Families’ Painful Memories Return

Pearl Ault Beswick remembers the day in March 1948 when a reporter knocked on the front door of her home in Manchester, England. She was 17, just back from a dance. Her father followed her.

“Do you have a son in the Merchant Marine?” the reporter asked. “Did you know that his plane crashed on a mountain in Alaska?”

“That was the way we found out about Wilfred,” said Beswick, who now lives in Whitby, Ontario. “We didn’t even know he was on a plane. All we knew was that he had been on a ship to Shanghai.”

Fifty-one years later, reporters asked her questions again, this time about a wreck that had been discovered in Alaska, and about rumors of Chinese gold.

“It brought back all the happy memories and the sad ones,” she said. “I mean, that was the place my brother took his last breath.”

Beswick hadn’t heard about gold rumors until her family talked with Kevin McGregor. Like other relatives, she says she doesn’t care about treasure, or about who owns it. She worries more about “men in their greed going after it,” about lives being lost looking for the unattainable.

Relatives of Robert Rabich, a 26-year-old merchant seaman from Easton, Pa., view things differently. “Everyone knew there was gold on that plane,” said Rabich’s sister-in-law, Janet Meehan. “To the men and the crew, it wasn’t a rumor. They were bringing back Chiang Kai-shek’s gold.”

Meehan, of Fairbanks, Alaska, lived in New York with her late husband, William, at the time of the crash. She remembers Robert’s sunny charm, how he regaled them with stories about Chinese treasure and drank beer with his brother all night long. He painted such a picture that William Rabich thought about trying to join the Merchant Marine too. Robert spent his last nights with them before boarding a ship to China.

“My husband got great comfort out of knowing exactly where his brother was buried, and knowing that no one could reach him,” Meehan said. “He hoped no one ever would.”

Dorothy Denman, of Anchorage, feels the same way. Tears fill her eyes when she talks about August Koistinen, the handsome uncle with the slicked-back hair who taught her to drive a Model T when she was 12. She chuckles as she remembers him sauntering back to the family farm in Michigan after the war, causing consternation in the kitchen when he asked for a drink.

And she remembers her disbelief when her mother told her that the man who was like a father to her had perished in a plane crash in Alaska.

“For years I would look for his face in the crowds,” said Denman, who flew over Mt. Sanford in 1982 to photograph the spot where he died.

“It’s such a beautiful place to be buried,” she says. “I think everyone should just let the dead rest.”