Victims Shared a Penchant for Adventure

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 anymore. Not someone who had planned to celebrate her 80th birthday in Egypt.

“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; the Pentagon said about 30 of the dead were Egyptian officers returning home after U.S. military training.

The dead also included at least eight Orange County residents and four teens from the ancient Egyptian 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.

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.

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.

“She loved the sound of children’s voices. . . . I could always send my son over to play at her house,” neighbor Jan Kain said.

Echoed neighbor Sally Stafford: “It’s hard for the [local] kids. . . . She’s going to be dearly missed.”

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.”

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

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

She regularly played cards with three friends--Judith Bowman, 57, and Sheila Jaffee, 63, both of Huntington Beach, and Beverly Grant, 82, of Santa Ana. For nearly a year, the foursome had planned a trip to see the pyramids, the Nile and Jerusalem.

Grant was a Brooklyn-born grandmother who settled in Orange County after the Great Depression. She was a former secretary for the conductor Andre Previn. She worked five days a week in the family’s landmark sporting goods shop in Costa Mesa and served up matzo ball soup and horseradish for her three sons, daughter, and their spouses and her two grandchildren. She’d lost her husband five years before, but she was moving at warp speed.

While on her three-week Middle East adventure, she planned to say a prayer at the Western Wall in Israel for a cancer-stricken friend. 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 son Steve Grant, an optometrist.

Grant had expressed doubts about the trip. She didn’t like to fly and had struggled with flying phobias. She even scheduled her 50th wedding anniversary in Las Vegas so her family--all based in California--could simply drive. She never wanted to have her whole family on one plane in case something happened. But she overcame the fear because she would be traveling with her three best friends.

Bowman also struggled with leaving her family but wanted a special experience with her friends.

“It was odd. [Bowman] called her friends. She called me and told me that she loved me,” said Bowman’s daughter, Lori Fernandez. “She said she was never going to leave my dad again for so long. At the airport, she broke down and cried.”

After seeing his wife off at Los Angeles International Airport, Max Bowman returned home to find a love note on his pillow, his daughter said.

“It said, ‘You’re the love of my life, and I’ll love you forever.’ ”

He never thought they would be the words to end their 42-year relationship, which began just before Judith was a runner-up in the Miss Huntington Beach pageant.

The couple celebrated their 40th anniversary in June for a marriage that produced a daughter, two sons and seven grandchildren--almost all of whom reside within a 15-minute drive of the home where the Bowmans have lived for 30 years.

Jaffee, the fourth member of the quartet, was an active congregant of Temple Beth David in Westminster and a mother of two grown daughters. She and former husband Melvin Jaffee owned National Lumber and Supply Inc., a Fountain Valley-based chain of home improvement centers that went out of business in 1990.

Jaffee’s daughter Faith Freeman is the owner of Primal Elements, a Huntington Beach specialty soap company. Freeman and her husband, Scott, lived with Jaffee for many years while they launched their business. Jaffee remained actively involved in the business as it grew from a small store in the Naples neighborhood of Long Beach to a large international business, maintaining her own office at Primal Elements.

A neighbor, Carl Morabido Jr., said Jaffee had moved into her townhouse only a few months ago. Along with her new home came a koi pond that the previous owners had built on the back patio. Morabido’s grandson was going to feed Jaffee’s fish while she was gone, and he did just that Monday.

Effat Mansour of Irvine was a prominent architect and city planner who worked for the Port of Portland, Ore., for projects in Egypt and had served on the Irvine Planning Commission. He had planned to visit his mother, brother and two sisters in Cairo.

His wife, Virginia, was a retired microbiologist at Baxter Healthcare.

Next-door neighbor Ardy Vaziri, an auditor for the state of California, described the Mansours as the most active, effective people in the community. “I have relied on both of them,” he said. “They were trying to do anything they can to help people.”

Vaziri saw the Mansours on Saturday as they were leaving for what was to be a five-week trip to Egypt and Africa. “I have never seen them so happy as when they were leaving Saturday morning. They said, ‘We’re going to the airport,’ and they had been looking forward to this trip for five years.”

Effat Mansour was from Egypt; his wife was American, Vaziri said. They brought the neighborhood together as a community, especially during their annual Christmas open house.

Now, neighbors have been leaving candles and flowers at the house that Vaziri said was the heart of their neighborhood. “This is a tragedy for all the community, and not only for me because he is a friend of mine,” he said.

The only solace, Vaziri said, was that the couple’s daughter, Amira, was not traveling with them, as she had originally planned. “God helped that their daughter is surviving,” Vaziri said.

Also on Flight 990 were retirees Arthur and Barbara Peever of Dana Point. Neighbor Bill Rosecrans described them as friendly, outgoing and enormously devoted to their grandchildren.

Arthur, 66, was on the board of directors at the El Niguel Country Club, Rosecrans said. “He was always talking about his grandkids. He hadn’t been able to go skiing with them last year because he had a bad knee. But he thought that was behind him and he was really looking forward to this winter,” Rosecrans said.

Barbara, 68, liked to play tennis, Rosecrans recalled.

The couple previously lived in Burbank. Their daughter and son-in-law, Linda and Joseph Markovich, live in Laguna Hills. Another son, Gary Peever, lives in Burbank. Joseph Markovich said the family did not want to comment.

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 and held briefly by Kurdish rebels on a trip in Turkey in 1990. It didn’t curb her urge to travel, her husband 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 standoffish 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 on 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!”

‘A Fine Gentleman and Good Friend’

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.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Palm flew its flags at half-staff on Monday in memory of Schwenk, who worked on new ventures and partnerships at the thriving Silicon Valley maker of Palm Pilots, now called Palms. Palm Computing is being spun off from 3Com, which makes computer networking equipment.

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. Nakhla 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,” Nakhla said. “I didn’t know that this [was our] final day.”

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