THEY STARTED GATHERING AT montoursville High School just hours after the crash. Students, parents, teachers, clergymen – there are only 5,000 people in this northern Pennsylvania hamlet, so it wasn’t long before everyone knew that among the dead on Flight 800 were 16 students from the school’s French Club and five adult chaperones. Some of the mourners wept quietly. But mostly they were silent, huddling together and vainly attempting to turn raw emotions into words. ““I mean, these were people you had just seen two days ago,’’ said Shelby Dingler, 20.
Almost all the students who died were classic overachievers, the kind of model students that parents boast about to anyone who will listen. Rance Hettler, 18, played football, basketball and baseball and was the district track champion, but he still found time to work on Students Against Drunk Driving and the History Club. Daniel Baszczewski, 17, had nothing but A’s on his report cards from first grade forward. He had won a scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania in the fall. Wendy Wolfson, 16, had just returned from New York, where she performed her own piano compositions at Carnegie Hall. Wolfson’s mother, Eleanor, was one of the chaperones. So was Judith Rupert, who graduated from Montoursville High in 1961 and worked as a school secretary for 34 years. For three long days and nights, the people of Montoursville met at the school to reminisce about how Rupert and their other lost friends had touched their town. ““The biggest thing that happens here is football season,’’ says senior Kevin Williams. ““It doesn’t happen in a town like Montoursville, you know?''
PAM LYCHNER DESCRIBED HERSELF AS A ““very weak person’’ before she was attacked in 1990 by a man who had already been twice convicted for sexually assaulting other women. Her assailant was sent to jail, but after serving only two years of a 20-year sentence, he became eligible for parole. He also decided to sue Lychner, 37, for the emotional trauma the case had caused him. An exasperated Lychner finally fought back. Working with two other women, she helped establish Justice for All, a Houston-based organization that lobbies for victims’ rights. The group, which now has 5,000 members in several states, has successfully pushed for laws limiting the early release of prisoners. Lychner also helped persuade judges to let crime victims address their assailants in court after a guilty verdict. In April the city of Houston issued a proclamation honoring her work. ““She just commanded respect from elected officials and from the criminal-justice system,’’ says Andrew Kahan, director of Houston’s Crime Victims Office. A former TWA flight attendant herself, Lychner was taking her daughters Shannon, 10, and Katie, 8, to France to see the gardens that inspired Claude Monet’s paintings (Shannon had just begun to copy the masterpieces at home). Lychner’s husband, Joe, had planned to join the family later.
IN 1994 MICHEL BREISTROFF, 25, WAS THE last defenseman cut from the French Olympic ice-hockey team. He skated as an undergraduate at Harvard, taking some time off to play professionally in the North American minor leagues. But his dream was to compete in the Olympics. After receiving his Harvard degree in biological anthropology last month, he was returning to France on Flight 800 to train with the French national team. Just before he boarded the plane, he stopped to make one phone call. While still recovering from the disappointment of missing the ‘94 team, Breistroff met Heidi Snow on Martha’s Vineyard. They fell in love. Breistroff wanted to make sure that Snow, a New Yorker, would follow him to France as he pursued his dream one final time. ““He called me from the pay phone in the airport and asked me to marry him,’’ Snow says. ““I told him yes.’’ The couple had planned to wed in a year.
JED JOHNSON, 47, WAS FAST BECOMING one of the most acclaimed interior designers in the country. His training was informal, but priceless. He began his career as a protg of Andy Warhol’s, honing his visual sense by working at Warhol’s famed Factory studio and going antiquing with the father of pop art. In the mid-’70s, Johnson oversaw the redecoration of Warhol’s Manhattan town house – each room done in a different, museum-quality period style – and his career was launched. He attracted an unusually eclectic, though uniformly wealthy, clientele, including Richard Gere, Mick Jagger and Yves Saint Laurent. He was traveling to France to finish work on a new line of fabric, which he planned to sell in a forthcoming string of his own boutiques in New York, Paris and London. But no matter how many magazines featured his work, his friends – including childhood neighbor Joan Lunden of ““Good Morning America’’ – say Johnson never lost his sweet, self-effacing shyness. ““The last thing he ever would have done was to go into someone’s house and make them feel bad about their furniture,’’ says his sister-in-law, Linda Johnson. ““He was very successful, but you wouldn’t know it.’'
JACQUES AND CONSTANCE CHARBONNIER fell in love on an airplane. The TWA flight attendants met 21 years ago when they were working a Paris-to-New York flight together, and they had flown as a team ever since. Jacques, 66, a French national who was a paratrooper in the Algerian war, managed the attendants; Constance, 49, an avid watercolorist, worked on his crew. They flew the New York-Paris route, one of their favorites, as often as five times a month, departing on Wednesdays and returning home to Northport, N.Y., on Sundays. The Charbonniers were only two of several veteran TWA employees on board Flight 800. Flight engineer Richard Campbell, 63, of Ridgefield, Conn., received his 30-year pin just two weeks before the crash. Two other men in the cockpit, Capt. Ralph Kevorkian, 58, of Garden Grove, Calif., and Capt. Steven Snyder, 57, of Stratford, Conn., also had more than 30 years of service with the airline. The TWA family was hit unusually hard by the crash. In addition to the 18-member crew working the flight were 17 employees flying to Paris to meet another plane. An off-duty TWA pilot, Donald Gough of Mill Valley, Calif., and his wife, Ana, a TWA flight attendant, also were passengers. Jill Ziemkiewicz, 24, who graduated from flight-attendant school in May, was making her first trip overseas. ““I can’t wait. I’m so psyched!’’ she gushed to her mother on the phone an hour before takeoff.
JACK O’HARA WAS HAVING A TERRIBLE week. As the Emmy-winning executive producer of ABC Sports, O’Hara, 39, oversaw all the network’s sports broadcasts, including ““Monday Night Football’’ and ““Wide World of Sports.’’ But on the day before the crash, he joined the growing list of employees laid off by ABC as it prepares to merge with Disney. O’Hara’s trip to Paris – where he was going to spearhead coverage of the Tour de France bicycle race – was to be his last assignment for the network. A soft-spoken man in a world dominated by hyperbole and high tension, he took the dismissal in typically level-headed style. ““Change is good,’’ he said in the memo he wrote to his staff. His co-workers and friends had hardly gotten used to the idea of his leaving when news of the disaster hit. ““In a business as tough as this one, he was truly one of the nice guys,’’ says Larry Kamm, who had worked for many years with O’Hara. ““I have no words. There are no words.’’ Because this was his last trip, O’Hara planned to mix relaxation with business. Sitting beside him on the plane were his wife, Janet, and their 13-year-old daughter, Caitlin, who recently won the French prize at the Middle School in Irvington, N.Y. The O’Haras’ twin 12-year-old sons stayed at home with their grandparents.
THE COINER WOMEN WERE A talented twosome. Constance Coiner, 48, an English professor specializing in women’s literature, was awarded tenure last year at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and also won the school’s award for excellence in teaching. The trip to France was a reward to herself for a wonderful year, one that included the finishing of her second book. Her 12-year-old daughter, Ana Duarte-Coiner, was an overachiever as well. She was a reporter on a children’s television show and an accomplished pianist. She was also on the varsity tennis team. In the spring, a local newspaper named her one of Binghamton’s brightest students. ““She was a dynamite young lady,’’ says her school principal, Tom Corgel. ““She always brightened my day.''
JUDITH DELOUVRIER, 47, WAS CROSSING the Atlantic for the second time in four days.
She was overseeing the renovation of her Manhattan home, but her children were vacationing at the family’s summer place in Hericy, France. She spent considerable time taking her son Henry, 9, to ice-hockey games and her daughter, Isabelle, 7, to ballet classes. ““She was the consummate mother,’’ said Delouvrier’s sister, Josephine Mandeville. A tireless volunteer for several New York nonprofit programs, she was also an active member of the Connelly Foundation, a family philanthropy that made grants to education, arts and social-service organizations. For several years she worked in the impressionist-art department at Sotheby’s, the renowned auction house. Her husband, Philippe, is president of Eastern Industrial Minerals in Brunswick, Ga. He, like hundreds of families around the world, are now beginning the struggle to carry on.
