Receding Water Reveals ‘Ghost Plane’ of 1963

On Father’s Day, 1963, Robert Louviere Jr. accepted the offer of a ride in a plane owned by his best friend, Clifford Gillman. It was to be a short spin from Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose to Calaveras Reservoir, about 10 miles away, and back.

Their families promised a special holiday dinner upon their return. Except the two men never came back. All the evidence pointed to a crash into the reservoir, but divers never found the wreckage.

The wives often sat on a hillside overlooking the water and talked of their husbands. The sons took to tossing roses onto the waves on Father’s Day. And in the intervening years, reservoir workers passed the tale on to new employees: Somewhere out there was a ghost plane.

Over the weekend, the drought apparently transformed that myth into reality.

The reservoir waters, receding a foot each day, dropped low enough to expose the rotting hulk of an upside-down plane that had lost its wings--a 1940s-vintage silver Ercoupe just like the one Cliff Gillman had flown there 27 years before. Two skeletons were inside.

And so the mystery appears on the verge of being solved--a situation that is at once satisfying, chilling and sad to everyone involved. Authorities say it is “99% certain” that dental records will prove that the remains are those of Gillman and Louviere.

“We talked about it all these years, my brother and me,” Wanda Louviere, who was 3 when her father disappeared, said Sunday. “We thought we knew what happened, but still we asked each other, ‘Is he really dead or what?’ ”

“It never left my mind,” said Donald Biondich, a Civil Air Patrol pilot who searched for the missing pair.

The Louviere family, Biondich, Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputies and Federal Aviation Administration investigators spent much of the weekend at the reservoir trying to seal the case.

“I just pray that it isn’t another false lead,” said Clifford Gillman’s wife, Fern, now 74 and living in Texas. “I pray that it is them so we can put them to rest.”

Robert Louviere Jr. was 24 at the time of the Father’s Day flight on June 16, 1963. Clifford Gillman was 48. The two were best friends, having met through Louviere’s fishing buddy--Gillman’s son, Jack. Louviere was set to start work at Gillman’s speedometer and car radio repair shop the next day.

Louviere Jr. was living in Santa Clara with his wife of six years, Betty, and their daughter and son, Robert, now 31. A third child--Clifford, now 27--was on the way.

Louviere Jr. wanted to take his son Robert along for the ride. His wife wouldn’t let him.

The plane took off about 5:30 p.m., Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ken Kahn said.

Later, a guard at the reservoir would explain that he had heard the plane, had seen it in fact, and then noticed a sudden quiet after turning his head. When he turned back, the aircraft was nowhere in sight.

The Louviere children would cling tight to that tidbit in trying to figure out what happened. Biondich was dispatched to the scene to investigate, but he couldn’t see a thing in the water, which was then about 150 feet deep.

Checking again, an observer with him spotted an oil slick riding the surface. “It wasn’t big,” said Biondich, now 56. “And oil slicks can drift. But I felt fairly certain that the airplane was there.”

Fern Gillman got a ride to the scene in another friend’s plane. By moonlight, she too saw the oil slick.

“A feeling went through me,” she said.

Betty Louviere and Fern Gillman got permission from the San Francisco water department to take walks inside the reservoir fence. In March, 1964, they held a quiet memorial service in a boat, launching a heart-shaped inner tube adorned with carnations. As it floated off, the two women were still straining for a sign of the plane.

The two families eventually lost touch.

Fern Gillman worked as a machinist. She left Santa Clara in 1980 to follow her son to Oklahoma and then to Mission, Tex., 100 miles from Austin. “I didn’t want to die out in California by myself,” she said. She never remarried.

Neither did Betty Louviere, six months younger than her husband.

“They promised each other they never would if something happened, so she didn’t,” said Wanda, the daughter. “This was her one and only love.”

The Louviere sons went back sometimes to toss their flowers.

And Don Biondich would train search-and-rescue pilots over the reservoir’s rolling, wooded terrain, telling them about the case he never closed.

Two weeks ago, Biondich rode a motorcycle to the mountains nearby. “I kind of sat on one side of the mountain, watching the water go down, thinking maybe something’s going to come out of this,” he said.

Friday night, watching television in his Castro Valley home, he realized it had.

A San Francisco news program showed footage of a wreck that a waterworks ranger had found as he patrolled the muddy marsh that had been until recently the reservoir floor.

Biondich recognized the distinctive double tail of an Ercoupe. He called the Sheriff’s Department and he called the TV station. Betty Louviere saw a similar broadcast on a San Jose channel.

Saturday, they all converged on the site. Betty Louviere stayed just a few minutes, unable to bear the emotion and commotion. “The hard part was when they took out the remains,” said Wanda Louviere.

The family made telephone requests Sunday for Louviere Jr.’s Navy dental records.

They heard from the coroner that a pair of Navy shoes had been found in the wreckage--just like the ones Louviere used to wear.

And they made another pilgrimage to the reservoir.

They walked far into the muck, but they still needed binoculars to see the old plane.

For half an hour, they stood there.

It wasn’t what she had expected, Betty Louviere kept telling her children, though she didn’t say what she’d had in mind.

She didn’t cry. She just kept reaching for the field glasses to take another look.

Times staff writer Leslie Berger contributed to this report.