Derek Abbey is president and CEO of Project Recover, a non-profit organization devoted to locating and repatriating the remains of missing American servicemembers.

“I really encourage every single one of our members, whether they were involved in a particular case or not, when somebody is repatriated and identified and then the family memorializes them, to go bear witness to that,” Abbey said. “Once you do that, it’s life changing.”

Project Recover is the official partner of Cliff Sjolund, Jr.’s effort to locate MEAL-88, the B-52 bomber missing on a training mission over the Gulf of Mexico since February 28, 1968.

Like Cliff, Derek Abbey is a former military pilot. Abbey began his work for Project Recover as a volunteer many years ago, participating in field searches in places like Palau in the western Pacific Ocean, and doing things like helping search through debris brought up from the seafloor with specialized equipment.

“I remember the basket came up, we took the lid off, and I looked in, and there’s the oxygen mask for one of the aviators,” Abbey said, describing a particular search. “And I picked it up and I probably held on to that mask, just kind of looking at it for five minutes,” Abbey continued, saying that a similar mask was standard equipment every day of his military flight career.

“Every once in awhile you just find this piece of something that just reminds you of why you’re here,” Abbey said, “and that we’re doing this for people, not aircraft or other things like that. It’s for the people that are involved.”

Searching for the missing and serving the families left behind, says Derek Abbey, is “just the right thing to do.”

Cliff Sjolund, Jr. never imagined he’d have a leadership role in a search for MEAL-88.

“I thought in 2021 when I delivered my report to the family members, I was done,” Sjolund said, referring to a report on the crew of MEAL-88 and their final mission – it’s nearly 150 pages long.

“In my mind,” Sjolund continued, “I had accomplished what I set out to do, which was to tell the story and give the story to the family members.”

That all changed for Cliff Sjolund, Jr. when he met Shawn Murphy, a military veteran and amateur historian who was part of the research team we were introduced to in Season One of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293.

“He basically said, ‘You’re not done,'” Cliff recalled, describing a pivotal conversation he had with Shawn Murphy in 2022. “And I said, ‘No, I am [done].’ And he said, ‘You will never be done until you bring these guys home.'”

Cliff ultimately agreed, though acknowledged that he didn’t have the expertise to actually mount a search for the B-52. It wasn’t much later when Shawn connected with Derek Abbey of Project Recover – buttonholing him after an informational event at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, and telling him all about Cliff’s research into MEAL-88.

Shawn readily acknowledges that he is seldom at a loss for words. He is also sincere, dogged and persuasive when it comes speaking up on behalf of American servicemembers who are missing – and who no one is searching for.

After Derek Abbey spoke with Shawn at the museum that day, the partnership with Cliff Sjolund, Jr. to search for MEAL-88 was not far behind. Shawn, Derek says, can lobby with great intensity for what he believes in.

“[But] for stuff like this,” Abbey said, “it doesn’t take a lot of convincing for me to start becoming interested in what we were talking about.”

When the search for the missing bomber gets underway offshore, Cliff will set up a base camp in Port O’Connor, Texas, not far from the old Air Force Base on Matagorda Island. He plans to welcome family members of the MEAL-88 crew, as well as his own relatives and others involved with the project.

While he never set out to actually search for the missing B-52, Cliff, a retired B-52 commander, is clearly committed to this mission, and to seeing it through to a successful conclusion.

And he also hasn’t lost his sense of humor.

“If there’s anybody to blame for this, it’s Shawn Murphy,” Cliff joked.

To contribute to the effort to search for MEAL-88, please visit the project website: B52BomberDown.org.

Dave Wellman is nearly 90 years old. He’s a docent at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, and has been volunteering in this capacity for 31 years.

“I have experience in the Air Force and working for Boeing, and so I love and I live airplanes down here,” Wellman explained, one sunny afternoon in late winter. “I enjoy talking about anything airplane and history involved, especially the B-52, because the B-52 I flew in Vietnam on a number of missions.”

As Wellman describes his love of all things aviation and airplane related, he’s standing in the shadow cast by a huge wing. The wing is attached to a vintage B-52, which is on display outside the Museum of Flight. The giant bomber is there in that spot, in part, because of the efforts of Dave Wellman.

“This airplane we have here at the museum, we got this in about 1992,” Wellman explained. “They flew it in up to Paine Field in Everett, and it sat up there, and it just deteriorated badly.”

Paine Field is north of Seattle, and it’s where the Museum of Flight’s main restoration facility is located.

“A group of us Vietnam veterans, we got together, got with the museum, and we decided now is the time to bring that down here, to a thing we called Welcome Home Park,” Wellman continued. Part of Wellman’s motivation was to right a wrong: the way vets returning from a long and unpopular war in Southeast Asia were treated when they arrived stateside.

“It’s a park here to honor people that served in Vietnam, because when they returned home, a lot of folks, lot of the young men and people that served in there, they were not welcomed well in the 70s,” Wellman said. “And so now this is a chance to welcome people home.”

Like Cliff Sjolund, Jr., the man leading the quest to find MEAL-88, and like the men aboard that B-52 when it disappeared in 1968, Dave Wellman also flew B-52 bombers during the Cold War.

He went on “Alert” – those seven-day stretches of eating, sleeping and spending time with the other crew members and other crews near their parked bombers, 24 hours a day. The men were ready to respond in case the horn went off, which meant having to get their B-52s and deadly weapons airborne as quickly as possible. As commander, Wellman also led his crew through Radar Bomb Scoring (or “RBS”) training exercises, just like what the men aboard MEAL-88 were doing the night they vanished.

“BUF” (or “BUFF”)

As a B-52 commander, Dave Wellman also knows that the in-house and informal nickname for the giant eight-engine bomber – what he and all the other crew members called it – was “BUFF.”

That word is an acronym, Wellman explained.

“Its nickname is the ‘Big Ugly Fellow,'” he said. “‘B-U-F’ [which is] sometimes modified to a certain extent.”

Wellman’s family-friendly, museum-docent version leaves out one “F” – that’s the modification he referred to in his polite way. The second “F” happens to be the first letter in the gerund form of an expletive, in this case used as an adjectival modifier for “Fellow.” This ultimately adds a fourth character to the acronym and converts the nickname from “B-U-F” to “B-U-F-F.”

“It’s not very pretty,” Wellman said, clearly admiring the aircraft but sounding a little sheepish. “But it’s majestic.”

The B-52 on display at the Museum of Flight is across the street from Boeing Field, and is just down the road from where the first B-52 prototypes were built, and where the first model rolled out of the Boeing factory in 1952. The bomber has a long and remarkable history, with more than 70 still in service and flying missions for the U.S. Air Force nearly eight decades after the iconic aircraft was first designed.

Enduring Cold War Aviation Icon

“It is the icon of the Cold War, really,” said Mike Lombardi, Senior Corporate Historian for The Boeing Company. “And you can use terms like venerable, legendary . . . and it just goes along with its legendary status that it would have this incredible origin story.”

Lombardi oversees the Boeing Archives, located south of Seattle. He’s written books and given public programs about Boeing history, and, in particular, about the company’s iconic bombers of World War II, the Cold War and beyond – the B-17 Flying Fortress, the B-29 Superfortress, the B-47 Stratojet and, of course, the B-52 Stratofortress.

In response to a request from the U.S. Air Force for a long-range, high-capacity bomber, Boeing proposed a turbo-prop powered design and gave a presentation outlining their thinking at a meeting at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio in 1948.

There was only one problem, says Boeing’s Mike Lombardi: the Air Force didn’t want a turbo-prop bomber. They wanted a jet.

“It was a Thursday afternoon,” Lombardi explained. “The colonel that’s doing this evaluation says, ‘Come back Monday with a better idea.’”

The Boeing team – the “Boeing Brain Trust,” Lombardi calls it, including legendary aerospace engineering figures Ed Wells and George Shire – accepted the colonel’s challenge.

“So basically, over the weekend, they huddle in their hotel room there in Dayton, the Van Cleve Hotel,” Lombardi explained. “They pull the dresser over and then clear it off and get out their drafting pencils, and they start working this out.”

There were no 3-D printers in 1948, of course, but there was balsa wood, an easy to cut and easy to sculpt material long a favorite of modelers and other hobbyists, and readily available everywhere

“George Shire went down to the hobby shop downtown, bought some balsa wood and a hobby knife, and he sets out to start carving a model,” Lombardi continued. “And Ed Wells leads the team to develop a proposal. So they get on the phone, and they call back to Seattle, and they say, ‘Fire up the wind tunnel’ and they go through some calculations.”

“Gentlemen, this is the B-52”

“They draw up a jet bomber, and it’s going to need eight engines, it’s so big,” Lombardi said, “So they work it all out. Shire makes this model and puts it on a pedestal.”

On Monday morning, Lombardi says, comes the moment of truth.

“They go back to the colonel’s office . . . and they put the balsa wood model on his desk, and they give him this proposal, 33 pages is all it is,” Lombardi continued. “And they say, ‘Here’s our new idea based on your feedback.'”

“He looks at the model and opens up and looks at their proposal,” Lombardi said. “And he says, ‘I like this. Gentlemen, this is the B-52.'”

The Pilot’s Son

“I wonder sometimes, if I had my dad to raise me after age 10, would I have been a different husband and father?” Steve Salavarria asked. “Would my career have gone farther?”

Steve’s father knew the B-52 well. He was pilot of MEAL-88 the night it disappeared over the Gulf of Mexico. Steve – who was just a kid – was awakened early the next morning just after his mother opened the front door and got the news about the missing plane from Air Force officials.

“The doorbell rings, I didn’t hear that,” Salavarria explained. “What I woke up to was the wails of crying . . . my mother wailing. Not crying, but wailing.”

Steve’s mother was Barbara Salavarria, the first relative of a crew member tracked down by Cliff Sjolund decades ago. Barbara passed away a few years ago. Her son Steve says he thinks about the concept of closure, for the loss and grief from having a father who simply went to work one day and then never came back.

“I’ve talked with my sister and brother about it, and I’m not sure that we have ever thought that we lacked closure,” Salavarria said. “And so I’ve been thinking about it, you know, do I need closure?”

“I mean, if we find the the wreck and we get a dogtag out of it or something, is that going to give me closure?” Salavarria wondered. “I don’t know, because, see, that’s the thing. They didn’t have any counseling or psychology for us back in ’68 and ’69, so I don’t know.”

Should the search later this year for MEAL-88 succeed – should the B-52 be located, and perhaps identifiable remains of the members of the crew recovered – Steve Salavarria and the other family members of the missing men might finally be able to answer tough questions like these for themselves.

To contribute to the effort to search for MEAL-88, please visit the project website: B52BomberDown.org.

“I was Acting Wing Safety Officer at the time, and I got the call after midnight to come out to the command post at Carswell Air Force Base where the B-52 was stationed,” said Earl McGill, recalling the early morning hours of February 29, 1968.

McGill is a U.S. Air Force veteran pilot who flew B-29 bombers on 28 missions during the Korean War. He later flew B-47 jet bombers in the Cold War, and commanded a B-52 bomber during the Vietnam War as well. McGill published a book about his experiences as an aviator called “Jet Age Man.” The book includes a chapter about Meal-88, the B-52 that disappeared off Matagorda Island in the Gulf of Mexico in February 1968.

The chapter details McGill’s experience as part of the team from Carswell Air Force Base that investigated the loss of the eight-engine Strategic Air Command bomber.

“The colonel who was running the investigation told us not to speculate at all,” McGill recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t want to hear any speculation,’ and he was right to say that.”

Being part of the investigation team meant spending 10 days at Matagorda Island, listening to audio recordings of radio transmissions between the crew on the plane and the people on the ground, and examining paper records from the night the plane disappeared. In 1968, Matagorda Island was home to a Radar Bomb Scoring (RBS) site, where airborne B-52 crews were put through their paces electronically, via simulated bombing runs at various altitudes.

“We all felt that this was really something extremely unlikely that happened,” McGill explained, still wondering decades later what might have caused Meal-88 to crash. “We didn’t lose that many B-52s, so most of the ones that were lost [were lost because of] extreme turbulence, a couple by mid-air collisions, and stuff like that.”

Bottom line, B-52 bombers don’t just vanish, McGill says.

Apart from the tapes and standard documents related to the RBS exercises, there wasn’t much to for McGill and the other Air Force personnel to investigate at Matagorda Island in the days immediately following the crash.

“The boats were out there looking for it the whole time we were there, and they had some pretty good high tech stuff,” McGill said. “But they never found it.”

While U.S. Air Force searchers – with assistance from the U.S. Coast Guard – were unable to locate anything from the plane, on March 8, 1968, a school teacher found debris on a Texas beach. Almost immediately, officials at the Boeing facility in Wichita, Kansas confirmed for the Air Force that the object was from a B-52, it not necessarily specifically from Meal-88.

That’s when 23-year-old Cindy Dillaplain and her father decided to mount their own search for the B-52.

Cindy’s husband John Pantilla was a member of the crew. She was distraught over his disappearance, and by what she felt was an inadequate search, and hasty move by the Air Force to declare John and the other members of the crew deceased.

“The best way I can describe it, you feel like you have one arm and one leg and just half a body,” Cindy said about losing the love of her life. “So when you walk or you step or you go someplace, you’re just actually half a person, that other half of you doesn’t even show up.”

Cindy and her dad chartered a small plane and flew from Love Field in Dallas to Corpus Christi, Texas. From there, they flew over gulf waters near shore, but saw nothing of interest. However, on a scouring of the beach by foot and vehicle the next day, the two found several pieces of wreckage believed to be from the B-52 as well as a U.S. Air Force garment and an aviation air mask.

Hurrying home to Fort Worth on a Sunday afternoon, Cindy paused long enough to telephone Barbara Salavarria and tell her about the debris, and that they were transporting everything back to Cindy’s house. Barbara’s husband, Major Frank Salavarria, was the commander of Meal-88, and Cindy and Barbara were friends because their husbands were part of the same B-52 crew.

But, when Cindy and her dad reached Cindy’s home, someone was there waiting for them.

“In my yard in Fort Worth is two trucks – the Air Force Police – and they have guns,” Cindy said. “And they get out of their trucks and demanded possession of Air Force property.”

Cindy says the men confiscated the debris, and she never saw any of it again. She believes her phone and Barbara Salavarria’s phone were tapped, which she says is the only way the Air Force would have known that Cindy and her father were bringing their discoveries back to Fort Worth.

After a year waiting for John to return, Cindy moved on with her life and eventually remarried. But, as the years passed, she still wondered about what had happened to the B-52 and to her first husband.

In the early 1980s, she requested copies of pertinent documents from the Air Force, but it was only because of Cliff Sjolund tracking her down a few years ago that Cindy really began revisiting those long-ago events – events which understandably left a bad taste in her mouth when it comes to the Air Force.

“Cliff has been a godsend, and he has dedicated his life to the Air Force, and he tolerates my negative talk,” Cindy said. “And, bless his heart, I apologize every time I talk to him because of my negative outlook. I don’t know why he puts up with it, but he does. And he has a goal to right it.”

The goals of Cliff’s group that mean righting the wrong – preparing a detailed study of what might have happened, to find the B-52 and bring home the remains of the crew – were given an incalculable boost by what Cindy had taken time to do before she and her father headed back to Fort Worth from Corpus Christi on that Sunday back in March 1968.

When Cliff found her a few years ago, Cindy still had the photos, sketches, measurements and detailed notes about the debris that she and her father had collected on the Texas beach.

To contribute to the effort to search for MEAL-88, please visit the project website: B52BomberDown.org.

Late on the evening of February 28, 1968, a B-52 bomber carrying eight members of the U.S. Air Force crashed while on a training flight near Matagorda Island, Texas. There was no distress call, and no members of the crew ejected from the eight-engine, jet-powered bomber before it disappeared beneath the waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

After searching for two weeks, the Department of Defense gave up and declared the eight men dead. An investigation into the cause of the crash was inconclusive, and the Air Force moved on. This was the era of the Vietnam War, and of the Cold War, when some B-52 crews took part in dropping conventional bombs in Southeast Asia, and others stood by at a moment’s notice to run from their barracks, ready their aircraft, and get airborne within 12 minutes carrying a payload of nuclear bombs.

The crew of the B-52F Stratofortress – tail number 70173, employing the tactical call-sign Meal 88 – was being evaluated during the training flight for accuracy in both low-level and high-altitude bombing.

Along with the regular crew of six – Frank Mariano Salavarria, Major, US Air Force: B-52 Combat Crew Aircraft Commander (AC) and Instructor Pilot (IP); Charles Webb Roberts, Captain, US Air Force: B-52 Combat Crew Radar Navigator (RN); John Thomas Pantilla, Captain, US Air Force: B-52 Combat Crew Electronic Warfare Officer (EWO); Michael Lee Carroll, Captain, US Air Force: B-52 Combat Crew Navigator (NN); William Thomas Causey, First Lieutenant, US Air Force: B-52 Combat Crew Copilot (CP); and Kermit Crawford Casey, Master Sergeant, US Air Force: B-52F Combat Crew Defensive Aerial Gunner (AG) – were two evaluators: Philip Franklin Strine, Major, US Air Force: B-52 Combat Crew Aircraft Commander (AC) and Evaluator/Instructor Pilot (EP/IP); and Thomas D. Childs, Captain, US Air Force: B-52 Combat Crew Radar Navigator (RN) and Evaluator/Instructor Navigator (EN/IN).

In the years and decades following the disappearance, Meal 88 and all of the men aboard were essentially forgotten by the Air Force and by the community around Carswell Air Force Base, which the aircraft and crew had called home. Were it not for the end of the Cold War and the closure of Carswell, a monument to the men might have remained covered with vegetation, and the lost bomber would likely have remained forgotten or lost in obscurity.

Cliff Sjolund, Jr. is a retired U.S. Air Force pilot who flew B-52s from 1977 to 2000. It was his discovery of the monument in 1993 that led him to investigate the crash, to track down the family members of the missing men, and, ultimately, to launch a mission that may discover the whereabouts of the lost bomber as soon as later in 2025. Sjolund and his crew, in partnership with Project Recover, are currently securing the financial support necessary to fund the search.

The story explored in Unsolved Histories: Bomber Down is about what happened to the B-52, and about Cliff Sjolund’s mission to find the aircraft. But it’s also about the bonds between those who serve in the military and the families of those who serve. These bonds are strong, even between service members who have never met each other, or between service members and the families of others who served, but who were lost decades ago.

To contribute to the effort to search for MEAL-88, please visit the dedicated section of the project website.

Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293? has inspired creation of bipartisan bills in the U.S. House and Senate. If passed, the new legislation would finally recognize and support the families of hundreds of military members missing on dozens of non-combat military plane crashes since World War II. The inaugural season of the podcast focuses on an airliner which disappeared between Seattle and Anchorage in 1963 while carrying 58 active duty members of the military.

Bipartisan bill with roots in Washington State and Alaska

On Thursday, February 6, 2025, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) introduced the Flight 293 Remembrance Act. Senator Murray is a senior member and former chair of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, while Senator Sullivan is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The partnership makes sense, since Flight 293 originated in Washington State and was headed for Alaska when it went down. Companion legislation was also introduced in the U.S. House by Representative Marilyn Strickland (D, WA-10), a member of the House Armed Services Committee whose district encompasses Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the base from which Flight 293 departed.

“For far too long, the U.S. government has treated the families of servicemembers who went missing in non-combat plane crashes differently—denying them the communication, acknowledgement, and public support that other families of missing servicemembers receive,” said Senator Murray in a press release.

The Flight 293 Remembrance Act has already been endorsed by national organizations supporting military veterans, including Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), National Military Family Association (NMFA), and Military Officers Association of America (MOAA).

The inaugural season of the Unsolved Histories podcast, which was released in October 2024, tells the story of Flight 293, a civilian airliner which was chartered by the U.S. military and which crashed into the Gulf of Alaska on June 3, 1963. The Northwest Airlines DC-7C took off from McChord Air Force Base in Pierce County and was headed to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska when it ran into trouble. All 101 aboard were killed, and the cause of the crash was never determined.

Perhaps worst of all, no bodies were ever recovered. In the aftermath of the tragedy, surviving loved ones of the 58 active duty servicemembers on board Flight 293 were essentially forgotten because of Defense Department policies, and have been ever since. For many families, closure has been difficult or impossible.

Critical assistance from Tonja Anderson-Dell

With critical assistance from Tonja Anderson-Dell, the Flight 293 podcast highlighted the systemic disparities between how families of “Missing in Action” service members are treated in comparison to Flight 293 families and other families of those lost under similar non-combat circumstances.

Anderson-Dell, whose grandfather was lost on a similar military flight in Alaska in 1952, has been working to recognize and support these forgotten families for 25 years. She founded a non-profit called Honored Bound to document the dozens of missing aircraft and advocate for families of those missing.

“I’m really at a loss for words,” said Anderson-Dell when she learned of the legislation. “I’m just happy that a senator actually listens. I’m speechless.”

“This is fantastic news,” said Greg Barrowman, who lost his 17-year-old brother, U.S. Army Private Bruce Barrowman, on Flight 293. Barrowman has led efforts to commemorate Flight 293, including a private fundraising campaign that resulted in privately-funded monument dedicated at Tahoma National Cemetery on the 60^th anniversary of the crash.

Senator Patty Murray: Committed to passing Flight 293 Remembrance Act

According to a press release from Senator Murray’s office:

“Since World War II, hundreds of military personnel have been classified as ‘Missing Not In Action’ (M-NIA) following non-combat plane crashes—and unlike the families of those classified as “Missing in Action” (MIA), who receive regular updates from the Department of Defense (DoD) and invitations to remembrance events, M-NIA families have long been left unsupported and excluded from these resources. The lack of a formal recognition system for M-NIA servicemembers has resulted in these families being denied the public acknowledgment, memorials, and support services they deserve. The bipartisan Flight 293 Remembrance Act seeks to correct these disparities by ensuring that the sacrifices of M-NIA servicemembers are properly recognized, their families receive essential support, and they are included in remembrance efforts.”

“It’s long past time to fix this and at least provide federal recognition for families who lost loved ones in tragic accidents like Flight 293,” Senator Murray said.

“Our legislation would ensure that the service of our fallen heroes is commemorated and that their families receive the recognition and assistance they deserve,” Senator Murray continued. “I’ll be working hard to get this commonsense bipartisan solution across the finish line.”

In an old mill town on Puget Sound north of Seattle, a stretch of brick road is crossed by a vintage railroad bridge. It’s the only part of the landscape in Everett, Washington that remains unchanged from one of the darkest days in the city’s history more than 100 years ago.

“I can’t think of anywhere else in the city where any other brick street part or portion might still survive,” said local historian Neil Anderson. “It’s the last, and a lot of history walked over those bricks for the last 100 and some years.”

The roadway and bridge, at the west end of Hewitt Avenue just north of the old Everett railroad depot, function as an unintentional frame containing a view of Everett’s working waterfront – in particular, the section of the harbor where a pier called City Dock once stood.

The Everett Massacre

It was on City Dock and in the waters just west of it where gunfire erupted between law enforcement on shore and labor activists aboard two steam vessels.

It’s unclear who fired first, but when it was all over, the so-called Everett Massacre of November 5, 1916 had claimed the lives of at least seven men. The event was one of many in the Pacific Northwest from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, when labor and management clashed, often with deadly result.

In that era, Sheriff Don McRae amassed what’s been called a private army – hundreds of civilian men from a business club who were deputized and armed in order to tamp down labor activism, and even just plain free speech, in Everett.

On the day of the Everett Massacre and moments before the shooting started, those deputies – and anyone else tagging along or otherwise taking part in the public demonstrations that day – had just marched down Hewitt Avenue, their feet drumming on the old bricks – the same ones which remain in place there today – and the tops of their heads clearing the steel trusses of the old bridge, which also, remarkably, still stands unchanged and in place.

“It became a real wound in Everett,” said lifelong Everett resident, local historian and Anderson’s friend Jack O’Donnell. The Everett Massacre “was one of those things that people in the city would not speak about for years.”

“Everett was a real mill town at that time,” O’Donnell continued, as he stood on the old brick road and took in the view to the west, framed by the bridge. “There were so many mills that became highly unionized, and there were a lot of real skilled workers like the shingle weavers, and they were having a strike.”

Wobblies Join The Strike

It was that strike which ultimately led to members of Industrial Workers of the World – known as the “IWW” or “Wobblies” – coming to Everett in 1916 to take part in public speaking events at the corner of Hewitt Avenue and Wetmore Street, about five blocks from the brick roadway and railroad bridge. The Wobblies came to town with the intention of speaking in public and being arrested for doing so, and then being jailed – in hopes of clogging the jail and defeating Everett’s efforts to stifle free speech. A similar thing had happened on the other side of the state in Spokane in 1909, and the Wobblies had claimed victory.

On October 30, 1916, a large group of Wobblies came to Everett, anticipating arrest. Instead, the 41 men were savagely beaten and run out of town by Sheriff Don McRae and dozens of his deputies. The union men were not arrested or charged with a crime, and there was no due process – only knocked out teeth, dislocated bones, and internal injuries from blows and kicks rained down on the men.

The two boats of Wobblies heading north from Seattle to Everett on the morning November 5 were going back in search of vengeance.

“So when the VERONA, the first of the two vessels, came in, they said ‘You can’t disembark here,’” O’Donnell recounted, describing what Sheriff McRae shouted at the Wobblies trying to land at City Dock.

“And they said ‘The hell we can’t,’” O’Donnell continued, repeating what the Wobblies reportedly told Sheriff McRae. “At some point, a shot was fired because both sides were armed.”

The gunfire didn’t last long, but two deputies were fatally wounded on shore. On the VERONA, five men died, but more may have fallen over the side and drowned – though no additional bodies were ever recovered, and no men were reported missing.

Will the Landscape and Viewscape Survive?

The landscape in question, perhaps other than the street and sidewalk right-of-way running beneath the bridge, belongs to BNSF Railway.

Railroad officials are planning replace the aging bridge, which dates back to 1910, with an earthen berm. This would mean filling in the area beneath the bridge and eliminating the historic landscape where Everett Massacre participants marched down Hewitt Avenue to meet the boats full of labor activists. Tracks over the current vintage bridge carry BNSF freight trains and local commuter trains.

Plans for altering the historic landscape are a joint effort of BNSF Railway and the City of Everett. In an email, city of Everett spokesperson Simone Tarver shared some of the project details.

The park is “being paid for and built by BNSF,” Tarver wrote.” Parks (officially, Everett Parks and Facilities) has been working closely with BNSF on the design.”

It’s unclear from Tarver’s email if the historic significance of the hardscape of the bricks where participants marched and of the so- called “viewscape” which retains its 1916 look (and which frames the view of the site where the Everett Massacre took place) were taken into consideration at any point so far in public or private discussions related to the design of the berm. This possible significance is likely to come up when the project and any necessary permits are reviewed in a process mandated by the State of Washington.

For those who believe preservation of places where difficult parts of history happened is key to never forgetting the lessons taught by that difficult history, there may still be time to convince BNSF Railway and the City of Everett that bricks and railroad bridge – the only remaining landscape from the Everett Massacre – is worth saving.

Otherwise, the landscape, like the history of the Everett Massacre itself, will simply vanish.

“Not very many people have heard about the Everett Massacre,” said Neil Anderson. “And when you start digging into the history, a lot of people have no clue of where that event took place.”

To hear author Ian Ross tell it, when the U.S. Navy airship Shenandoah crashed in September 1925, it was unlike any aviation tragedy before or since.

“It hit extreme turbulence over Ohio and broke into basically three pieces,” Ross said. “And the control car, with most of the officers, dropped away and fell to earth and killed everybody [inside].”

“The upper section broke into two pieces, and both of those pieces floated to earth,” Ross continued. “The rear section floated down and dragged across, and most of the people that were in that section survived.”

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Navy explored and experimented with so-called “lighter-than-air” aviation through balloons as well as rigid-framed airships filled with helium, including the Shenandoah and three other craft.

“In order to test this theory of long-distance flight for a dirigible, they set up a planned trip to come up here [from Lakehurst, New Jersey] to Seattle by way of Fort Worth and San Diego,” aviation historian Lee Corbin said.

Airships require specific infrastructure much different from what fixed-wing, heavier-than-air craft (that is, airplanes) need, Corbin explained.

“So they built three different mooring masts,” Corbin continued, explaining that a mooring mast is a tall column designed to secure the nose of the airship and to supply things like water, electricity and fuel.

The Navy built “one down in Fort Worth, which I think now is a parking lot for a warehouse down there,” he said. “And they built one at what’s now called North Island Naval Air Station [near San Diego].”

“I’m pretty sure that one is gone because of all the construction [from] when they were building the airfields,” Corbin said.

“But interestingly enough, the one that was built at [what was then known as] Camp Lewis is now on a portion of McChord Air Force Base,” Corbin continued. “And it’s out in an area that was left undeveloped all these years.”

Corbin was able to investigate what remains of the mooring mast. “There’s actually still a foundation down there,” Corbin said, and “if you know where to look you can find it.”

Photos that Corbin took show the concrete footings of the mast and guy wires, as well as remains of the foundation of the shed built to service airships. LiDAR images that Corbin tracked down in public online databases show the remains of a track built in a huge circle around the mast. He says this track was constructed sometime in the 1930s to accommodate a heavily weighted vehicle to serve as additional mooring connection for airships even bigger than the Shenandoah, though no other airship ever did visit.

“The mooring mast was only used once” for the one-day visit of Shenandoah in October 1924, Corbin said.

In Corbin’s research, he also discovered that a man from Seattle named Roland G. Mayer served as an officer on the Shenandoah. Mayer survived the 1925 crash, and is credited with helping others also make it through alive.

Mayer went on to serve aboard the Navy airship Los Angeles, and also flew aboard the Navy’s other two lighter-than-air giants the Akron and the Macon. Mayer was at Lakehurst, New Jersey the day after the Hindenburg disaster in May 1937, and took part in the Navy’s initial investigation into the crash.

“He also was a glider pilot . . . [and he had a] glider license, actually, that was signed by Orville Wright,” said Mayer’s grandson Kevin Vogel. “So that will give you an idea of how long ago he was involved in all of this.”

Vogel says America’s “lighter-than-air” aviators have been mostly forgotten by history, as has the original military purposes of airships – to patrol the oceans for enemy ships and serve as skyborne aircraft carriers. This eventually proved impractical, dangerous and often deadly.

“Basically, he was a keel officer of the Shenandoah and he was responsible for the engineering aspects of the ship,” Vogel said. “Anything that happened to that ship, if there was a motor that went out or something like that, he was responsible for getting the guys together to get it working again. That’s what he did.”

Lee Corbin says that Mayer graduated from the University of Washington in 1917 with an engineering degree. This led directly to a job for Mayer and two classmates. Their employer was the airplane company that had been launched just one year earlier by Bill Boeing.

The job with Boeing didn’t last for Mayer, but it turns out he was in pretty good company with the other two classmates who did stick around.

“What’s interesting is the three names” of the UW graduates who went to work for Boeing in 1917, Corbin said. “Mayer was one of them, Claire Egtvedt was the other, and [the other one was] named Phillip G. Johnson.”

Incredibly, Egtvedt and Johnson would each go on to high-level leadership positions at Boeing.

“So there’s no telling what Mayer would’ve done” if he’d stayed with what became an aerospace giant, Corbin said.

But Mayer had other plans. Corbin says Roland Mayer worked at Boeing only for a few weeks before heading east to work as an engineer for the Navy in Philadelphia and to help design and build the Shenandoah.

Ultimately, airships did not prove to be a safe and reliable form of travel. It was less than a year after the Shenandoah visited Camp Lewis when the ship met its untimely end in a thunderstorm over the Buckeye State.

For the six crew members in the front section – the section where Roland Mayer also found himself – it was a little more complicated.

“I personally believe very strongly that [Roland Mayer] played a vital role in the survival of that front section,” author Ian Ross said.

When the ship broke apart, the front section floated free and gained altitude, and the men aboard had to pilot it as if it were, essentially, a rudderless balloon.

Rigid airships were ultimately made obsolete by advances in fixed-wing, heavier-than-air aviation, and the loss of the Shenandoah – along with several other high-profile deadly disasters – didn’t do much to promote their viability.

Along with the Hindenburg crash in May 1937, two additional Navy airships were destroyed in storm-related crashes in the 1930s. The Akron crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 1933 killing 73, and then the Macon crashed off the coast of California in 1935 killing two. Still, during World War II, the U.S. Navy used dozens of smaller, non-rigid inflatable blimps for patrol and reconnaissance.

Though his airship days were over by the late 1930s, Roland Mayer spent several more years in aviation, eventually running Convair’s plant in Fort Worth, Texas where B-24 Liberator bombers were manufactured during World War II.

After the war, Mayer retired, and he and his wife bought a ranch north of Fort Worth. Grandson Kevin Vogel says that Mayer didn’t dwell on his airship exploits.

“It’s not like he had mementos all around the house of his Navy days, not at all,” Vogel said. “It was like he had moved on.”

Though he was an early Boeing employee, aviation pioneer, Navy veteran, hero of the American airship era, and builder of World War II bombers, Roland G. Mayer left all that behind for pursuits much closer to the ground.

“He would’ve been perfectly happy if he had died on his tractor, out in the field tilling the soil,” Vogel said.

On March 22, 1811, the American barque (or small ship) “Tonquin” – 96 feet long, built in New York in 1807 – sailed into view of the mouth of the great River of the West, also known as the mighty Columbia.

This was about five years after American explorers Lewis & Clark had wintered near the Columbia on the Pacific Coast in what’s now Oregon and Washington. One of the concepts the duo’s Corps of Discovery brought to the attention of American entrepreneurs was the notion of profiting from trading furs, collected on the Northwest Coast, with merchants in China.

John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company

Thus, on board the Tonquin was a group of aspiring fur traders known as the Pacific Fur Company, a business venture financed by American entrepreneur John Jacob Astor. The objective was to establish a post (which they called “Astoria”) and begin trading with Indigenous people to collect furs to export to the Far East. British ventures known as the Hudson’s Bay Company and Northwest Company were already doing the same, mixing commerce with Great Britain’s political interest in claiming the Northwest Coast for the crown.

The man hired by Astor to take charge of the ship was a strict disciplinarian. His name was Captain Jonathan Thorn, and his character had become clear not long after the Tonquin left New York the previous September and sailed around Cape Horn, and then to the Northwest Coast by way of Hawaii.

Thorn was a former U.S. Navy officer, but the clerks and partners of the Pacific Fur Company aboard the ship weren’t willing to being ordered around as if they were midshipmen or even officers. There may have been anger-management issues, too; Captain Thorn clearly had a short temper.

Graveyard of the Pacific

The arrival of the Tonquin at the mouth of the river meant crossing the treacherous Columbia Bar, an area which later came to be known as the “Graveyard of the Pacific.” The Tonquin’s attempted crossing proved deadly to a number of crew members, mostly due to Captain Thorn’s impatience and poor judgement. Unfortunately, the violence and death that resulted from Thorn’s leadership during the ship’s arrival proved to be something of a foreshadowing of what was to come just a few months later.

When Captain Thorn’s career came to an abrupt and deadly end on the coast of what’s now British Columbia in June 1811, an estimated 100 others died along with him. Though many have searched, the exact place of the disaster has never been identified, and the Tonquin has never been found.

The fur traders left behind at Astoria didn’t make out so well, either. When the War of 1812 broke out between the United States and the British, Astor’s managers ultimately sold Astoria to the Northwest Company rather than face potential attack by the Royal Navy. Still, when Royal Navy Captain William Black arrived at Astoria sometime after the sale, he insisted on formally occupying the stockade and acting out a performative “capture” of it for King George – even though a British company had already bought it from the Americans.

Bizarre Twist Helps Secure the Old Oregon Country for the United States

Later, in a bizarre twist because of provisions laid out in the 1814 Treaty of Ghent, Captain Black’s actions came back to bite Great Britain. The treaty formally ended hostilities between the U.S. and Great Britain, and required the British to return all captured territory. When Captain Black acted out the fake surrender and seizure of Astoria, the land comprising the Old Oregon Country – most of what’s now Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia – had not formally claimed by any country, so the faux capture and forced return helped bolster American claims. In the decades of complicated diplomatic wrangling that followed, Captain Black’s bogus taking of Astoria ultimately only strengthened American claims. In 1846 when the land was formally divided and the international boundary drawn some 250 miles north of the Columbia River, the American share of the Old Oregon Country was far greater than Great Britain had ever imagined.

“I had my two-year-old son and my wife, and we hopped in the car and went up Highway 99,” said Ron Palmer, a retired man who lives near Seattle. “ I was on swing shift at Boeing, and I just had to see it.”

What Ron Palmer had to see was the aftermath of the crash of a brand-new Boeing 707 jetliner. The aircraft, which was being used to train airline pilots, had gone down north of Seattle late one autumn afternoon in 1959.

Ron went to see the crash site, and he brought his camera along.

Visiting The Crash Site The Next Day

“I was fortunate to walk right up to the river’s edge,” Palmer said. “It was on a kind of a berm or a dike or something. I stood there and took some pictures with my little camera. I don’t think I was there more than 10 minutes.” 

More than 65 years later, Ron Palmer’s photos of the crash are a stark reminder of what remains an unusual disaster and outlier in aviation history: the only time a Boeing jetliner has crashed in the aerospace manufacturer’s home state of Washington.

A Routine Training Flight

The Boeing 707 jetliner took off that day from Boeing Field in Seattle for what was supposed to be a routine training flight. On board were four employees of Braniff Airlines, a representative from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and three men who worked for Boeing, the manufacturer of the jetliner.   

It wasn’t too much later, somewhere in the skies high above rural Snohomish County, when something went terribly wrong. A Braniff pilot named Jack Berke, who was learning how to operate the new jet, lost control during what should have been an uneventful procedure: recovering from a “Dutch Roll.”

Within moments of Berke’s misstep, three of the 707’s four engines were torn from its wings, and the jetliner caught fire. In the cockpit, a Boeing pilot named Russ Baum struggled to regain control and to aim the jet toward Paine Field in nearby Everett, Wash. for an emergency landing. 

But the jetliner was losing altitude too fast. Within a few minutes, the 707 crash-landed along the bank of the Stillaguamish River a few miles west of the small town of Oso, Wash. The forward section of the aircraft was crushed on impact and burst into flames.  Four men, including the Boeing and Braniff pilots, died in the cockpit; four other men on board who had moved to the rear and braced for impact miraculously survived.

Unfortunately, the crash of the Braniff Airlines 707 didn’t have to happen. Investigators later determined that a Boeing pilot – whose job was to teach the Braniff pilots about the plane – broke the rules about how to administer the Dutch Roll exercise, and also didn’t properly instruct the Braniff pilots on the steps required to properly recover from the maneuver. These two factors led directly to the loss of the plane.

“Oh boy. Here we go.”

Albert “Pete” Krause was a flight engineer for Braniff. He on board the 707 that day, in the cockpit, observing from a jumpseat at the back, when everything went wrong.

“Jack Berke was a good guy, but he just, I don’t know,” Krause said. “I saw that left knee go down [on the control pedal], and I thought, ‘Oh boy. Here we go.’”

Pete Krause and three others survived the crash; Jack Berke, Russ Baum and two others did not.

“[The crash] broke my back, and I still have a lot of back problems,” Krause said, “but I was able to finish my career flying, and the good Lord has smiled on me. I’m a happy camper.”

Deadly Crash a “Sad and Extraordinary Footnote”

The Boeing 707 is one of the most consequential aircraft ever designed and built by the aerospace giant, but its success wasn’t necessarily a given when the first prototype was revealed in a public “rollout” ceremony in 1954. From the time it went into service in 1959, other 707s crashed around the United States and in other parts of the world, often killing many passengers and crew members on board.

Still, though only four men died, the October 1959 crash – in Boeing’s backyard – remains a sad and extraordinary footnote in aerospace history and Pacific Northwest history.

November 29, 1847 was one of the darkest days in Pacific Northwest history. Presbyterian missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and 11 others who lived with them at their mission near what’s now Walla Walla died in an attack by members of the Cayuse tribe.

The Cayuse War

In the aftermath, American settlers and the U.S. Army launched a series of attacks that came to be known as the Cayuse War. Soon after that, Congress acted to designate Oregon Territory, comprising most of what’s now Oregon, Idaho and Washington, an official part of the United States, following a long delay.

In 1850, five Cayuse men were taken into custody for the Whitman murders and charged in the death of Marcus Whitman. After a brief trial, the men were convicted and then hanged at the old territorial capital of Oregon City, some 250 miles from the Cayuse homeland. What happened to the bodies of the “Cayuse Five” after the execution is not clear.

National Park Service Director has ‘Personal Connection’

“I have a strong personal connection,” said Charles Sams, former communications director for the Confederate Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and now director of the National Park Service. “My sixth-generation great-grandmother, who was married to a non-Indian, was the godmother to the Cayuse Five.”

“I think she had every intent as a Cayuse tribal member hoping to see that they would at least be sent home after they had been hung,” Sams continued. “And probably was very disappointed that they weren’t, because she knew the cultural significance of being placed back among the bones of your ancestors.”

The story of the Whitman Mission and the Cayuse is violent and complicated, even before the deaths there in November 1847. More than 170 years later, there are no clear-cut heroes or villains.

Forging Alliances in Search of the Cayuse Five

However, in recent years, Cayuse tribal members and officials with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (of which the Cayuse are a part), have been searching for healing and closure – and for justice – by working to locate the remains of the Cayuse Five and bring them home to Eastern Oregon. In this work, they have formed partnerships with academic researchers at the University of Oregon, and with elected officials in Oregon City.

Dedicating a Monument ‘Better Late Than Never’

One result of this new effort is that a monument was recently dedicated in Oregon City to commemorate the anniversary of the hanging, and to put down a permanent marker – when none had ever stood before – in tribute to the five Cayuse men who died there.

“It’s better late than never,” said Oregon City Mayor Denyse McGriff. “Oregon City has stepped up. We are sorry. We’re very deeply sorry,” Mayor McGriff continued. “And so this is really meaningful that we can come together as people to say something really bad happened.”

Teara Farrow Ferman is cultural resources manager for the tribe and a tribal member, and she took part in the recent dedication of the monument in Oregon City. She said the search is not so much about justice as it is about healing, and about making sure that the Cayuse Five know that they are still remembered.

“Just our presence in the area singing their songs, saying their names, us remembering them,” Farrow Ferman said, “they will hear that [and] they will know that we are going to continue looking for them.”

As the search for the graves of the Cayuse Five goes on – through archival records, old diaries, vintage maps as well as occasional field visits to investigate possible sites in Oregon City – Teara Farrow Ferman believes the search alone is a powerful thing, regardless of what the ultimate result might be.

“That’s healing for us,” Farrow Ferman said. “And I think it’s healing for them as well, to know that we haven’t forgotten them.”