A Journalist Remembers His Mother

Within an hour after my mother died in the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, her phone started ringing. The calls swamped her home in Sebastopol, Calif., for days afterward. Many were answered by the recorded voice of Ellen Masland Salyer, others by the live voice of her husband, my stepfather, Phil Salyer.

The first calls were the frantic cross-country communications of a stricken family watching in disbelief as the news unfolded from Ventura County’s coastal waters. Then came messages of grief from Mom’s many friends and of consolation from our family friends. Then came the media inquiries.

As a reporter myself, I knew something about what to expect. In my career at The Times and other newspapers, I have made many calls to grieving relatives in the quest to extract a human story from a death of public interest. I have knocked on doors without notice. I have asked people where they were when they heard the awful news and expressed condolences even while double-checking the spelling of names.

But nothing prepared me for the experience of being a relative of an airplane crash victim. Looking back at the topsy-turvy chain of events since Jan. 31, 2000, and looking ahead to Wednesday’s anniversary, I am astounded--not angry, but astounded--at how public it all has been.

My search of The Times archives found 147 stories last year referring to Flight 261. There was also an avalanche of reports in other newspapers across the country. The Day 1 story on what happened. The Day 2 stories on the 88 victims. Many of those referred to Mom and included a picture carried by Associated Press from her time as chairman (her preferred title) of the local Chamber of Commerce.

There were stories on Day 3 and onward on the salvage operations, the memorial services, the federal investigation, the questions about maintenance operations at Alaska Airlines, the questions about FAA oversight, the National Transportation Safety Board hearings in December, with the transcript of the final cockpit conversation, and on and on.

Most stories have performed a valuable public service. Almost without exception, the journalists involved have been extraordinarily sensitive to our family’s loss. On some level, they all empathize. Everyone has had a mother. Everyone knows, or can anticipate, how it feels to lose one. For 33 years and change, I had the greatest.

On the night of the crash, I was in touch with my Washington editors, who immediately contacted the national desk in Los Angeles to be on the lookout for Mom’s name. My neighbor, a national reporter for the New York Times, did the same with his bureau and offered all kinds of invaluable help as my wife, Esther Schrader (also a Times reporter), and I scrambled to confirm whether Mom was on the flight.

We packed up our baby daughter early Feb. 1 and flew from Washington to San Francisco. At SFO we were met by a friend and the first of many members of the Alaska Airlines emergency response team. They escorted us through a side door to avoid what they told us was a major media stakeout.

When we arrived at Mom’s house that afternoon, I learned that one TV crew had already come and gone. That night’s “Dateline” on NBC carried an interview with my stepfather in which he talked about the sleepless hours after the crash and how he coped with the loss of his wife of nearly nine years.

I decided then to handle the media myself. It was at least something that I knew how to do, giving a modicum of structure to a day when everything seemed to be falling apart. It was also a way to protect my family from a phenomenon they didn’t, and couldn’t, fully understand. I gave interviews to The Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Press Democrat, a Sonoma County paper.

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Mom’s resume helped. A 51-year-old mother of two, stepmother of two and grandmother of three, she had been a civic leader, president or chairman of many nonprofit boards, a citizen diplomat who worked to help Ukrainian women, a trailblazing CPA in a small-business community that was previously a male domain. She owned a beach-side condominium in Puerto Vallarta. At the time of the crash she was returning--a day later than anticipated--from a brief solo trip. The following week, my wife, daughter and I were to have joined her and Phil there. Add a few grief-filled quotes and biographical details and--presto!--there’s a Day 2 story.

On Feb. 2, her obituary was atop the Press Democrat’s front page, bumping aside John McCain’s primary victory over George W. Bush in New Hampshire. We turned down a request to go on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” At that point, the national media left our family alone. But local coverage continued. On Sunday, a photo of my sister, Ingrid, was the centerpiece of the local news section. The picture showed her sobbing in a pew during the first memorial service for Mom.

The following week we attended another service in Mom’s hometown of Carlisle, Pa., where her parents live (front-page story there). There was a group memorial in San Francisco and a caravan of victims’ relatives to the coastline near the crash site at Port Hueneme, neither of which I attended. The state Senate even adjourned one day in her memory, and our state senator sent us a memorial resolution, certified with the state seal on Feb. 10, describing Mom as “a go-getter” and “a distinguished Californian.”

We didn’t know whether Mom’s body would be found. I was content to let it rest in the sea. Others in my family rooted for recovery. The extraordinary deep-sea salvage operation (also exhaustively chronicled) gave them hope. Within three weeks we learned a positive identification had been made, in part from dental records, and my family flew again to California for the burial. That too was a local story.

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The past year has produced a stream of stories related to the crash, some written by my colleagues in the Washington bureau. Now we have the anniversary events and, inevitably, more coverage. Obviously, this recollection is adding to the pile.

My sister and stepfather are flying to Southern California for the anniversary. They will view the recovered wreckage, participate in a group memorial and travel to the site. They are hoping to gain a degree of understanding of a death that so far has defied comprehension. Reading about gimbal nuts and jackscrews doesn’t suffice.

I will not attend. We are expecting a baby any day. But even were that not the case, I would not go. After the incredible traumas, revelations and publicity of the past year, I prefer to dwell now on memories of the life Mom led--the private stuff between a mother and a devoted son--rather than the spectacularly public death of Ellen Masland Salyer.