A Shared Willingness to Explore

She marched against the Vietnam War and rallied for women’s rights. She took her kids to hear Martin Luther King Jr. raise the roof in Washington. She studied art and yoga and toured the world on a whim. She was a free spirit who liked her food best when it was as strange as her surroundings.

But to a society fixated on youth, Eugenia Rhodes was just another old lady in Chicago. Not somebody who once pummeled a purse-snatcher on a bus, got a degree in gerontology in her 60s and dragged her husband on vacations to Minsk and Bangkok until he couldn’t take the weird food any more. Not someone who had planned to celebrate her 80th birthday in Egypt, the land where the pharaohs died, where Cleopatra ruled, where today terrorists have been known to target Western tourists.

‘She Would Just Get Up and Go’

The cause of the crash was still undetermined. But Rhodes’ reasons for being on the plane, part of a tour group of mostly older people, were perfectly clear. “She was just curious,” said her son Jeff, a computer programmer. “She would just get up and go. She would go into neighborhoods even I wouldn’t go into. In many ways, she was fearless.”

That final adventure, which her family said was a gift to herself, was abruptly taken away on Sunday, when an EgyptAir Boeing 767 bound for Cairo plunged into the Atlantic Ocean after taking off from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 217 people aboard. Nearly half were Americans, many of Middle Eastern descent, and the Pentagon said 30 of the dead were Egyptian officers returning home after U.S. military training.

The dead also included four teens from the ancient city of Luxor, who had spent two weeks at a high school in the sister city of Baltimore, where they haunted the shopping malls and bonded with their American counterparts.

“They all promised to write each other and stay in touch,” said Bernadette Forman, president of the Dunbar High School PTA. She said the Dunbar students were shattered by the tragedy.

Many of the passengers were part of tour groups of older people, white-haired retirees who moved in a different world.

Dream of Cruising the Nile Cut Short

In Irvine, neighborhood children posted a sign saying, “We’ll miss you” on the garage of 71-year-old Tobey Seidman.

A globe-trotting grandmother who made her home the center of activity for youngsters on Morning Dew Road, Seidman had broken her wrist at the Great Wall of China and lunched in Kenya. She often surprised the grandkids with postcards from foreign lands reading, “Guess where I am right now?”

Sunday’s crash cut short a lifelong dream of cruising the Nile and taking in the Great Pyramids. She traveled all the continents with friends and family, her relatives said.

“She’s been everywhere, done everything,” said granddaughter Michael Cedillos.

Beverly Grant wasn’t just a Brooklyn-born grandmother who settled in Orange County after the Great Depression, who served matzo ball soup and horseradish for her three sons, daughter and their spouses and her two grandchildren. She was a former secretary for the conductor Andre Previn. She worked five days a week in a son-in-law’s gun shop in Costa Mesa. She’d lost her husband five years before, but she was moving at warp speed.

She was on a three-week Middle East adventure with three friends, and planned to say a prayer for a cancer-stricken friend at the Western Wall in Israel. She was so active that she lied about being an octogenarian because the label just didn’t fit. “She was 82 years old, but she was in the prime of her life,” said her son Steve Grant, an optometrist.

On Monday, the sterile list of Flight 990’s manifest was much more than a death list. It was a roll call of distinct lives, people who despite age or ethnicity or point of origin were compelled to explore another part of the world, or just revisit their roots.

Imilda Kolander was a 66-year-old resident of San Ramon with a husband named Harry. She was also a seasoned traveler who’d been kidnapped by Kurdish rebels on a trip in Turkey in 1990 and held briefly. It didn’t curb her urge to travel, her husband said.

“She continued that trip in another part of Turkey. She told me, ‘I have to get back on the horse,’ ” he said.

He said he had been anxious about the trip to Egypt and was unusually demonstrative when he dropped his wife off at San Francisco airport for her flight to Los Angeles, where she picked up the doomed flight.

“I’m kind of a stand-offish guy, usually, but this time I grabbed her and hugged her hard, kissed her and said, ‘I love you,’ ” Kolander said. “She said, ‘I love you too, but I gotta go grab me an aisle seat.’ ”

Willie Jackson may have been a computer programmer from New Jersey, but he was also the man who broke the color barrier at the Rochester, N.Y., Fire Department in 1964. Jackson, 61, stayed a week, just long enough to prove a point, and moved on to IBM. He and his wife, Mitzi Swench, were residents of Scotch Plains, N.J., and were simply going on an exotic vacation.

Salah Adam wasn’t just a naturalized Canadian from somewhere in Africa. He was a former Sudanese runner turned missionary who planned to visit refugee camps in his besieged former country, where civil war between the north and the south has left a huge humanitarian crisis. He was also going to attend a wedding and was with his wife, Shaline, and their 2-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son.

Rafik Fayez Iskander was a marketing manager for a Cleveland publishing company. He was an Egyptian who immigrated to the United States when he was a boy. But he was most proud to be from Alexandria, the great metropolis founded by Alexander the Great, the home of a lighthouse considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Soaring Optimism for Alexandria Trip

“I left Egypt in 1965 at the young age of 6, yet there is so much that I still remember of those few wonderful years,” he wrote in obvious rapture last December in an Internet discussion group set up by expatriates from Alexandria.

“Stories told by my parents, friends and relatives that make me wish I was able to experience their Alexandria--an Alexandria, and indeed an Egypt, where the lives of Muslims, Jews and Christians intermingled with the warmth that came from having lived under the same sky and tilled the same rich earth.

“Dare we hope that we might see such an Alexandria and such an Egypt again? Inshallah [God willing].”

In August, he wrote about how disappointed he was during previous trips in 1993 and two years earlier, where his idealized visions of the stunning old city on the edge of the Mediterranean were frayed around the edges.

“Both times I was so depressed after seeing the deteriorating conditions of the once-beautiful city,” he wrote. “In a couple of months, I will once again be visiting Alex . . . See you soon, Alex!”

His optimism was soaring as the trip got closer, as other Internet correspondents told him about the refurbishments undertaken by Alexandria’s governor. “I hope to see them for myself when I visit our beloved country in 10 days!” he wrote. “May God help us in making Alexandria [and our Egypt] the best place on Earth once again.”

Iskander shared a home with Dr. Stephen Reinhart, 38, who was also aboard the plane. Iskander worked at Penton Publishing for roughly a decade and was known for rambling the world.

“He was an avid traveler who liked to take one major long trip a year,” said Penton spokeswoman Mary Abood. “He’s been all around. He was a bright guy, who was well respected and liked by his col Kurt Schwenk was the director of business development at Santa Clara-based Palm Computing, the maker of the popular Palm Pilot. But the 39-year-old Palo Alto man was also a traveler who had been to Nepal, Spain and Ireland. He was headed to Egypt with his mother, girlfriend, his girlfriend’s friend and a sister and her spouse.

Schwenk was a rugby enthusiast who joined Palm in February and stood out for his intelligence and hard work, said his boss, Mark Bercow, vice president of strategic alliances. “Those who knew Kurt will remember him as a man of incredible integrity, a remarkable work ethic, and most importantly, a fine gentleman and good friend,” Bercow said.

Palm flew its flags at half-staff on Monday in memory of Schwenk.

For some passengers, the trip wasn’t an adventure, but a necessity.

Financial difficulties prompted Mourad Mouneer Yassa’s sudden decision to return home for a visit to Egypt. Yassa and his wife, Eatdal Nakhla, came to Southern California and settled in Long Beach two years ago. They worked overlapping day and evening shifts at the same Anaheim packaging factory to make ends meet and juggle care of their two young children.

They were struggling and had fallen behind on rent for an apartment in Egypt, where they had left their furniture. By law and custom, Yassa had to personally return to his homeland to set things right.

He planned to fly out Friday, on another airline, but canceled at the last minute. Then family members called from Egypt, urging him to come before his lease was canceled. Eatdal gave her husband jewelry to help cover the bill. At the airport, he promised not to be gone long--just four days. He worried about leaving his young family without the support of any relatives in the Los Angeles area.

Laughter on Their Final Day Together

“I’ll return for you. I won’t leave you alone,” he promised before boarding Flight 990. Despite the family’s money problems, it was a warm send-off.

“We were driving around the airport laughing,” said Nakhla. “I didn’t know that this [was our] final day,” she said.

Eugenia Rhodes’ husband, a retired analytical chemist from Lever Brothers, stayed at the couple’s home in Chicago for this trip. Orestes Rhodes said he and his wife were married 53 years ago and didn’t have enough cash for a honeymoon, other than in downtown Chicago.

They took a cross-country trip to California in 1973 and, after that, there was no stopping his wife, a licensed real estate agent and occasional holiday worker at Marshall Field’s who nevertheless devoted herself to homemaking.

“Eugenia loved to travel, she loved meeting people, eating different things and seeing new things,” he said. “She loved to fly.”

She was an unabashed liberal activist who reflexively jumped into a brawl between two Chicago cops who were wrestling with a black man wielding a broken cologne bottle, said her son.

“I was about 12, 13. I was screaming at her to get away. Two cops, a guy with a busted bottle and my Mom in a brawl,” he said, chuckling at the memory. “He happened to be a black man and she thought [the police] were persecuting him. It wasn’t the case at all. It was a pretty nasty struggle. She was just a feisty woman.”

Times staff writers Karen Alexander, Rich Connell, Mary Curtius, Ken Ellingwood, Mireta Gurgenidze, Bonnie Harris, Mitchell Landsberg, Phil Willon, Joseph Menn, Times Community News correspondent Louise Roug and researchers Janet Lundblad, Edith Stanley and John Beckham contributed to this story.