How the 1962 Orly plane crash, which claimed 115 Georgians, forever altered the city’s destiny

By RICH SHUMATE
Atlanta Magazine/June 1992

The jet that crashed was six time zones and 4,000 miles from Atlanta, in France. But it was this city, not Paris, whose destiny was altered forever in an instant in 1962 — more than 100 of Atlanta’s best and brightest violently consumed by flame, the quiet of a Sunday June morning punctured by news so unexpected, so immense that it was beyond understanding.

A city was thrown into a summer of grief, of funerals, of learning to cope without people who were so much a part of the fabric of leadership, of life.

“Everyone I came into contact with that morning couldn’t believe that it happened,” says Ivan Allen Jr., who was Atlanta’s mayor in 1962 and who knew most of the dead. “People were just not willing to accept it.”

A plane crash is always tragic because of the suddenness with which a group of healthy, happy people, usually thrown together by chance, engaging the benign exercise of air travel, perish in one horrible, gruesome instant. But the crash at Orly Airport in Paris on June 3, 1962, was unique in that its victims were not strangers hailing from distant points.

On board were 115 Georgians, 106 from metro Atlanta.

None survived.

At the time, former Mayor William Hartsfield called the disaster the biggest blow to Atlanta since the Civil War.

The roster of the dead was made up disproportionately of members of the city’s powerful gentry. They were a Who’s Who of Atlanta: businessmen, members of prominent families, the ladies in charge of good words. They were a close-knit bunch, had grown up together, lived near each other in upscale neighborhoods on the northside like Buckhead and Ansley Park. They worshiped together in churches like Second-Ponce De Leon Baptist, First Presbyterian, St. Philip’s and Christ the King cathedrals. The lunched together at the Piedmont Driving Club, the Capital City Club. They were people who had the time and money to travel through Europe for a month. On board the plane were 27 married couples, 11 major corporate executives, 13 women active in the Junior League.

And arts patrons. Especially arts patrons.

For the common threat that brought these Atlantans together was the Atlanta Art Association. Only members of the association, which promoted arts programs and ran an art school and museum, were eligible for the trip, designed to promote the group and expose its members to the treasures in the museums of Europe.

Many on the tour were longtime members who had worked hard to promote the arts in the city, but perhaps a third of the people on the plane joined the association just to go on the European trip.

Only about 45 people had taken the full, month-long tour organized by Air France and American Express, considered a bargain at $895. Over the course of a month, those travelers had gone sight-seeing and museum hopping in London, Amsterdam, Lucerne, Venice, Florence and Rome, before ending their tour in Paris. The rest of the group went to Europe on a charter, traveled on their own and then returned to Paris for the trip back home.

Atlanta Constitution columnist Doris Lockerman described those who perished on the plane as “couples rewarding themselves with the adventure of a lifetime; the bon vivants who took these European jaunts as regularly as opportunity presented itself, stepping upon a transoceanic airplane as casually as if they were boarding a Peachtree bus; the wives whose husbands had no taste for sight-seeing, or no time to take from their work, and had urged them to go on this holiday with their friends; the parents awakening the sensibilities of their children to the world around them; the widows, radiant, gallantly self-reliant, filling unaccustomed spaces of time with new interests.”

The list of the dead was a list of men and women of achievement:

Roby Robinson, partner in the Robinson-Humphrey investment firm, and his wife, Louise, who lived for many years in the landmark Pint Castle on West Paces Ferry Road.

Frances Longino, a member of the city’s library board and daughter of the co-founder of Davidson’s department store.

Katherine Bleckley, clerk of the Georgia Supreme Court and a descendent of one of Georgia’s most prominent families.

Morris Brandon Jr., owner of Superior Syringe Co. (Morris Brandon elementary school in the city was named for his father.)

Raiford Ragsdale, who the year before had completed a two-year tenure as the only woman on the Atlanta school board.

Charles Shaw Sr., a Sears executive and superintendent of the Sunday school at Druid Hills Baptist Church.

Ruth McMillan, Atlanta’s Woman of the Year in 1955, who campaigned to allow women to serve on juries and enroll at Georgia Tech.

Sidney Wien, a retired businessman whose passion was buying artwork and donating it to museums.

Rosalind Williams, a vice president at Tucker Wayne and Co. advertising agency.

Dr. Christopher McLoughlin, a well-known physician on the staff at Piedmont Hospital.

William Cartledge, owner of the El Morocco supper club. His wife, Helen, president of the Theatre Atlanta Women’s Guild.

Redfern Hollins, a transplant from England who was director of research at W.R.C. Smith Publishing Co.

C. Baxter Jones Jr., a lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1952. His wife, Julia, was a past president of the Junior League.

Del Paige, who headed the Atlanta office of the national accounting firm Ernst & Ernst and was president of the Atlanta Art Association.

Of course, not everyone on the tour was rich or prominent. But each one had a story that ended that day at Orly.

Helen Seydel was an artist who told a friend that she saw this trip to Europe as a “spiritual resurrection.” Her marriage had ended suddenly, unexpectedly, upending her life. Now, at age 46, refreshed by a pilgrimage to Florence, Seydel believed the was ready to return to Atlanta and begin again.

After the crash, Life magazine printed a picture of the room where she painted at her home on Lakeland Drive. Her artist’s tools were as she left them, in strict order. The tubes of paint were lined up neatly, the brushes reposed on the left edge of the table. On the wall above the easel was a self-portrait of a middle-aged women with auburn hair and green eyes.

Paul Doassans, 42, was the district manager for Air France in Atlanta who helped organize the trip. He had not actually taken part in the tour, but he decided to fly to Paris and make the return trip with the group. He was coming home to a new bride, a stewardess for Delta Airlines he had married just five months earlier.

Douglas Davis Jr., 33, had not been on the tour, either — he lived in Paris — but he was among home folks. He was the son of pioneer Atlanta aviator Douglas Davis Sr., who died in a plane crash in 1934. The younger Davis left the city in 1958, embarking on a career as an artist. In Paris, he had met up with an old friend on the tour, Tito Italgo, with whom he had studied art in Atlanta. Italgo wanted to stay in Europe, so Davis took his seat on the plane to come home to help his mother move into a new home.

Betsy Bevington got on the plane with her mother after she bid her husband, Milton, goodbye in the terminal at Orly Airport. He didn’t take part in the tour, but he had surprised his wife by meeting her in Paris for a short vacation.

“We just did the normal ‘touristy’ things,” he says — seeing the Louvre, Saint-Chapelle, taking the Michelin guide and walking the city.

But the Bevingtons would not be together on the flight that afternoon. He was booked on a later plane because she didn’t like them to fly together. Her caution would, in hindsight, seem like a premonition.

“She was somewhat apprehensive of airplanes in general. Our sons at that time were 7, 8 and 9. She thought it would be unfortunate if we had an accident and both parents were taken out,” Bevington says.

“I kind of pooh-poohed the idea.”

The skies were clear and sunny. It was nearly half past noon, Paris time. The plane was a half-hour late because the Atlanta travelers had dawdled in the airport’s duty-free shops, making last-minute purchases.

Captain Roland-Paul Hoche moved the Air France Boeing 707, named Chateau de Sully, away from the terminal toward runway No. 26.

Happy, full of the experience of Europe, the travelers were on their way back home.

The takeoff proceeded normally. Then, after the plane got just a few feet off the ground, the wheels touched back down. The plane veered off the runway.

“At that point, you could see black smoke, and you got a pretty good idea that something was wrong,” says Bevington.

He had been watching his wife’s plane take off through a terminal window.

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R.P. Turner Jr. first heard the news over his clock radio when he woke up that Sunday morning in his Atlanta apartment.

He was 19, a student at Georgia Tech. He had grown up in Marshallville, a small town between Macon and Americus famous for its devotion to colorful camellias.

Turner’s mother, Louise Turner, painted watercolors of camellias in exacting, botanically correct detail. She had give up a career as a fashion illustrator in New York to return to Georgia with her husband, and she had developed a renown for capturing camellias as no one else could. But Mrs. Turner didn’t limit her repertoire. She plucked people off the street to pose for her and made her two sons sit and pose when what they really wanted to do was go play baseball. She worked in the light of sun porches on either side of the Turners’ brick home on East Main Street, and she would move from one porch to the other as the sun moved through its day.

That afternoon, R.P. Turner was to meet his parents at the Atlanta airport. His mother liked to travel and expose herself to a wider world of art, and her husband would accompany her on forays. Even though she didn’t live in the city, she was a member of the Atlanta Art Association.

The Turners had gone with their friends to Europe. They were to return home in time to see their youngest son, Tom, graduate from high school the following Tuesday.

When he woke up, R.P. heard the news. A plane had crashed in Paris. Early reports were sketchy and only hinted at the magnitude of news to come.

“The first thing I started doing was figuring flight times,” he says. “Thinks started clicking in.”

The first wire service report of the tragedy, from United Press International, reached Atlanta at 7:27 a.m.: Paris, June 3 — An Air France Boeing airliner crashed today at Orly Airport with more than 100 persons aboard, airport authorities said. The French news agency France Press said, “Few of them escaped death.”

There was no mention yet of the plane’s destination; that would come 15 minutes later, from the Associated Press: The plane was bound for New York, Atlanta and Houston.

Newsman King Elliott was on duty at WSB Radio that morning when the first rudimentary reports arrived, saying that an undetermined number of Atlantans had perished in a plane crash in France. There was no mention yet that this was the art association’s plane. Elliott decided to alert Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. and called his home.

Allen was out of town, at his family’s farm in Heard County, about an hour west of the city near the Alabama line. He had been mayor for less than six months, after winning a hard-fought campaign against segregationist Lester Maddox. It had been a rocky few months. Voters torpedoed a bond issue proposed by Allen, which included money for an arts center in Piedmont Park. And he had taken some hard hits after ordering erection of a barricade on a street running between white and black neighborhoods where racial tension had risen.

He hadn’t fared well in his first tests as mayor, and now he was to face one that was unprecedented.

The mayor’s wife, Louise, called him at the farm and passed along the few details Elliott had given her. He told her to call back if she heard more information and started out the door. Then, Allen says it dawned on him that it had been a month since he had gone to the airport and bid farewell to the art association tour. He knew they were scheduled to return after a month, and he began to fear the worst.

He called his secretary, Ann Moses, and asked her to open City Hall. Still in the work clothes he was wearing on the farm, he tuned his car radio to WSB and drove back to the city.

“(The news) was very fragmentary at that point,” Allen says. As he was driving back, he heard an announcer say that Jack Glenn, a friend of Allen’s, and his wife were among the victims.

“I knew that wasn’t the case. I knew they were in Atlanta,” Allen says.

But he was also hearing names of people he knew were on the tour.

King Elliott had made another call that morning, to Aubrey Morris, then news director at WSB. Morris wasn’t home, either, and Elliott passed on the information to his wife.

Morris, too, knew many of the people on the tour and had seen them off at the airport. In his years covering news in the city, he frequently came into contact with them. He was at an early church service in Sandy Springs that Sunday when an usher tapped him on the shoulder and told him that his wife had call the church and wanted to take to him about a plane crash in Paris, France.

“I knew immediately what it was,” he says.

The crash happened at 6:29 a.m. Atlanta time, as the city was just beginning to awaken. News did not have the immediacy in 1962 that it has today. It was almost an hour after the crash before reports started reaching Atlanta, and the details were sketchy and incomplete. Some early reports said that only 18 Atlantans had died in the crash, that most of the people on the art association tour were still in Europe.

By 10 a.m., that hope would be gone forever.

As Atlantans got in their cars and went to church, they began hearing the full story. Of the 132 people on the plane, 130 had perished. Only two French stewardesses, who had been thrown from the plane as it broke apart, survived.

Back in Paris, Milton Bevington encountered the stewardesses when he went to an Air France office in the terminal, knowing that the plane had crashed but still clinging to hope that his wife might have survived.

“They were sitting in the office. When I saw them, I guess I thought I might see some other people …” he says, his voice trailing off. But he learned there were only two survivors, and neither one of them was his wife.

Betsy Bevington was 33. When she graduated from college, her parents had promised her a trip to Europe, but she didn’t go at the time, choosing to marry instead. One decade and three children later, her father decided to make good on the promise. He was supposed to accompany her on the trip but died the January before. Her mother came from Florida to take the tour instead.

Once he knew his wife had died, Milton Bevington put in a call to some friends in Atlanta, asking them to take his sons to a cabin on Lake Rabun so that the wouldn’t hear the news on the radio or television. He wanted to tell them himself.

“The next day, when I came back, I went up to the cabin and broke the news,” Bevington says.

At the time Betsy Bevington and the rest of the passengers died in 1962, the Orly crash was the worst single-plane disaster in the history of aviation. The only local disasters that Atlantas of 1962 could remember through their own experience to rival the crash were the Dec. 7, 1946 fire at the city’s supposedly fireproof Winecoff Hotel that killed 119; and a tornado that hit Gainesville in 1936, killing more than 200.

But neither of those tragedies had taken so many of their personal friends.

In 1962, WSB Radio broadcast Sunday services from the First Presbyterian Church. The day of the crash, the broadcast was interrupted to that Morris, at the Air France office on Forsyth Street, could begin reading names of the dead. Assisted by a businessman who had come to the office and knew many of the victims, Morris began giving short biographies, trying to be a reporter, and keep his emotions from creeping into his voice.

Then he got to the name of Ruth McMillan. He knew her and her sister, May, very well.

“It was in their house that I had my first room when I came to work at the Atlanta Journal after coming from the University of Georgia,” he says.

When Morris got off the air, he put in a call to May.

That afternoon, families and friends of the travelers crowded into the Air France office to receive confirmation of what they deep down already knew. A woman on the airline’s staff, Collette Lautzenhiser, checked a passenger list for the anxious, repeating over and over in her light French accent, “I’m sorry … I’m so sorry.”

In the archives of the Atlanta History Center is a passenger list of the ill-fated flight, with names in green-tinted teletype ink. Beside some names are check marks, beside others question marks. In the margin of several pages, in a delicate hand, the word “notify” is written, followed by names and addresses.

By late afternoon, a traffic jam had developed downtown along Forsyth Street. Word had spread that the Journal was planning a special edition, the first since Margaret Mitchell was hit by a car and killed in 1949, and a crowd had gathered in front of the newspaper offices. The extra carried a straightforward banner headline: 119 Georgians Killed In Fiery Paris Jet Crash

A Paris newspaper was more dramatic: Catastrophe a Orly. Un Boeing S’Ecrase: 130 Morts

Ivan Allen wasn’t sure what a mayor should do to respond to a disaster of this magnitude — there was no precedent. By that afternoon, he had decided that his place was in Paris.

“I thought it was the right thing to do. It was purely to be a help to the families (of the victims),” Allen says. “I had no position of authority outside of Atlanta.”

He also had no experience in international diplomacy. Atlanta mayors then were not the worldwide travelers they are today, so he would have to rely on his education and instincts. Reflecting on that afternoon years later in his book, Mayor: Notes on the Sixties (written with Paul Hemphill), Allen wrote that one thought that crossed his mind was how fortunate it was that he, and not Lester Maddox, was representing Atlanta.

At 5:55 p.m., Allen, accompanied by Assistant City Attorney Ed Sterne, left on a flight to New York. They would catch a connecting Air France flight to Paris on a Boeing 707, the same kind of plane that had crashed.

Morris traveled with Allen and Sterne. When he had heard that the mayor was going to Paris, he went to his boss at WSB, Elmo Ellis, and told him that he thought the place to cover the story was in Paris. To his surprise, station management let him go. He would be the only Atlanta journalist on the scene for two days. Mayor Allen, not used to the crush of media in New York, asked Morris to also act as his unofficial press aide. He agreed.

When the Atlanta entourage arrived at Orly, they flew over the crash site. They saw the skid marks on the runway, evidence of Captain Hoche’s ill-fated attempt to stop the plane. They saw the wreckage, off the end of a runway next to a cherry orchard near a small French village.

When the mayor’s party toured the crash site a short time later, the debris was still smoking, and many of the victims’ personal belongings, thrown from the plane as it was breaking apart before the explosion, were strewn all over the runway. They found unbroken bottles of champagne, and the mayor picked up a banner from the West Point Rotary Club, which belonged to a friend on the trip, Morgan Ganty. He saw a dress that, because of the color and style, he recognized as belonging to Nancy Frederick.

“She was the first date I had as a young man,” Allen says. “I remember going over to her house on my red bicycle on a Sunday to pay a call.”

At the time of the crash, Allen described the victims as “my generation. We were boys and girls together.” Thirty years later, Allen, now 81, points at a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from those dark days ans says, “There’s a list of my friends.

“It’s still emotional.”

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Roland-Paul Hoche was 40 and had been a pilot with Air France for 16 years. Eighteen months before the crash of the Chateau de Sully, he had tried to qualify to flying the Boeing 70 and failed. Four months later, on his second try, he passed.

Some early reports speculated that the plane was perhaps too overloaded to get airborne. The absolute maximum capacity of a 707 was 312,000 pounds, and, on June 3, the Chateau de Sully was carrying 303,000 pounds.

Yet, the official investigation found that the plane should have been able to take off with the weight it was carrying. It was a series of human errors that prevented the plane from getting off the ground.

The first mistake was made when the flight crew incorrectly set the angle of the horizontal stabilizers (the small wings on the back of the jet). When Captain Hoche put the engines in full thrust down the runway and tried to pull up on the controls to get airborne, the plane rose only a few feet, then returned to the runway.

What Hoche should have done at that point, according to investigators, was pull up forcefully on the controls. Instead, he threw the engines into reverse thrust, put on the brakes and tried to stop the plane. It was his last, fatal error.

When a jet is hurtling down a runway, it reaches a point of no return, after which a pilot is committed to taking off. Under procedures used at the time of the crash, the co-pilot called out the point of no return to the pilot.

Calculations made by investigators show that Hoche was past that point when he tried to stop the plane. The question, however, is whether he knew that he was, whether the co-pilot called out the proper warning. In 1962, there were no voice recorders in the cockpits of planes as there are now. (In fact, after the Orly crash, aviation officials in the United States started looking at requiring cockpit voice recorders in all planes. They are now standard.) So what was said, and by whom, died with the flight crew.

As Hoche tried to stop the plane, it began careening down the runway and crashed through some runway lights. The left wing hit the ground, and the tail section of the plane broke away, throwing the two stewardesses who survived, as well as a steward who later died from his injuries, free from the plane.

The front of the jet then crashed through a fence and leveled an unoccupied house in the village of Villeneuve le Roi. The fuel then caught on fire and exploded.

The passengers burned to death.

“We just only hope it was instant,” says R.P. Turner. “They told us it was.”

The plane crash occurred three days before the anniversary of the D-Day invasion, and the villagers of Villeneuve le Roi were holding a ceremony commemorating the liberation of prisoners of war. Firemen and policemen in dress uniform rushed to the scene to put out the fire.

It took two hours of fire fighting before the bodies could be removed. They were laid in the cherry orchard and later taken to five morgues in and around Paris. Allen and his party would later visit all five morgues to see if they could visually identify any of the bodies.

They could not. It would take several weeks before all of the bodies were identified through finger prints, dental records and personal effects.

Damage claims were filed against Air France on behalf of 122 victims. However, international flights are governed by a treaty known as the Warsaw Convention, which limited the amount of damages that the airline would have to pay to $8,300 per victim. Lawyers for the Orly families argued that since the flight was a charter, not a commercial flight, it was not governed by the treaty. They took that argument to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals but lost.

In February 1969, the final claims against Air France were settled. The average payment was $84,000 per victim.

Three days after the crash, the people of France participated in an interdenominational memorial service at the American Cathedral in Paris. During the service, a choir sang the standard hymn, “God Be in My Head.”

“Every time I hear that song, I’m reminded of that occasion,” says Aubrey Morris. For him, the service in Paris is his most vivid, emotional memory from those days 30 years ago.

After the service, Ivan Allen’s party returned to Atlanta, arriving in the city at 7:40 p.m. Wednesday evening, June 6. Morris recalls that the crowd at the airport, which included families of the dead, applauded as the mayor came into the terminal. “God bless you, Ivan,” one man said to Allen.

Over the next seven and a half years in office, the city would see grace under pressure from Allen in other troubled times — during the Summerhill riots in 1966, while testifying for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. But his handling of the plane crash established Ivan Allen as a leader and a legend.

Members of the mayor’s party had virtually no sleep over the course of three days in France. For Allen, it had been an emotional time, seeing his burned friends in morgues, seeing their belongings on the runway. After reporters at the Atlanta airport had asked their questions, the mayor’s wife, Louise, took him by the arm and said, “Will you please excuse him?” then led Allen away.

The day before the service in Paris, two Atlanta churches hard hit by the crash, the Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King and St. Philip’s Episcopal Cathedral, held memorial services. Each had lost 20 members in the crash.

Christ the King was crowded past capacity, the largest Mass in the church’s history. Life magazine ran a photograph of a woman who could not get a seat inside, kneeling in worship on the cathedral’s steps.

The first three bodies came home on June 15. Over the next month, as the dead came back home, there were as many as five funerals a day.

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On June 3, 1966, four years to the day after Atlanta’s European voyagers perished at Orly, their next-of-kin gathered at 15th and Peachtree streets, next to the old High Museum, to break ground on the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center.

Not long after the crash, Atlantans had begun talking about what they might do to commemorate those who died. What they decided is quintessential Atlanta: They decided to build something.

In this case, it was a $13 million arts center, built with private funds raised in the names of the victims. Today, the memorial center, now a part of the Robert W. Woodruff Arts Center, is home to the Atlanta Symphony, the Alliance Theater and the Atlanta College of Art. The current High Museum was added in 1983.

The citizenry had rejected an arts center before the crash. Afterward, it embraced the idea.

There were predictions at the time of the crash that it might take 25 or 30 years for the city to recover from the vacuum in leadership caused by the crash; that turned out not to be so.

On the occasion of the opening of the arts center, the French government gave the city a bronze cast of Rodin’s The Shade, which still sites in the main stairwell of the building.

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After hearing news of the plane crash on the radio, R.P. Turner got a friend to drive him back to Marshallville. When he arrived, the yard of his parents’ house was filled with people. Both the Methodist and Baptist churches had canceled services, and mourners came to pay their respects.

“It was a true outpouring,” he says. “Mom and Dad had so many friends.”

R.P. Turner did not return to Georgia Tech. He and his brother, Tom, took over the family’s farm, which they still operate today. They took all of their mother’s artwork and put it up in the attic of his parents’ house, where R.P. and his family now live.

About a year ago, R.P.’s wife, Susan, brought out Louise Turner’s extraordinary collection, which includes 250 works. Among them is a self-portrait, which she painted while looking in a mirror.

The family decided that her legacy shouldn’t sit in a musty old attic. They are now selling prints of two of the camellia watercolors and working with an Atlanta curator to set up an exhibition of Louise Turner’s work.

When their mother was making them pose instead of letting them play baseball, the sons resisted. Now, they feel blessed that they have these pieces of their past and their mother.

She is back home, in her own house. But for her son R.P., the memory of the news on the radio that morning in Atlanta doesn’t go away, not even after 30 years.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it.”

For Milton Bevington, who remarried three years after the crash, what he witnessed that day in Paris is still hard to talk about, even after three decades. But he says what usually comes back to his mind is not the smoke but the faces of the travelers in the terminal, a vivid picture of both his wife and her mother.

“It’s always in your mind. I won’t say it’s on your mind, but in your mind,” he says. And as for getting over witnessing such a disaster, “you kind of decide you don’t have much option but to go on.”

“You just decided you’ve got to do it, and you do it.”

And that’s what Atlanta did.