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The Story of how it came to be
In the
fall of 2004, I received an e-mail from a former Walkersville Resident. He
had found my flyARIA.com Advanced Range Instrumentation History site
through a Web Search. He commented about the web site and how he liked it.
I replied to his e-mail and thanked him for his comments.
The next
day I received another e-mail from him. He told me that he had recovered
some personally identifiable items from the crash site in the years
following the crash. He explained that he had tried to return the items to
the families but he could not find out any information that would permit
him to do so. He offered to send me the items to ultimately return to the
families.
I was
taken back by this e-mail, I didn't believe him until the package arrived
on a Saturday. I could not bring myself to open it immediately, it sat on
the dining room table for most of the day. As promised, the items were in
the box neatly packed with care.
The
former Walkersville Resident was David Denn. David was 12 when ARIA 328
went down over Walkersville. David had kept the items for all of these
years looking for a course to return them.
Within
days of David Denn's initial contact, I received an e-mail from a family
member of one of 328's crew. This was a first communication for me with
this family and when I received the package from David Denn, I learned
that this individual would be my first contact with the news of the
recovered item for their family. I later learned from David that it was by
this crewmember's name in a Web Search that he found the flyARIA.com web
site.
All of
the families involved with the recovery were contacted and items were
returned. I had the pleasure of talking with extremely appreciative
families. I told them about David Denn and the story of how it came to be.
David
had also included another recovered item in the package that he had sent
for the ARIA 328 family members intended for me. He didn’t tell me that he
was sending anything else.
What
David didn’t know was that on the morning of the 6th of May I
was tasked to deliver a CRU-60 oxygen regulator to an awaiting ARIA 328. I
arrived at the flight line, ARIA 328 engines running, climbed into the
aircraft and delivered the CRU-60.
In the
package David had included a CRU-60 that he recovered the following year
after the crash.
Bob
Beach, a former ARIA MC, had thrown out an idea to a number of ARIA Alumni
about placing some type of a Marker in Walkersville for ARIA 328. At this
time he was not aware of the events of the recovery.
With the
events that had transpired, it was clear to me that we were being driven
to construct a Memorial.
Randy Losey |
National Museum