Georgia: The Cherry Orchard

Into a cherry orchard in France, not far from Paris’ Orly Airport, walked a grey-haired man, Ivan Allen Jr., the mayor of Atlanta, Ga. Before him lay the charred debris of an Air France 707 jetliner.

Through the grey, smoke-stained wreckage he poked. “I recognize that tie,” he said. “And that dress. That’s Bob Pe-gram’s tie, and that dress belonged to his wife Nancy.” Years before, as a youth on his first date, Allen had taken Nancy out. He moved on. Here was a pair of children’s wooden Dutch shoes, there a few color slides of castles in Germany, some gay apparel, a brochure about Strat-‘ford-on-Avon, a movie camera, a green Michelin guide to Paris, a little girl’s dress, picture postcards from Florence, a half-burned evening slipper. “I knew nearly every one of them,” said the mayor of Atlanta. “I went to school with some of them. I was in business with others. I was in love with some of the ladies when they were girls.”

Less than 24 hours earlier, the chartered jet was roaring down the Orly runway on takeoff. Unaccountably, it failed to lift. The pilot jammed down on the brakes, threw the powerful engines into reverse thrust. But the speed and momentum were too great. The plane rocketed ahead, plowed through a fence, grazed a house, and smashed to pieces in a fiery cloud, killing eight French crew members and 122 passengers. Miraculously, two stewardesses were thrown clear.

One of the passengers was a Frenchman.

All the rest were from Georgia, most of them Atlantans. Most were members of the Atlanta Art Association, which sponsored their tour through Europe’s ancient citadels of art. They were the leaders of Atlanta’s cultural life, and they feasted their senses at the Louvre, at St. Peter’s and St. Mark’s, at the Tate and the Uffizi Gallery and the Doges Palace. They had dined on the Via Veneto and in Maxim’s.

And after nearly a month, they had assembled for their return trip at Orly with their mementoes and pictures and memories. Now they were dead.

The List. The crash cast a pall of anguish on Atlanta. In that one searing moment on a sunny Sunday morning died a whole family—Frederick Bull Jr., his wife, their two young daughters, Bull’s mother and uncle. Dead were a dozen or so artists, some of them promising, including Douglas Davis, 33, who had been living in Paris and had decided at the last minute to visit his mother in Atlanta. Dead were Art Patron Sidney Wien, his wife and their daughter; Del Paige, president of the Art Association, and his wife; Tom-Chris Allen, southeastern advertising manager of LIFE, and his wife; Mrs. David Black, one of the tour organizers and an energetic leader in Atlanta’s art world. Married couples and individual parents who perished left 31 children aged 14 and under; one Atlanta church lost 16 members, another 14. another 12.* Atlantans who had families or friends aboard the plane rushed to the Air France ticket office downtown to check the passenger list. Over and over again, Chief Reservation Clerk Colette Lautzenhiser picked up the phone to say: “Yes. they were on the plane … I am so sorry.” Her knuckles whitened as she gripped the phone, and her eyes closed. “I am so sorry, Madam. They were on the list.” “Don’t Cry.” Insistently, radio bulletins tolled the death list. The Journal issued an extra—the first since Author (Gone With the Wind) Margaret Mitchell died 13 years ago. President Kennedy and President de Gaulle wired their sympa thies. Mayor Allen said, “This was my generation … my friends,” and departed, via Air France, for the scene of the crash.

In the streets, people gathered to read each other’s newspapers, murmuring “hor rible, horrible, horrible.” Sunday evening church services became funeral rites. Five miles from downtown Atlanta, in the Buckhead section where most of the vic tims had lived, friends and relatives dropped a protective curtain of silence around the mourning families, answered the phones, manned the doors, accept ed the flowers. The silver trays on foy er tables whitened with visiting cards and notes.

As if in search of clues of foreboding, many Atlantans reached back to reread cards and letters that their friends had sent, and to recall the last words they had spoken before leaving Atlanta. Housewife Mary Louise Humphreys had written: “I will never be quite the same after this trip. My horizon has widened.” Frances Beers, a divorcee, had written to her daughter: “This is the most delightful trip I’ve ever had. If I should die on this trip, I would die happy.” Mrs. Ezekiel Candler, wife of a Coca-Cola Co. executive, had told her daughter: “If I don’t come back, don’t worry. Don’t cry. I will have died happy in Europe.” Another woman wrote from Greece: “I have found here peace and beauty and understanding. Now, for the first time, I want to come back and read Homer and all the new and old books about the Greeks. I could feel all this stirring anew in my mind, and I felt well and sure.” There were some last week who thought that Atlanta’s cultural life had perished in the cherry orchard. But the tragedy gave resolution to others. Amid Atlanta’s grief, there was talk of establishing an art school as a memorial; there was a new burst of enthusiasm for a proposed bond issue for the establishment of a cultural center of the performing arts. But, as a Presbyte rian minister said: “You can substitute people like that, but you can never replace them.”

* At a Los Angeles meeting of the Black Muslim organization (TIME, Aug. 10, 1959) on the day of the crash, Leader “Malcolm X” cried: “I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has happened . . . I got a wire from God today [laughter]. Wait, all right, well somebody came and told me that he really had answered our prayers over in France. He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it because the Muslims believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But thanks to God, or Jehovah or Allah, we will continue to pray, and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.”