Faith Works 9-2-22

Faith Works 9-2-22
Jeff Gill

Eighty years and a journey through time
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On September 8, 1942 the pain and tragedy of a World War came to the skies and streets of Newark, Ohio. A B-25 on a training mission preparing for overseas combat flew out of Wright Field near Dayton, now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and in heavy clouds with presumably faulty navigation systems came down to tree top level in the heart of Licking County.

The rest of the tale, the eight deaths, two local citizens killed on the ground and six crew members, is fairly well known in the area. When I first came here in 1989, it was one of the first pieces of local lore I learned, and over the years Kevin Bennett and Doug Stout have told the story very thoroughly to local audiences. Their research and diligence to honor the dead I cannot improve upon.

Where I found myself caught up in the narrative, though, aside from almost daily driving through the intersection where that crash occurred on Hudson Avenue, was the name of the third crew member. The pilot and co-pilot each had just enough time to exit the plane but not enough for their parachutes to deploy; the navigator went down with the B-25C Mitchell, dying on impact along with two service members hitching a ride to New York and the two women of Newark caught up in the destruction on the ground.

That Army Air Force navigator was Second Lieutenant Russell E. Newlin, of Indianapolis, Indiana. He was described as 30 years old in some early accounts, but in fact died at the age of 22, a very new and junior volunteer in the still fairly new service.

And he was a Newlin. This immediately caught my eye, because my mother's mother was a Newlin, and frankly it hadn't seemed to be a common name to me. Grandmother Walton's Newlin family was from east central Illinois, not far at all from central Indiana, and I thought all the way back in 1989 "we might just be related."

1989 was 47 years after the crash, and now 33 years ago from today, as we prepare to mark the 80th commemoration of the tragedy. 33 years ago, we didn't have the internet or Findagrave or many of the tools which both speed up research today, but also throw a great deal of dust into the gears of imperfect or disproven or outright incorrect information. You can, with computers, go wrong more quickly and with greater confidence. I don't want to go back to microfilm reels and dusty volumes in warehouses; I love the quick availability of scanned in images of books once hard to reach even when you went to the storage location, and how archives continue to be placed online available to all. Yet I'm aware of Sturgeon's Law as it applies to genealogical research as well as science fiction or television or any other field of human endeavor.

So over the years I've followed some dead ends in tracing the history of Russell Newlin, newly commissioned airman and youthful casualty of the earliest days for America of World War II. His context, and that of the servicemen and civilians who died with him, was one of a vast and hurried mobilization. Pearl Harbor was just nine months earlier; in the Pacific the Battle of Midway had happened only three months previously, while the European Theatre would not open for the United States until Operation Torch in North Africa two months later. Local citizens had been at Pearl Harbor and were being steadily drawn into the global conflict, but awareness and understanding of the scope and breadth of that world war was still limited to vague maps on the front pages of the Advocate and newsreels shown at the Midland and Auditorium Theaters just blocks away from the crash site.

I still know much less about Russell Newlin than I wish, but I can confirm we are related — just much further back than I thought we might have been. But his death, decades before I learned of it, has led me to learn more about the history of Quakers and Newlins in America, from central England to a grist mill in southeastern Pennsylvania, to a settlement in North Carolina where Newlins still populate both cemeteries and the landscape, and then the point where our lineages separate, even as multiple Newlins left slave owning country for free soil in Indiana and Illinois. Russell and I are cousins, many times removed.

The connection, though, remains.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's related to lots of Gills but none from around here, sorry! Tell him about any Waltons or Newlins you may have heard of at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.