I mean…you know by now that I’m obsessive, right? I get going on a topic, it occupies most of my energies for 4 or 6 months, then I’m on to something else. I am going to find that damn Helldiver crash site on Sugar Camp Hill if it’s the last thing I do. Which thing it might well be. Here’s the Laurel Highlands Trail as it passes between the tall rocks between miles 57 and 56–or maybe 56 and 55.
And here is the Navy radioman, George Cohlmia, whose body was found 50 feet from the smoldering Helldiver fighter jet. He was one of 10 children of Lebanese immigrants to Oklahoma (of all the world’s many places…) In George’s obituary, his father is called “Rev. Cohlmia.” Must have been Baptists fleeing religious oppression in the homeland: out of the frying pan into the fire, quite literally. He was a high school athlete who voluntarily enlisted as soon as he turned 18 and then died at 19.
It weirds me out because my oldest child is 18, and in my mind still a sweet toddler asking me to read to her.
Sadly, there’s almost nothing online about the 23-year old Frank Z. Campbell who was flying the plane. It seems that he had no siblings, so there was no one left to remember him after his poor long-widowed mother died in 1983.
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