"Dr. Gaede Drops In"

The Maule Rocket in the low woods where it crashed to Earth.

DR. GAEDE DROPS IN

FEBRUARY 2011

Even though it was just Aug. 2, 1967, 16-year-old Jack Foster was already contemplating winter when a sound from above diverted his focus, and what he saw next jolted him out of his snowy reverie.

Out in the yard at his parents’ home, as he worked on his snowmachine—a heavy, single-ski, double-track Ski-Doo Alpine—the sound of a single-engine airplane caused him to peer upward and investigate. Flying slowly only a few hundred feet over the exposed flats behind the Foster house, a blue-and-white aircraft was just crossing over the small airstrip owned by neighbors Dan France and Dave Thomas.

As it is today, the sight then of a small plane overhead was common, and this plane would have garnered little further attention from Foster if—quite suddenly—the plane’s engine had not died.

“I heard it sputtering, and then the engine quit,” said Foster. The plane banked once and began nosing sharply toward the ground, and then it disappeared behind a line of trees. From hundreds of yards away, Foster heard it strike the ground with great force.

Although he feared the worst, he shifted into action. After grabbing a fire extinguisher from the garage, he raced for the driveway where he had parked his panel van that he had painted a metallic blue to cover its original Army green. In his haste, he turned the key too far—from the first OFF position, past ON, and into the second OFF position. When he pressed the floorboard starter with his foot, nothing happened.

Once he realized the error, however, he adjusted the key, cranked up the engine and headed down the road toward the crash site. In less than two minutes, he was clambering over the berm left from an old homestead clearing as he lugged the extinguisher and shuffled through some low brush and scattered, snaggly trees. Quickly he approached the crumpled aircraft, the nose of which was angled into the soil.

The tail was bent to the left, and the left wing had suffered a deep gash about two-thirds of the way out from the fuselage. From the broken foliage, it appeared that the left wing had struck a tree and spun the aircraft back in the direction from which it had come. Foster noted the plane’s registration number, N4605T, but did not recognize it.

“I hollered in there, ‘Are you guys okay?’ And nobody answered me. That’s when I left the fire extinguisher there and I took off and went and got Dave ‘cause I knew that Dave had been in C.A.P. and probably knew a lot of first aid.”

Foster was referring to Dave Thomas, a local carpenter who at that moment was working at the home of Calvin and Jane Fair. He and Shorty Harris were building the Fairs’ new home, so they could move out of the turquoise-and-white trailer they had had hauled to Soldotna in 1960, all the way up the Alaska Highway, from Indiana.

Restarting his van, Foster lifted dust behind him as he raced the half-mile or so to the Fair homestead. The time was just past 10:30 a.m.

***************

About four hours earlier at the Soldotna airport, local physician, Dr. Elmer Gaede, fired up his blue-and-white Maule Rocket and prepared to take off for Seward, where he would attend the hospital staff meeting later that morning.

He and his medical partner, Dr. Paul Isaak, planned to arrive in separate planes for the meeting. They had been traveling separately for quite some time, according to passenger and Soldotna pharmacist Lee Bowman, who had come to Alaska with his wife, Julie, one year earlier to work for Toby Buckler in Soldotna Drug.

“They had flown together once to Seward and got into some really bad weather, and they decided it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to kill both of the doctors in town in one crash,” Bowman said.

The doctors had formed a partnership in 1961, working on the second floor of the Soldotna medical clinic, with Dr. Fair practicing dentistry on the first floor. Since the central Kenai Peninsula had no hospital, they were both considered part of the Seward hospital staff because of the frequent surgeries and other procedures they performed there.

Bowman was hunched in the front passenger seat of the four-place Maule. In one of the backseats sat Dane Parks, a good friend of Bowman’s who had recently moved to Alaska with his wife, Betty. Neither Bowman nor Parks were on board for the staff meeting. They had been invited along by Gaede because the men were interested in a late-summer hunt and he wanted to show them “the easiest goat hunt in Alaska.”

Bowman and Parks had met while students at Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Michigan. The Bowmans lived one floor above the Parkses in married student housing, and the four of them became close friends. In fact, said Bowman, the Parkses “were really the impetus for us coming up here.”

Dane and Betty were studying to become teachers, and they hoped to start their careers in Alaska. But after graduating, neither could find a decent position available, so they decided to postpone their plans for another year. Meanwhile, Lee and Julie were unexpectedly placed on the fast-track to the north country.

With Bowman about a semester away from graduating with his pharmacy degree, he eschewed a couple of low-paying offers he received from Michigan pharmacies, and he began writing to the Alaska state pharmacy board to learn about positions available and how to qualify. When he received no response, he tried another tack: He wrote to his aunt, Leah O’Reagan, who was living in Soldotna at the time, and asked her to ask the local pharmacist how to reach the state board.

That pharmacist was Buckler, who was “vigorously” looking for a new employee. While one of the Michigan job offers was for six-day work weeks and an annual salary of $6,800, Buckler offered to hire Bowman sight-unseen, to help defray his moving expenses, and to pay him a salary of $1,000 a month.

Consequently, the Bowmans arrived in Alaska a year ahead of the Parkses, and, since Dane wasn’t slated to report to his new teaching job in Palmer until the end of August, he and Lee had decided on a hunt. After cooling their heels in Seward for a couple of hours, Gaede would fly them over the goat-friendly slopes of Cecil Rhode Mountain in Cooper Landing and show them an effective access point off Snug Harbor Road.

The morning flight to Seward was scenic but uneventful. While Gaede met with the rest of the Seward staff, Bowman and Parks wandered around town, visiting a local cannery and watching workers unload a shipment of fresh halibut. Bowman photographed the cannery workers and also snapped images of the city and Resurrection Bay.

When he finished his roll of film, he set the camera to REWIND and began cranking the film back into its canister. For some reason he still cannot fathom, however, he neglected to rewind the entire roll, leaving several exposed frames of film still stretched across the shutter and connected to the take-up reel inside the camera. It was an unfinished action he would later come to regret.

Gaede, meanwhile, finished his meeting, and the three men piled back into the plane, took off and headed through the pass toward Cooper Landing. After eyeballing the mountain for goats and examining the best approaches, Gaede turned the plane toward Soldotna, flying low down the Kenai River drainage and over the surrounding flats to give his passengers a chance to spot more animals.

By the time they were six river miles above the Soldotna airport and flew past the Fair homestead—where Dave Thomas was helping Joe Norris from Soldotna Supply to unload some lumber—they were cruising slowly at about 500 feet and had already seen numerous moose, plus one brown bear in the Funny River.

A minute or so later, their plane was spotted by Jack Foster as he worked on his snowmachine in his parents’ yard. And seconds later, the engine of the Maule Rocket was dead and they were knifing swiftly toward the ground.

********

The cause of the failure in the single-engine Maule Rocket is still open for debate—despite the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board—but the result of that engine failure remains irrefutable: The plane plummeted to the ground with its three occupants inside.

 “It was like you turned off the switch,” said Bowman. “It was just humming along fine—and then nothing!” The propeller stopped turning, and there was nothing to be heard but the sound of air rushing past the wings and fuselage. They were no more than 500 feet above the ground.

The plane’s nose dipped as their airspeed dropped. They had just passed over the dirt airstrip co-owned by France and Thomas. Below them now was mixed foliage, head-high brush and occasional large trees—a remnant of the 1947 Kenai Burn—and, beyond that, a copse of mostly mature aspen and spruce.

“Elmer had to make a choice: straight ahead into an absolute sure crack-up that was not very manageable because of the scattered trees and the crummy conditions, or try to turn—and if he turned, there was the airstrip and two different roads, potentially,” Bowman said.

“Even though we were flying too low and too slow to make a turn, he opted to try that. He made the turn, and it stalled. We dropped right out of the sky. Any expert that I ever talked to about it has said there was no way that plane should have been flying again before it hit the ground, but it did. Just before we hit, he got control again and he got the wings flat with the ground.

“Why it didn’t just auger straight in and kill us all is—well, the only answer I have is divine intervention.”

An instant before the Maule struck the ground, the left wing slammed into a spruce snag, and the plane pivoted 180 degrees even as the tree snapped off at ground-level. The underside of the nose bashed into the brush-covered soil, and the occupants of the plane were tossed about violently inside.

Dr. Gaede smiles through the pain.

Dr. Gaede’s face slammed into the hard dash above the steering column, breaking out five of his teeth, and the impact of the crash caused a compression fracture in his upper lumbar area. He passed out and slumped over onto Lee Bowman, who had fared even worse.

Bowman’s head had also surged forward on that initial contact with the ground, his face smashing into the instrument panel, slicing his upper lip all the way to the left nostril. Fragments of glass and metal tore at his forehead, and a small piece of his scalp and a hank of his hair were caught by the equipment and ripped away. Bowman also suffered a compression fracture to the lumbar area, and somehow he broke his left ankle.

In the backseat, as the gyro continued to wind down and the smell of smoke and hot oil permeated the air, Parks was bounced around, bruised and knocked cold, but at first appeared uninjured.

************

Thomas, a member of the local Civil Air Patrol, looked up from the new shipment of lumber when Foster skidded into the driveway. After a brief explanation, they were headed for the crash site, where Thomas instructed the boy to go home—the location of the closest telephone in those days—and to call an ambulance while he tended to the individuals in the plane.

Inside the plane, Bowman had been awake for a short time and was worrying about the prospect of a fire. He attempted to find a power switch to stop the flow of electricity, but the blood running into his eyes prevented him from seeing clearly. He shoved Gaede off his lap and into an upright position, grimacing at the biting pain in his lower back. Both Gaede and Parks were moaning softly, but neither had yet regained consciousness.

Despite freeing himself from the weight of the pilot, Bowman could not move effectively or force his door, which was wedged slightly ajar, to open all the way.

As Thomas was attempting to start a rescue, Foster was calling the Soldotna clinic. Immediately the nurse who answered the phone wanted to know if the pilot had been Dr. Gaede, but Foster had no idea. The plane had been unfamiliar to him.

Quickly an ambulance, driven by Don Thomas and Billy Thompson, was dispatched and en route. They arrived, coiling up dust on the gravel road, less than 15 minutes later.

Later, as Gaede—who had been raised in a Mennonite farming family—was being removed from the plane, Bowman remembers that Thompson said, “Okay, Doc, we’ll get you down to the clinic, and Doc Isaak will take care of you.” And Gaede said, “Who the hell is Dr. Isaak?”

“I can remember that just as clear as if it was today,” Bowman said, laughing. “Elmer rarely ever swore. I don’t know that I ever heard him swear.”

Gaede, his face bright red with blood, was transferred to the ambulance on a stretcher. The rescuers then tried to slide Bowman across Gaede’s seat, but his injuries made the move too painful, so they went to work on the jammed passenger door. According to Bowman, Don Thomas “fixed” the problem.

“He was a huge guy,” Bowman said. “He was about 6-4 and probably weighted close to 300 pounds—big strong burly guy. And he just took ahold of that door and literally ripped it off its hinges. Then he said, ‘There! We got some room.’”

After Bowman was hoisted out and carried to the ambulance, Parks climbed out on his own, appearing dazed but in control. Someone in a private car drove him to the clinic, where he was examined and sent to the Bowman home.

According to Bowman, however, Parks was not okay. “His activities throughout the day were just goofy,” he said. “He insisted that somebody drive him back out to the plane crash site and take his picture to prove that he was actually in the plane wreck. To this day, he has total amnesia of the wreck. He does not remember anything about the engine stopping, of Elmer turning. The next thing he remembers is being at our house.”

Dr. Gaede starts to heal.

Gaede and Bowman, meanwhile, needed immediate medical attention. In Prescription for Adventure: Bush Pilot Doctor, Gaede’s oldest daughter, Naomi, quotes her father: “Although I was in good hands with the well-qualified clinic nurses, Dr. Isaak hastily returned from Seward, in his plane, and sutured my face back together. It took over fifty stitches to pull together my forehead, chin and mouth area. Since I couldn’t shave over this new face-lift, I grew a goatee, mustache, and long sideburns.”

He refused to be sent to Providence Hospital in Anchorage, so he was driven home to recover.

Bowman, on the other hand, required the expertise available at Providence; unfortunately for him, getting that care in a timely fashion meant another airplane ride. On a stretcher, he was placed into the roomy back-end of a Piper Cherokee 6, which then took off into deteriorating weather.

“It was an absolutely horrendous flight,” Bowman said. “It was raining and hailing. The inside of that plane sounded like being on the inside of a snare drum. And the wire-basket stretcher that they put me in to strap me down had a metal reinforcement bar that was right across where my back was broken. Every time we would hit one of those slamming-up-and-down bumps, it made the flight even less fun. So I was pretty happy when we landed.”

At Providence, Bowman said his care seemed once again providential.

First sign of good luck: He was going to be under the auspices of Anchorage’s top orthopedic surgeon, Dr. George B. von Wyckman—although that knowledge was tempered somewhat by the notion that von Wyckman, who disliked plastic and cosmetic surgery, might also be sewing his face back together.

Second sign of good luck: At the moment Bowman arrived, Dr. von Wyckman was busy in the operating room, so, when Anchorage’s best thoracic surgeon, Dr. Arndt von Hippel, walked in to see if von Wyckman needed assistance, von Hippel was asked if he wouldn’t mind working on the new arrival. He said he’d be happy to help, so some of the state’s most talented hands performed delicate surgery on Bowman’s face. Von Hippel required 300 stitches to do the job. “He did such a miraculous job in putting me back together—my lip, my forehead, up in my scalp,” Bowman said. “It was an absolutely masterful job.  And you really have to look right now to see any of the scars.”

Third sign of good luck: Dr. von Wyckman had recently returned from a seminar on back surgery and recovery. At the seminar, emphasis had been placed on the use back braces, instead of full-body casts, to speed patient recovery. A back brace was ordered from out of state, and Bowman was fitted for it a few days later.

A month after the accident, Bowman was back at work at Soldotna Drug.

After the accident, a friend removed Bowman’s camera from the wreckage and thought Bowman might appreciate a few photos of the airplane, so he moved around and recorded three images on the film. Unfortunately, that trio of pictures were exposed over the images of the cannery workers, so Bowman had no wreck photos of his own until Parks sent him copies of a few of his Polaroids.

The man who remembered nothing at all from the incident gave Bowman evidence from an event he would never forget.

 

Dane Parks by the wreckage of the Maule Rocket.