Faith Works 6-9-22

Faith Works 6-9-22
Jeff Gill

A journey through dates and stones and memory
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September 8 this past week, the eightieth anniversary of the tragic B-25 crash in downtown Newark, is both a reminder of a tragedy, and a connection to the past.

Those eight deaths, six Army Air Corps crew members and two local civilians caught on the ground, were truly how World War II came directly to the streets of Licking County. We had locals already in the military who were caught up in Pearl Harbor and Midway, but for the most part since Dec. 7, 1941 the war mobilization had been people leaving here and going "over there." It would be a few months yet before Americans would invade North Africa, let alone Europe, and Licking County residents would be there . . . but not yet.

The war came home, as green air crews and untested equipment went up, and one came down right here. The same model of bomber would crash in similarly heavy cloud cover into the Empire State Building a couple years later, but by then even the home front had become accustomed to training accidents and friendly fire once we were well into 1945.

In 1942 it was still hard to grasp, and the pain was still largely in the future, until that cloudy Sept. 8th. People died, right here, some with parachutes not quite opening, others killed by an airplane even while walking down a sidewalk.

And as I've already written, decades later, the shock of recognition for a new resident in reading the name "Newlin" on the crew list.

Russell Newlin and I share an ancestor so far back we barely get to call ourselves relatives, but I've been touched enough by the coincidence to visit his grave in Indianapolis. His father and grandfather died after his passing, and mother was still alive somewhere in the city when I first moved there. You can tell by the dates and the stones that they bought a plot of four graves to bury their son, and then used them as needed in the decades that followed.

In going to Crown Hill Cemetery, a familiar place in fact across the street from the seminary I attended, and visiting Section 96, I started to notice something when I went in search of Russell Newlin. Dotted about among this "newer" section of a cemetery with a long history, where President Benjamin Harrison, James Whitcomb Riley, and many other historic Indiana figures are buried, there were others. Other young deaths of 1942. The stones were a bit older than most, lichens and mosses helping them stand out when you realized what you were looking for.

And they tended to be the first of a family, with the painful reality of parents passing on years later, with fresher stones. Every few paces, an older 1942 or 1943 or 1944 headstone, then a cluster usually to the west, of related names who were clearly mothers and fathers of the first stone even when they didn't say so (and they often did). Sometimes four, occasionally eight or even twelve, and if you're of such a mind, you could puzzle out who the other relatives were or might have been, and a few mysteries left unsolved.

The tragedy remained. Not just of Russell Newlin's loss here in a plane crash trying to get to a further destination, falling short in Newark, Ohio, but of a scattering of twenty-something year old men, buried without spouses or children, now guarded by parents who had outlived them and a few more sentry grandparents and cousins and such.

It's a quiet corner now of the vast cemetery; most of the lots sold, few unused and those left probably doomed to be unoccupied as the family moved on, or forgot, or never knew. Visitors and flowers are rare, though you can see a few sections away where current committals are ongoing.

Here is just the memory of sorrow, of families coming to deal with both the emotional and practical side of losing an adult child in what, by the dates, had to often be in training and preparation and the run-up to the war itself, but they no less the casualties of that war.

Of course, I also think standing there of the ministers, the officiants, of how they would have tried to comfort those parents and siblings, in a season just before the time when almost everyone knew what this would feel like, forerunners of the grief and determination yet to come.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's done quite a few funerals himself. Tell him how you find comfort in sorrow at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.