Southern Storm by Samme Chittum

Author:Samme Chittum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

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About the same time that Richard arrived home, another New Hope native, 26-year-old Cherry Waddell, was wrapping up her workday in a construction-trailer office on the site of a new subdivision in Douglas County, about 18 miles southwest of New Hope. Normally, Waddell would have been at her home in New Hope—a ranch house built on 25 acres that her parents had left to her, and which sat on a hill overlooking the main highway. But her husband’s work as a contractor required his presence on the job site, so she and Chris Waddell and their two small children had been absent from New Hope for the past seven months. That day, she had left her son, Jason, three, and daughter, Wendy, two, with a close friend who was also her babysitter.

When she arrived home, both children were excited to see her and clamoring for her attention the moment she walked in the door, and the babysitter was anxious to leave. “It was that time of day. I call it the changing of the guard,” said Waddell, who was reaching for her purse to pay the babysitter when the phone rang. “It was my mother. And she was just hysterical. The only thing she said was ‘Berlie Mae has been killed in a plane crash!’ And then she hung up. Of course, I called back right away, but the line was busy and I couldn’t get through.”

Waddell’s first reaction was bafflement. Her great-aunt, Berlie Mae Bell Craton, lived next door to her elderly blind sister, Ruth Bell. Both women were homebodies and lived alone. Waddell was certain that Berlie Mae would not have left New Hope without telling her relatives and asking them to look after Ruth. “Berlie Mae had never flown anywhere on a plane in her life,” said Waddell. “Most folks in New Hope had never even been to an airport, let alone on a plane. It didn’t make any sense. I was so confused.”

Waddell kept trying to get through to her mother in New Hope. For hours, every time she picked up the phone handset, the only thing she heard was a nonstop busy signal. Her husband, Chris Waddell, was also puzzled, and he wondered if his wife had been the victim of a crank call. But Cherry Waddell said she was certain that it was her mother who had called. Not until she turned on the television to watch the local newscast did she heard a report that a small plane had crashed in New Hope. Very soon, she said, the report was revised; like Richard Carter, she was astonished to learn that the plane was actually a commercial airliner. Even then, details remained sketchy. It was only much later, when she was finally able to get through to her mother on the phone, that Waddell began to piece together the extent of the disaster that had claimed her great-aunt’s life, killed seven others, and left another New Hope resident, Ernest L. Prewett, badly burned and fighting for his life.

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