Beneath Haunted Waters by Peter Stekel

Author:Peter Stekel [Stekel, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2017-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

As World War II slips into our past, a small museum at Billy Creek on the northwestern shore of Huntington Lake reminds visitors of Exterminator and her crew. Located in an old Forest Service guard station, inside the museum you’ll find a tiny room dedicated to the plane in the lake. There are some photos on the wall, a few artifacts, yellowed newspaper clippings in a display case, and a framed portrait of Exterminator.

One final story about Exterminator and her crew remains to be told. In 1991, a fourth-grade student at Big Creek School (the Southern California Edison company town just downstream of the reservoir) saw a newspaper article about the Edison Company’s plans to lower the reservoir level so they could work on the dam. The plane in the lake was mentioned, along with the exciting comment that it might be visible as the shoreline was exposed. The student brought the article to school one day and her teacher, Bob Crider, recognized his student’s interest in the story. The crash became an unprecedented class research project, “the likes of which he [had] not experienced in twenty years in the classroom.”

During the next four months, under Crider’s direction, the fourth graders pushed everything aside to focus on the plane in the lake. “They are acquiring writing and language skills far above the fourth-grade level,” their teacher reported. “It’s really turned the kids on to education.” Working in pairs, the students researched the history of Exterminator, her crew, and the 461st Bomb Group at Hammer Field. They succeeded in contacting most of the airmen’s families, too. On multiple field trips they visited the crash site and the wreckage, visible that winter as the reservoir level dropped to a historic level. They even made the long journey to Castle Air Museum where they got to see a B-24 Liberator on display.

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