Tragedy Cries Out for Explanation

They were no one and everyone. Each carrying aboard the future possibilities and dangling ends of ordinary lives. Gone in a flash, they left behind empty spaces.

There were a 12-year-old French boy going home from a visit with a pen pal in New Jersey after one last dish of pistachio ice cream, a Kansas City landscaper and his wife on a pilgrimage to the formal gardens of Paris, a Houston woman who crusaded for victims’ rights after surviving an attempted kidnapping and rape, who was taking her two young daughters abroad.

There were a brilliant young interior designer who once had lived with Andy Warhol and taken fashionable New York by storm; the wife of a well-known jazz saxophonist from Los Angeles; a veterinarian’s assistant who worked extra hours for the vacation of a lifetime; a feminist academic who, having won tenure, decided that she could go into debt to show her young daughter the wider world; a television sports producer who might have been in Atlanta, if his network had not lost coverage of the Olympic Games to a rival.

And, carrying the heart and pride of a small town in Pennsylvania, there were 16 members of the Montoursville High School French club, who had sold hoagies, washed cars and saved their earnings for a year to pay for the trip of a lifetime.

“An amazing collection of talent--academically and athletically and socially--the kind of kids when you asked for a volunteer, their hands go up,” Principal Dan Chandler said. “The kind of kids you’d be proud to take home.”

“It’s a little community. When someone dies, it affects everybody,” said 15-year-old Lisa Williams, a cheerleader like two of those who perished. “We’re a lot of good people here, and I didn’t think that we deserved it--no one does.”

Lisa Williams had touched on the unanswerable question.

Beyond the sheer horror, part of the haunting quality of a catastrophe such as the destruction of TWA Flight 800 is the way that an otherwise unimaginable combination of people, coming from different places and intent upon different missions, is suddenly fused in a common end. The abruptness of the tragedy is so staggering that it seems to cry out for explanation, for a point or meaning beyond blind chance.

Thornton Wilder pondered that issue in his 1927 novel, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” He described the effort of a Jesuit priest to find pattern and meaning in the lives of the five disparate travelers who plunged to their deaths because they happened to be crossing an ancient bridge at the one moment in its 100 years of service that it failed.

“If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in human life, surely it could be discovered latent in those lives so suddenly cut off,” Wilder wrote. “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. . . .

“Some say that we shall never know, that to the gods our lives are like the flies that boys kill on a summer day, and, some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

*

Twelve-year old Ludovic Chanson had ended a storybook visit to the United States with one last dish of his favorite ice cream, pistachio decorated with colored sprinkles. At the airport, he hugged his buddy, 14-year-old pen pal Luke Sargent, until a flight attendant came to lead him down the jetway at Gate 27 to his seat on the airliner that would take him home to France and another holiday at Euro Disney.

Ludovic and Luke; Luke and Ludovic. The two boys had been inseparable, one from a small town outside of Paris, the other from the leafy New Jersey suburb of Mendham. They talked about baseball. They talked about basketball, especially about Michael Jordan. When he left, Ludovic’s suitcase bulged with so many Chicago Bulls and New York Knicks souvenirs that he had to sit on the top to close it.

“He was a real good friend. He was like a brother to me,” Luke said, his neatly cropped bangs and freckled face sparkling incongruously in the sunlight as he tried to contemplate what had happened. Lapsing at times into the present tense, as though his friend was at his side, he said: “We’re really, really close.”

Then he said: “He loved joking around. He loved basketball and sports. He was just a great kid, I mean. He had great pride for his country, and he always talked about how good France was. We always write back and forth.”

He was at home, changing out of a wet swimsuit about 10 p.m. Wednesday night when a television bulletin told him of the crash. “It was 10 o’clock when I saw it. I cried and I cried. I cried for about an hour. I thought there’d be survivors, and I thought he’d be one of them. But not anymore.”

*

Don Gaetke and his wife, Stephanie, of Kansas City, Mo., were planning to travel throughout France but, as professional landscapers, they were looking forward to examining the formal gardens that gardeners count among the historic treasures of France.

Lynn Peters, a family friend of 28 years, said that they were traveling with Stephanie’s cousins, Brenna and Chrisha Siebert, on a long-planned vacation. Brenna, 25, who Peters said “had settled down” after moving around a lot and had just bought a house a few weeks ago, worked as an assistant at an animal hospital in Jefferson City.

“She was sunny and uplifting,” her boss, Lynn Shively, said. “She’d worked a lot of extra hours to pay for the trip.”

Brenna’s sister, Chrisha, 28, had earned a master’s degree in set design at Ohio State University and worked at Rockhurst College in Kansas City. The two sisters, while booked for the full tour, “might have gone and done their own thing if they had wanted to,” Peters said. “They were wonderful kids.”

*

Pam Lychner of Houston was a former TWA flight attendant traveling with her daughters, 8-year-old Katie and 10-year-old Shannon, on complimentary tickets from her former employer. She had become a locally prominent advocate for the rights of crime victims, founding an organization called Justice for All after surviving an attempted kidnapping and rape.

The group helped win the right of crime victims to address the court after sentencing. Most recently, she had been working for tougher parole laws in Texas.

But according to a friend, Kim Reid, what she wanted most “was to be the ultimate mother and housewife. That always came first.”

Perhaps the closest thing to a celebrity aboard Flight 800 was Jed Johnson, a wildly admired interior designer and disciple of Andy Warhol. Johnson, born in Alexandria, Minn., graduated from high school in Sacramento. After a brief time in college, he fled to New York with his twin brother, Jay, and the two got jobs as Western Union messengers.

One day in 1968, Jed delivered a message to Warhol’s Manhattan office, called The Factory. Tall, handsome and lithe with sandy-colored hair, Jed was hired immediately by Paul Morrissey to sweep the shiny hardwood floors. “We pay the same as Western Union,” Morrissey reportedly told Jed, “but at least you get to stay in one place all day.”

Johnson became part of Warhol’s inner circle, traveling with the artist, decorating his houses and working on his movies, including “L’Amour” and “Frankenstein.” He was so soft-spoken, according to writer Fran Liebowitz, that he had to hire someone else to shout “action” for him when he was working on Warhol’s films.

In time, Johnson’s decorating skill attracted such attention that he was commissioned to do, Yves St. Laurent’s apartment in the Hotel Pierre and the homes of entertainers Mick Jagger, Barbra Streisand and others.

“He had a fantastic eye, perfect pitch of the eye,” said Liebowitz, who was at Johnson’s apartment with his brother, Jay, and other friends. “You could show Jed 100 chairs and he could put them in descending order of how good they were. He was amazing.”

*

Thomas Weatherby of Stevenson, Ala., had no brush with fame. Thirteen years old, he liked hunting, fishing, swimming and camping. And he belonged to the Boy Scouts. He was traveling to Europe with his mother, Brenda Privette, and friends, though he lived most of the time with his father and stepmother.

Dollie Robinson, his step-grandmother, remembered a recent visit to her home in Red Bay, Ala. “He was a sweet little boy. He came to my house just a few weeks ago, and we played softball and went camping and fishing.

“He was slim, and kind of tall and he had dark brown hair and had little girlfriends,” she said.

“I’m looking at a picture of him now. He has a beautiful smile and his hands are in his pockets and he’s standing in front of a Christmas tree. That was this past Christmas. I got him a sweatshirt and some underwear and socks--you know, it was a beautiful Auburn sweatshirt.”

*

Constance Coiner’s older sisters used to tease that, in high school, she was majoring in cheerleading and gentleman callers. “We older sisters always chided her about not being academically serious enough. ‘You should work on your grades,’ we told her,” said her sister, Virginia Coiner Classick, a social worker from Woodland Hills, Calif. “Well, Constance had the last laugh.”

After receiving her master’s and doctoral degrees at UCLA in history and English in the 1980s, she was honored as the outstanding graduate student of the year in 1987. She immediately landed a teaching position in the English Department at the State University of New York in Binghamton, N.Y.

Coiner’s specialty became women writers. She taught a popular class called “Multicultural Women Writers of the U.S” and, in 1994, she published a book with Oxford Press called “Better Red,” about the writings of Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le Sueur and other working-class women writers in the Communist era. At the time of her death, she was working on a second book about poet Carolyn Forche.

“Constance had always lived on a shoestring budget and didn’t have the money to show her daughter, Anna, the world the way she wanted to,” Classick said, noting that her sister had worked as an au pair in Paris to learn French.

But last August she got tenure and, when an old high school friend invited mother and daughter to share a place in Paris for a time, she decided to scrape the money together.

“It seems ironic now,” said Classick, choking on the thought, “but her one challenge was to pay the plane fare.”

*

Then there was Eileen Rence from Appleton, Wis.

“Last night at about 5 o’clock, my dad, he dropped my mom off at the airport in Chicago, but her plane didn’t take off because there were horrible thunderstorms. On the way home my dad heard about the plane crash over the radio in his car--that was the flight my mom was supposed to be on,” her 17-year-old daughter Erica said Thursday night.

“We didn’t know if my mom got on it. . . . We were frantically calling all the airline people for hours.”

Eileen Rence missed Flight 800. With the line tied up, she could not get through to her family and had to call a friend, who delivered the message that she was still alive.

*

There was no such heart-stopping good news for Montoursville, Pa.

The 16 members of the French Club, their teacher, the teacher’s husband and three other chaperones made the trip to Kennedy International with time to spare.

One had talked of little else for months, her boyfriend remembered. Another was so afraid of flying that, despite all the work to raise the money, she had almost decided she didn’t want to go. She reportedly arranged to have a friend sit beside her “because I’m too scared.”

“I had one of my friends call me around 11 o’clock last night, saying there was a plane crash in New York,” Montoursville Mayor John Dorin said. “He said our French club was going overseas and this was an overseas flight. I started putting 2 and 2 together and made several calls. That’s how we found out our group was on that flight.”

Almost immediately, the entire town knew.

“You can’t even comprehend when you have that many people involved,” Dorin said. “If it were a city like New York City, maybe 20 people wouldn’t mean that much but when you’ve got a community of 5,000, that means a lot to a community.”

Debbie Dickie, the French teacher, and her husband, Doug, were not sure they should travel together across the Atlantic. They worried about what would become of their two children, 7 and 5, if they both died. But in the end, they decided they couldn’t resist the opportunity.

The Rev. Gary Finn, pastor of Community Baptist Church, said that he came to the school in the early morning hours to help set up a makeshift counseling service for students. “Some just need to cry. Some just need somebody to cry with,” Finn said.

Cooper reported from Washington and Baum reported from New York. Staff writer Sam Fulwood II contributed to this story from Montoursville, Pa.