. Near the golf clubhouse, the Hiskeys lived in a cottage, so Sonny's front yard became his training ground.

Five years after Sonny's birth came the next child - my father, Jim Hiskey. That gap of five years made Sonny into more of a dad than a brother. Sonny taught my dad how to play golf, but Dad could never beat him. Sonny taught Dad how to drive the lane in basketball, but Dad could never beat Sonny to an easy lay-up.

Whatever you do, Sonny said, you have to give it your everything.

By 1938 the final son was born, nicknamed Babe. Golf soon became the three brothers' refuge.The Hiskey brothers: Babe (sitting), Jim (standing left), Sonny (right) with their golf trophies.Enlarge this image

While their dad took care of the course and golfers, Sonny's mom Valna - my grandmother - suffered violent episodes of manic depression. Her husband, then later her sons, took her to the state mental hospital where she would remain for weeks or longer. This cycle continued for 19 years.

When she was well, their mom kept large scrapbooks. When people talked about the Hiskey boys, when local sportswriters covered their golf victories, the first and oldest brother was always rated the best. Sonny was Dad's biggest hero.

In the early 1950s, Sonny left for Texas, where the top college golf teams played. A few years later his younger brothers followed. Dad chose the University of Houston, eventually winning three national team titles.

Dad was a 19-year-old sophomore playing in a tournament when his coach stopped him. Your brother Sonny has died in a plane crash. Everyone would understand, the coach said, if Dad quit his round right then.

No, Dad said. I'll keep playing. In golf and in life I have to give it my everything. Sonny would want me to.

Grief and anger changed everything for my dad. By the time I was born 7 years later, Dad had set a far more radical course than Sonny would have ever imagined.

To understand Dad's choices -- and how those shaped who I became -- I had to find out as much as I could about what really happened to Sonny. Was he as perfect as family legend and the past 56 years had made him to be? As a journalist, I believed there was no greater tribute to his memory, and to Dad, than setting the record straight.

***

I requested the crash report through the Freedom of Information Act, which gives Americans access to government documents.

When the package arrived from the Air Force, I had a shiver of anticipation that what was inside could change - for better or worse - my fantasy of his valiant struggle against the dark funnel cloud of death. 

The faintly legible pages quickly reversed everything. Weather, the investigative team reported, had nothing to do with the accident. Stress on the left wing, caused by an unspecified movement of the plane, contributed to the crash. They couldn't pinpoint the exact cause.

Even harder to take was the revelation that Sonny was no James Bond. He was rated only an average pilot.

Sonny in Air Force photoEnlarge this imageAverage? Over five decades that had wrinkled the rest of us, Sonny stayed eternally young, handsome and smiling, our family's Joe Kennedy Jr. He was the perfect first son, stolen from us before his promise could be fulfilled.

Yet here was the fact in black type and yellowed paper. Based on his limited number of hours of flying time, Sonny had taken the co-pilot's seat on his final flight as simply average. The pilot was rated above average.

The guts of the report still shrouded the truth. More than a dozen pages were blank. Statements from witnesses were omitted, their testimony given in return for a promise of privacy. 

I needed these details so Sonny might live again - in truth, not myth -- for us, the younger generations who never knew him. I made my case in an appeal letter to the Air Force. 

A few weeks later, an email arrived from an Air Force archivist. Attached were witness statements.      

***

Their names were still blacked out, but the witnesses' words described in color the surreal evening of March 21, 1956.

In Robertson County, Texas - midway between the busy college towns of Austin and College Station - the night was settling in. People were eating late dinner or getting ready for bed.

Around 9:15 pm, the quiet broke with a roar.  

"A high norther," "a jet running up," "an airplane...coming out of a power dive," witnesses reported hearing. Then, an explosion.

In the dark, they looked. But no one could see any fire. The next day aviation maps and charts showed up in truck beds and yards - and more gruesome discoveries began turning up.

I was taken off guard by testimony from Sonny's flight instructor. In the cockpit, Sonny tried too hard to prove he had mastered simple tasks. "An inferior [sic] complex," the instructor diagnosed.

My idea of Sonny was becoming less perfect, and more real. Each bit of information made me want more. 

Online, I mapped the crash site that lies about 700 miles west of my home computer. I collected addresses of four nearby homeowners with the last name Brunette - one name that hadn't been blacked out of the crash report.

I copied Sonny's news obituary and wrote a short note that acknowledged the small odds of finding anyone 56 years after the accident. "I know it's a long shot," I admitted, but still hung on to hope as I sent them off in the mail.

***

What happened next reminded me of what golf had taught me long before. Give it your everything, but know too that the final score isn't in your power. A good round always turns on luck.

A week after I mailed my letters to Texas, Kent Brunette called. As head of the chamber of commerce, Kent knows seemingly everyone in Robertson County. As a rabid genealogist, he knows all about the families and history of his home area.

He was only 2 when my uncle's plane crashed. The accident hadn't surfaced in his years of research. The mystery only made him even more eager to help.

"I know what you're trying to do," he said.

He offered eerie proof: A decade before Sonny died in a plane crash, Kent's aunt, Alma Brunette, had boarded a plane in New York City. She had just shopped for her wedding dress. She was heading back home to Texas.

The plane crashed near Richmond, VA. On the verge of marriage, filled with so much promise, her life ended. Kent never knew her. As he learned more about his family history, that gap in memory became gaping. He set out to do fill it - to do exactly what I was doing.

Now Kent became my volunteer investigator.

Armed with my Air Force witness statements and a very faint map of the crash site, he asked around Robertson County for anyone who might remember the crash. He publicized my present quest, with parallels to his past one, in his column in the county's weekly newspaper.

As writers, he and I struggled to find words to capture this hunt. "A heartfelt gesture of remembrance, or a way of paying homage to, an aunt or uncle who died way too soon," he said. The image that came to my mind was a family tree. One dead branch was suddenly sprouting evergreen.

Kent had reason to believe he could turn up an eyewitness to Sonny's crash. He had before.

Years before, he and his parents traveled to Virginia's state archives to research newspaper accounts of his aunt's plane crash. That led them to the spot in the Henrico County woods where Alma Brunette had died.

An old man appeared. At the time of the crash, the man had been a young boy whose dad owned the property. He described what he remembered of the night the accident took place.

Now Kent went hunting in his county for a person like that for me.

***

The Air Force map from the crash report was barely legible - a bunch of faint squiggly marks with a few notations, around an "X" where the plane went down.

Kent traced the map's railroad tracks. Those hadn't changed in 56 years. Kent recognized where they veered slightly from a road that he had known as long as he had known anything, FM1940 in New Baden. His grandmother had lived on this road. 

The "X" lay southeast of another road. This one led to the German cemetery, where each gravestone had online GPS coordinates, Kent's gift to fellow genealogy sleuths. 

In a driving rain on a Sunday afternoon, Kent loaded up his dad Bill for a drive around the "X." They stopped in at Kent's aunt. She advised him to talk some nearby kinfolk. "I don't really know these people," he admitted to me later. " Just heard about them from my dad over the years." That described where my adventure had started, too.

By phone, Kent reached one cousin, who just happened to be at a family reunion. The cousin asked around and quickly put the pieces of memory together.

My uncle's plane, Kent learned, had crashed on a farm that now belonged to a cousin that Kent didn't know he had. In helping my quest to connect to my uncle, Kent was making his own unexpected family connection.

"Come on down, " Kent wrote me in an email. His newfound cousin "can show you a close proximity to where he thinks your uncle's plane crashed."

 ***

On a brilliant, cloudless Sunday in mid-October 2009, Kent and his father Bill met me at the red brick New Baden General Store, a century old mercantile that once offered "anything from cars to coffins." I was eager to soak in everything the Texans could tell and show me.

But first, they needed to understand why my uncle was my hero, and his journey to Texas. At an old wooden picnic table, I spread out the crinkled, faded and now unbound scrapbook kept by my grandmother more than half century earlier.

About 150 miles northwest of our gathering spot was the place that drew my uncle from Idaho. North Texas State College was known as the "Notre Dame of college golf" back in the early 1950s. Sonny boldly made the team as a walk-on, and as a reserve player, he surprised everyone by winning the national (NAIA) championship.  That earned him a scholarship, and predictions of success on the PGA Tour. As a young golfer, I had leaned on these legends of my uncles and Dad for inspiration, to earn my own diploma via a golf scholarship.

Sonny with the plane he learned to flyEnlarge this imageWhen Sonny played college golf, the Korean War was going on. He deferred military service, and protected his golf future, by joining his campus Air Force ROTC. After graduation, he became a first lieutenant stationed at James Connelly Air Force Base in Waco. That's where his final flight, in a B-25 bomber, lifted off on the first day of spring in 1956.

***

I showed them the crash report. The radar intercept mission was one of the first flown by training students. The B-25 had taken off at 7:35 pm and the flight went smoothly for about two hours, until communication was lost.

Kent's efforts to find sources for me had indeed struck the gold he expected. A white-haired couple joined us at the picnic table, eager to read my materials and offer their memories.

Jeannette Cooper, 72, and her husband Dennis Cooper, who at 77 was born the same year as my uncle, had driven over from nearby Hearne with their daughter. They had lived here all their lives, amid families so interconnected over time that Mrs. Cooper once dated a boy she didn't realize was her cousin. I understood why they offered me their help. For the Coopers, family connections identified everyone.

Because Robertson County was close to several pilot training centers, and the flat open terrain allows people to see forever in the distance, citizens were accustomed to planes falling from the sky.  As a girl, Mrs. Cooper stopped playing in the schoolyard when she noticed on the horizon a plane spiraling down. She saw the plume of black smoke. Her class was hurried inside. Recess was over.

Mr. Cooper took care of the fuel and tires on B-25 bombers at nearby Bryan Air Force Base, another place that trained pilots. The B-25 was a propeller plane used in World War II that was about to give way to the jet age. Mr. Cooper liked this aircraft so much that after the military discontinued their use, he got a B-25 for himself.

His deep attachment explained his reaction when he heard that my uncle's B-25 went down: "That's one of ours."

Mr. Cooper immediately joined Bryan Air Force Base's crash recovery team and headed to my uncle's accident. No matter that he had just completed a 24-hour shift. He hoped that by seeing the damage he could better understand this beloved aircraft. His wife went with him.

The Coopers confirmed the crash report. They arrived after the six bodies, all on board, had been removed: my uncle, the pilot, three students and a radar instructor. A watch from one of them, found at the crash site, indicated the accident happened at 9:32 pm. 

The Coopers' crew discovered so much fuselage in such thick foliage that they had to fetch a bigger truck, with a crane. Finding metal or maps were one thing. Personal effects were another.

"I found a shoe," Mrs. Cooper said, her face furrowing. "I didn't touch it. I just left it there."

Mr. Cooper saw enough numbers on the wreckage to know this plane was not one of his.

"There was no fire," he said, confirming the crash report, but still puzzling to him because the plane fell into an area with so many "leaves and branches on the ground. Those woods were still thick well into the 1970s."

I took notes as the Coopers reminisced, and noticed how much they liked helping me. Emotions and facts they had kept for so many years suddenly mattered again.

They had kept these details over a generation in which lives became documented by a trail of electronic data. Like the clippings of golf wins and military service that my grandmother had saved, the Coopers had stored their memories of March 1956 as original content. This data could only be retrieved with a face-to-face visit. What they had to say couldn't be Googled.

Over time, their questions about the plane crash -- why it went down, who was in it -- faded.

I recognized that pattern in my own family. No one doubted the weather explanation. As time and distance widened, a gap formed where legend and misunderstanding found easy root.

 ***

Soon the rumble of gravel interrupted us, and a 1-ton Dodge semi pickup pulled up.

Edwin John "Junior" Dieckman Jr. "is my second cousin, but I had never met him before this," Kent said by way of introduction. Junior was our escort to the crash site.

First, Kent and Junior traced how they were related with help from Kent's father. Bill Brunette, 89, served as our human almanac with such gravelly twang that I had to ask for translation.

Bill recalled another military tale pointing out the primal desire to understand a loved one's final minutes. While seeking details may sound morbid, not knowing is even harder.

A nephew, Floyd Brunette, died in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, "but they never found his body," said Bill, who served in Europe during that conflict.

A tombstone in the nearby cemetery carries Floyd's name, and a plaque at the national cemetery in Hawaii honors him, but there remains emptiness. Thinking about that person is like pressing "scan" on a car radio. There's no final station. 

The military located remains that might have been Floyd's. Investigators "took DNA from my mother," said Junior, who is related to the Brunettes through her, "but there was no match."

Bill pointed out Floyd's house as we headed along the FM1940 highway in Junior's big truck. More evidence that for these families, by staying so close and retelling their stories, the past is a constant present.

We turned onto Dry Prong Road, then onto Gourd Neck Loop. The truck's big tires kicked up an almost white cloud of dust from the long drought here.

We pulled up to a house on the farm where Junior has lived much of life. His front step offers a view of several homes, all belonging to kinfolk.

The Coopers had left us, and now my quest to know my uncle hinged on this outgoing cattle farmer who talked between spits of tobacco. A month earlier, we had been strangers. I was here because as a kid, Junior had a keen interest in family lore.

Junior was only 2½ at the time of my uncle's crash, but he grew into a kid who "loved to listen to old people talking," he told me. "You can learn a lot that way."

 ***

Junior described the labor that went into their family farm, and I recognized my family's work building golf courses.

The Dieckmans and the Hiskeys arrived from Germany with a deep work ethic, cutting old family ties by crossing the ocean. My grandfather moved boulders to build golf courses that people still enjoy today. Junior's grandfather and his team of mules plowed the dirt to raise tomatoes, okra, cantaloupe, and watermelon.

The Texans shared my family's zest for an old story told with humor.

"Sometimes Granddaddy plowed at night with no shoes on, by lantern," Junior said.

"That's not strange in our family," Kent replied. "That's normal!"

From Junior's front yard, I sat shotgun while Junior shifted the truck into four-wheel drive to cover the last bumpy yards to my final destination.

The truck jostled us across a field that, back in 1956, was an almost impenetrable mass of low-growing trees and bushes. This was hard to imagine, because it was now green pasture trod by a herd of cows with big lazy eyes.

The only vestige of the old landscape was a deep thicket in front of us. Junior braked. We got out.

The gully was maybe 20 yards wide, and 50 yards long - a dark green, bushy gash in the pasture. The steep, uneven sides and a 10-foot drop-off made clearing the trees near impossible. What still hung on, even in the drought, were gnarled scrubby oaks and yaupons, and a tree with rough bark and dripping sap called a "piss elm" ("Oh those hurt you when you get a whipping!" Junior said). 

A wire fence around the gully kept out the cows. Even on this bright sunny day, peering over the fence, all I could see in the thicket was near pitch darkness. This was nothing like the tumbleweed-strewn landscapes of my childhood imagination.

Junior called the gully "The Dugout." This was what remained of where Sonny's plane crashed.

The morning after the crash, his aunt Lavelle Russell crawled into the thicket. From his description, she was the person in the crash report who had first found pieces of the plane. She found a blue jacket. Then a body.

"She went up and got Granddaddy and they went and told somebody," Junior said. "They said it was pretty gruesome before the Air Force got here."

Junior gestured at the tops of the tangled foliage that stretched in front of us like a dark green barricade.

"From what I understand, they found [wreckage from the plane] all up and down this," Junior said. "Stuff was up in the trees."

The brush had been so thick over such a large area that it cushioned the falling aircraft. As it hit the thicket, the plane shredded.

"I can't believe it didn't catch on fire," Junior said.

I looked down at terrain now dry and dusty. So many grasshoppers jumped about that the "sugar sand" beneath my feet appeared almost to move. I closed my eyes to imagine again how forested this place had been.

Memory, I thought, resembles the story of this landscape. A fresh experience or tragedy is thick and dense, like that old thicket. Time strips away everything but a souvenir, a scar, a dugout. 

Over time, this thicket had given up more pieces of the crash.

Junior's uncle, George Dieckman, salvaged the canopy - the clear, curved window that protected the pilot. His dogs huddled under it during rainstorms. Junior played on top, giddy up on his transparent saddle.

So much change over 50 plus years. Here, even the map changed. The Air Force base that my uncle flew out of, they told me, is now Texas State Technical College.

And what lay deep below us had changed everything for this family. The Dieckman farm, purchased for $4.25 an acre, makes big money today by harvesting natural gas more than 20,000 feet below ground. Junior paid for his truck and his wife's in cash. My version of that was unfolding, too, by digging deep into the dusty layers of family history to find what was most valuable. I saw too that this bushy area was where one family force ended and another had begun.

I thought back on how Sonny's death left a deep gash in my father's heart. No golf victory, not even beating the storied Byron Nelson head to head at the Texas Cup Matches, could fill Dad's emptiness.

One night, a year after Sonny's death, Dad reluctantly attended a campus meeting in which he heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. That night, he decided golf would be second in his life. He would devote himself to know God and spread the message of Jesus. He would give his everything to a force he could not see.

His missionary work would take him away from my mom, brothers and me. His drive would fuel my drive for his attention. I wanted to achieve enough, to be enough of a good daughter for a father who was always driving for more. The more I attained, the more the emptiness inside me deepened.

I ended up so deeply depressed, hospitalized just as my grandmother had been, that I wanted to die. This part of my life stayed secret until the discovery that other women in my family had similar experiences. Secrecy kept us isolated, and the pattern repeated for four generations. What we didn't know hurt us. I believed, even more strongly now from my Texas visit, that sharing even the most difficult stories helped connect and heal us.

I left Junior's farm full of appreciation to these Texans so willing to help me piece together my uncle's final flight. Against the odds that 53 years would erase the truth, these kind strangers of Robertson County stepped forward to fill in my family gap.

In the context of this place, their lives and so many family connections, I better understood my less-than-perfect uncle. I better understood my father's loss. I understood the forces that had brought me to this point in my life. People with giant empty holes inside them are driven to fill them.  That road can lead to Jesus, to self-destruction, to Texas.

"It mattered to people here what happened," I wrote in my notebook before leaving. "They remembered. That meant a lot to me, that they didn't forget. We don't want to be forgotten."

I took a small detail with me, a mental postcard to hold close as the miles separated me from Central Texas.

The Dieckmans, every year, go back to the ravine where my uncle's plane crashed. They locate on a nice-sized cedar, chop it and set it up as their Christmas tree. Their German forefathers lit it with real candles. They don't do that anymore, but the tree still comes from the same place and serves as that is a centerpiece of their family all being together.

That image fills me with a new light.

Michelle Hiskey of Decatur, Ga. is a veteran, award-winning journalist and free-lance writer. She can be reached at michelle.hiskey@gmail.com.