'Time doesn't heal all'

Publication Date: July 17, 1997
© Gannett Suburban Newspapers

By Bill Dentzer
Staff Writer

A year ago yesterday, Janet O'Hara was watching her twin boys and a neighbor's son play baseball, excitedly chatting away about the trip that she, her husband and daughter were about to take to France.

It was her husband Jack's last assignment for ABC Sports - overseeing the network's coverage of the Tour de France. Daughter Caitlin was going as a present for winning the French award in her graduating eighth-grade class. The twins, Matt and Brian, had passed on the trip in favor of basketball camp - a decision just about any 12-year-old boy would understand.

Janet relayed the details to her neighbor, George Berger, that summer evening, even what airline they were taking. So it was with instantaneous horror the following night that Berger bolted upright when a news flash began to creep across the Yankee game that he and his wife Jane were watching on TV. A TWA 747 had just crashed off Long Island.

"I knew there was a good possibility that that was their flight," Berger recalls now.

As the Bergers quickly confirmed, the O'Haras of Irvington were on board when TWA Flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island a year ago today. This week, in a whirlwind of ceremonies honoring the 230 who died, they will be remembered along with Nicholas Bluestone of Pound Ridge, Marie Ellison of Mount Vernon, Patricia and Kimberly Kwiat of Briarcliff Manor, Marion Ott Percy of Tuckahoe, and Ruben Windmiller of New Rochelle. So too will Manhattan resident Lois Van Epps, a teacher in Greenburgh, and Edwin and Ruth Brooks of Martha's Vineyard, parents of Rye resident Stephanie Elliman.

In the year since the crash, relatives of victims have coalesced and organized. Bonds were forged among the many who lingered more than a month at a hotel near John F. Kennedy International Airport, riding an emotional rollercoaster fueled by crash theories and the wait for bodies to be recovered from the ocean floor. Several emerged as spokesmen for the group.

In contrast, the families of Westchester's victims from the outset kept their quiet grief closer to home, asking reporters to leave them alone and largely skipping the events organized to help survivors understand the tragedy and deal with the pain. Still, as they look to comprehend why horrible tragedies happen to good people, they have found outlets for their grief by honoring and preserving the memories of those they lost.

Community comes together

Irvington, the O'Haras hometown, is among Westchester's smallest communities, and it shows. All along Main Street, which slopes steeply down to the Hudson River from Broadway, people shout greetings to one another in scenes that beckon to another era.

So it was that Irvington would take the O'Hara tragedy hard. Some 2,000 people attended their memorial service last July, at least half from the village.

"Something like that affects everyone," said Teresa Sopot, pushing her daughter Allessandra on a swing in Irvington's Matthiessen Park yesterday morning. "You think in a small town that you're insulated from all these things and that none of these things ever come to your house. But they do."

Inevitably, the sum of the loss was greater than its parts. The crash had taken from Irvington a couple who won a $20,000 raffle held for a new school playground, only to turn quietly around and donate half of the prize back for the playground.

In Jack O'Hara, it took away the Little League coach and trustee at Abbott House, a home for abused children in the village, who was mentoring a 13-year-old there and trying to get the home more involved in the village's recreation activities, all the time holding down one of the most demanding jobs in television as executive producer of ABC Sports.

In Janet, it took away the soon-to-be vice president of the PTSA, the driving force behind a village girls softball league, the former president and still active member of the local theater group and Meals on Wheels volunteer who threw herself into every aspect of village life.

And it took away their 14-year-old daughter Caitlin - the flute player, actress, athlete and serious student, a counselor-in-training at Ardsley Country Club and volunteer at the Greenburgh Nature Center, who had learned life's lessons well from her parents.

"Those of us that knew Jack and Janet and Caity very well - never really knew them very well," said Dennis Lewin, who had been Jack's boss at ABC and had encouraged the O'Haras to move to Irvington in 1987. "Once they were gone, all of us that were really close to them still found out things that none of us ever knew. When you put it all together, you realize how incredibly involved they were as a family."

Irvington wanted to honor the spirit of family and community that the O'Haras embodied. But it took time to figure out the right way.

"We don't want to do anything that's somber and sad and morose," George Berger remembers thinking. "We want to do something in their spirit, and that was always upbeat."

Two dozen friends, neighbors and others formed the O'Hara Foundation and, at the village's suggestion, organized a youth basketball tournament that would fund charitable contributions in three categories - for community, for education and for youth. The first tournament, with 16 teams, was held in January. The proceeds went to help build new waterfront recreation fields in Irvington, fund a new college scholarship at Irvington High School, and send four boys from the Harlem Little League to baseball camp in Pennsylvania this summer.

Starting later this year, the tournament will be held annually in November, expanding to six days over two weekends and as many as 48 teams.

Matt and Brian played in the January tournament, and on the final day, Caitlin's classmates read poetry. The boys have been looked after by their aunt and uncle, grandparents, and in a sense, by the entire community.

"I guess the lesson for me is whether you define community as a whole town or village, or a family, that the community works," Berger says. "These guys have been surrounded with love and caring and all of those things, and that's community."

Elsewhere, Westchester victims are remembered in ways public and private, grandiose and personal.

At the Kent School in Connecticut, where Nicholas Bluestone would have graduated last month, his fellow seniors planted a Japanese maple and installed a bench in front of the school's middle dorm in May. As a member of the senior council, he would have served as verger in the school chapel, organizing church services. But his classmates kept the position vacant all year, pulling extra duty instead to handle his responsibilities.

The school where he won awards for poetry, played lacrosse and studied both Latin and Greek held a memorial service for him last September and created a scholarship in his name. Elaine Griffin, the headmaster's assistant, remembers how she would open her window to hear him play guitar outside, withholding any further compliment for fear of embarrassing him.

"There really was a true coming together, a real bonding of people around his loss, and it continues to be that way," said the Rev. Richardson W. Schell, Kent's headmaster. "The sadness is just beginning to lift a year later."

Likewise, Ossining High School this year awarded a new scholarship in memory of Kimberly and Patricia Kwiat. Kim, a 1988 graduate, went on to pursue a career in business, first with studies at Boston College and later at graduate school at Pace University in White Plains. Her sister, a 1993 OHS graduate and president of the National Honor Society, was majoring in international relations at Notre Dame and thinking about law or graduate school.

One scholarship winner, Erika Browne, wrote an essay with her memories of the two girls, her neighbors. The other, John Christopher Chapman, wrote about the plane crash and the significance of being linked both to the tragedy and to the Kwiats.

"Kim and Patty were young, vibrant, and ready for life," Principal Kathleen Zazza said at graduation June 26. "It is in living by their example that we can keep their memories alive."

The school and the National Honor Society will plant two dogwood trees - one pink and one white - in front of the high school this fall.

At Edgemont High School in Greenburgh, hardly a day passes where someone fails to mention Lois Van Epps, who taught English for 24 years. A year ago, the Manhattan resident was heading off on her annual summer vacation.

"There have been some painful moments," said Principal Bill Smith. "But it's an experience all of us have grown from."

The school awarded two seniors, Heather Hirsch and Moises Tantalean, scholarships in her name. Messages students left on a painted boulder at the school last summer remained throughout the year.

In October, Van Epps' friends joined students and teachers to dedicate a memorial flower garden behind the school. A bronze plaque in the garden recalls one of her favorite descriptions: "A certain whimsical charm."

"Lois was part of the life of this school," said Edgemont vice Principal Richard Tortorici, who once traveled with Van Epps to Spain.

The garden blossomed brightly this spring.

"Just like Lois," Tortorici said.

At the Sigmund Cohn Corp. in Mount Vernon, the specialty metals company where Marie Ellison had worked for 37 years, her memory floods back to workers every time they take inventory. She was in charge of it for years.

"Always her handwriting is on something," said Julia Nicholson, a fellow supervisor.

Despite a visceral fear of flying, Ellison, a widow, had planned a three-week vacation in France to visit the convent where her father had sent her when her mother died. She had left France as a teen-ager, coming first to Canada and then to the U.S. to work as a maid.

Her husband Arthur, whom she met at work, had died in 1994, and her family was her co-workers.

"I really miss her an awful lot," said Kevin Geberth, director of company security. "I'm just getting used to her being gone."

The pain remains

The year since the crash has not completely taken away its horror. For some, like the daughters of victim Marion Percy, a 77-year-old retired home economics teacher, the first anniversary brings little by way of emotional relief.

Virginia Percy, who lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, recalls the horror of the day last fall when several articles of her mother's clothing arrived in the mail, including the T-shirt with wildflowers that she bought for her mother on a vacation in the Adirondacks. The shirt bore the marks of the ordeal that victims went through.

She and her sister Pamela will attend Sunday's memorial at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. But they have no desire to visit the hangar in Long Island where investigators continue to examine the wreckage.

"It hurts more than I thought it would after a year," Virginia Percy said.

And there remains a yearning to know what caused the crash. Ruben Windmiller's friends in New Rochelle are coming to accept his death, but they can't fathom why the crash remains a mystery.

Ed Like, a neighbor, misses conversations with his friend out at their coop complex's dock on the Long Island Sound. Windmiller moved to New Rochelle from Brooklyn, where he built a successful plumbing supply business. Even at 66, he was known for taking his 44-foot sailboat out when rough seas kept others dockside.

"He was a very focused, single-minded man, and I respected him for that," Like said. "He would push the envelope to the extreme... I find it very hard to believe the government hasn't found an answer to what happened, with all our technology and all the money they spent."

A family moves on

In Irvington today, the O'Haras' church, Immaculate Conception, will hold a memorial mass for them. This afternoon, Caitlin's friends will plant a tree in her memory at the Ardsley Country Club. Tomorrow, the anniversary will have passed, but not the grief it recalls.

"Time doesn't heal all wounds," said Lewin, who left ABC and now works for the National Football League. "But occasionally the wounds get a little easier to deal with."

And along with healing the wounds of Flight 800's crash comes coping, inevitably, with change. Matt and Brian O'Hara's aunt and uncle lived with them in Irvington this year. But the family is returning to New City in Rockland County, where the boys start high school in September.

"The school crossing guard stopped me one day and asked me if it was really true that they were leaving," said Jane Berger, one of Janet O'Hara's closest friends. "I think overall they'll handle it just like they've handled this. They're moving ahead."