Mistress of the Mix: Silver Linings

It’s not often, I think, that one could find a silver lining in something as tragic as a plane crash. But today, I reckon to do just that.

For this story, we’re going back to March 11, 1967. A small private plane, a single engine Cessna, took off from an airfield in Portland, Oregon. On board was 54-year-old Alvin Oien Sr., his wife Phyllis, and his teenage stepdaughter. And then it disappeared.

[s2If !current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)]

[/s2If]

[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)]

You might have heard about this story if you’ve lived here long enough, because it happened right here. Thirty five miles west of Redding, on the Shasta-Trinity county line. As the small plane flew over the Trinity Alps of Northern California it hit some bad weather, veered off course and crashed into a snowbank about 5,000 feet up, somewhere between Shoemaker Bally and Bully Choop Mountain south of Buckhorn Summit.  It was just 8 miles south of Highway 299. Close enough that if the snow hadn’t been so deep, and if someone had tried to venture down the road to Bully Choop Mine that spring, this story might have had a different ending.

The rugged terrain that hid the evidence of a 1967 plane crash.

Actually, no matter where you were at the time, if you were alive and old enough, you probably would’ve heard about it. The story was front page news across the country, and captured a lot of attention for years because of its aftermath. But the only reason anybody outside of northern California would remember this story today is probably because of Carla.

Carla Corbus

Carla Corbus was 15 years old. She was Phyllis Oien’s daughter from a previous marriage, the third person on the Cessna. Her stepfather Alvin, who owned the Clifford Hotel in Portland, was an experienced pilot, and was at the controls that day. It ran – or flew – in the family.

Oien’s 31-year-old son Alvin Jr. flew search and rescue missions while in the military, and was a commercial pilot for Delta Airlines in 1967. In fact, the Oiens were headed for the Bay Area that day to visit Alvin Jr. while he was on a layover. He was a respected man, known for his candor. Alvin Jr’s experience in all of these areas became very helpful later, but perhaps not in the way you might expect.

When the Cessna never made it to a scheduled refueling stop in Red Bluff, the plane was reported overdue, and a massive search and rescue operation was triggered. The last known location of the plane was when it had checked in 5 miles west of Medford. So the search area was massive. Alvin Jr. dropped everything to participate in the most important search mission of his life. He ended up in Redding, and stayed for 107 days, conducting hundreds of search flights across the region, hoping and hoping to find his family.

His family was hoping, too. Because they survived the crash. Injured, yes. But the Oien family, all three of them, survived. Phyllis was a nurse, so she probably tended to their wounds. Alvin had a broken arm and some fractured ribs. His back hurt. Phyllis also had a broken arm as well as a broken ankle, but Carla, miraculously, was only badly bruised.

Alvin Oien had faith that they would be rescued. So they waited. They waited, and waited, and waited. They rationed the small amount of food they had on board: some candy that included lemon drops and two bags of M&Ms, three small jars of jelly, some Milk of Magnesia tablets, and vitamins. They even ate a tube of toothpaste. They melted snow for water. They found an FAA airman’s log, and began to write about their ordeal in the margins and unused pages of the plastic-bound manual. They started lists of foods they wanted to eat after they were rescued, and gifts they’d like to receive.

After five days had passed, the Oiens decided they’d better quit waiting for someone to find them, and instead look for help themselves. Alvin decided that he should be the one to try to hike out. So he said goodbye to his wife and stepdaughter, and trudged off toward the west, in snow that was up to his armpits. He made it down the hill and through a gully, calling out that he was okay after making it across. And that was the last they heard from him. He never returned, and neither did help.

A page from Carla’s diary. “Just snow and hope….”

Meanwhile, back at the crash site, Carla and her mother tried to stay busy to keep their minds off of the gnawing hunger. Their food lasted only eleven days. They ripped up the plane’s upholstery and fashioned a deck of cards that they used to play pinochle. They wrote letters to loved ones. Carla and her mother starting keeping a diary in the airman’s log. Carla celebrated her 16th birthday. After a week Phyllis wrote that she feared Al hadn’t made it out. Carla kept things upbeat for the most part, teasing the search and rescue team she was sure would eventually find them, and writing (as seen in a page from the diary above), “No food, just snow and hope kept us alive.”

But it didn’t keep them alive forever.

In early October, almost seven months after the Oien family crashed in the mountains, Shasta resident Floyd Bolling was hunting for deer when he came across the crash site, along with the bear-scattered remains of Carla and Phyllis.

With only Carla’s diary to go by, investigators determined that the mother and daughter had lived for at least 54 days before a combination of starvation and exposure finally accomplished what the plane crash did not.

Alvin’s son didn’t give up the search simply because the women had been found. He still had hope that his father, a former logger and avid outdoors man, might still be out there, alive. He was joined by his two younger brothers, and the three continued searching for any sign of their father. Using as much vacation time as they could get, the brothers drove into the Bully Choop area, using the crash site as a jumping off point. They spent their days searching, their nights camping.

They never found their dad, and eventually gave up looking when they couldn’t take any more time off of work.

Then hunting season came around again. And again. It was September 23rd, 1969 when James White and his father-in-law John Graham were walking just off Bully Choop Road searching for deer, and instead they came across a human. Well, what was left of him.

All that was left of Alvin Sr. when he was found were some scattered bones, tattered clothing and a ballpoint pen, compliments of the Clifford Hotel. It was engraved with Alvin’s name. There was a pair of shoes, green with mold and missing their laces. A stray cuff link, a pair of pants with some money, a camera and Alvin’s glasses. There was also a stack of postcards that he’d written, with very specific instructions about how his estate and funeral arrangements should be handled in case of his death.

He knew.

Although Al never made it out, he came close.  When he finally perished, he was just 40 feet away from the road. He must have known that he was close to civilization, because there was no way he could’ve missed the telephone line that ran along the road. He’d also fashioned a large arrow on the ground, that most likely pointed towards the crash site. Something that could’ve been seen by the air. He had also hung a glove on the branch of a tree, hoping it would capture someone’s attention. He’d only made it less than a quarter of a mile away from the crash site. His sons had probably come so close so many times to finding their father.

With all the candor he was known for, Al Jr. was an outspoken critic of the failed search, and he had a prime spot to vent his frustrations in front page newspaper articles across the nation. He felt the Civil Air Patrol was poorly organized, and didn’t understand why Emergency Locator Transmitters weren’t standard equipment on all civil aircraft. The radio beacon technology existed, and had been used for years on military aircraft. Why not every aircraft? He wanted their story told far and wide, so he sold his stepsister’s diary to the Saturday Evening Post, which published excerpts of the diary, along with the story of their heroic, yet fruitless attempt to survive long enough to be found.

The story touched the soul of Colorado Senator Peter Dominick (a former military airman) who agreed with Oien. He immediately introduced legislation to require all civil aircraft to be equipped with Emergency Locator Transmitters, and by December of 1970, President Nixon was signing Federal Aviation Requirement 91.207 into law, effective at the end of 1973.

Although the Oien’s tale ends with their tragic deaths, those deaths have ultimately saved the lives of thousands of others who have been discovered alive because of a required device that pinpointed their location. So there you have it. I guess the takeaway from this tale is that if you look hard enough, even a plane crash can have a silver lining.

I’ve been referring to my own life over the past year as a total train wreck, but I think I’m going to start calling it a plane wreck instead. But I’m finally starting to get to the point where I’m finding the silver linings. Basically, 2018 was a real micro-penis of a year, and I’m glad to see it go. I know many of you are, too. But we’ve gotta keep looking for the silver linings. For the little things we can celebrate, like good food and a game of pinochle, and friends we know won’t give up looking for us if we go missing.

Here’s my most recent silver lining (which is sort of a cautionary tale in itself). I broke up with my veterinarian recently. Short story is that I had a falling out with a couple members of her office staff over my attempt to purchase flea medication and the $106 per month I was paying for my two dogs to be on an insurance plan. I felt like I was being hustled, and that they were spending a lot of effort to come up with reasons not to provide me with the services and discounts promised with the plan. And my dog had this nasty nasty cough that wasn’t going away. When we had our falling out, I asked for copies of my dog’s charts, and upon reading them discovered that the staff had written disparaging comments about me and my attitude right there in my dog’s permanent record. Classy.

I took my dog’s charts (along with x-rays the vet had taken four months ago to check out that nasty cough, that she’d prescribed anti-inflammation medication for) across the street to another vet, a sweet old guy who looks like Wilfred Brimley. He took one look at the x-rays and asked me why the other vet hadn’t mentioned congestive heart failure? He didn’t want to criticize, but it was really obvious what was going on. I told him that not only had the vet not said a word about congestive heart failure, but that when she took the very same x-xays that he was looking at a few months before, that she had noted in his chart that his heart was normal. Appropriate, she said. Which it most definitely wasn’t.

The new vet gave me the correct medications, put my dog on a special heart diet, and after a few weeks his wheezing has stopped completely.

I remember being so enraged about the way the office staff at the first vet had treated me that I couldn’t get over it. Until the moment the second vet figured out the diagnosis that the first vet had botched completely. If it hadn’t been for that entire ugly experience, my dog would be dead right now. Silver lining.

If you’ve got a silver lining story of your own to share, please do, and I hope you find something to enjoy in the Silver Linings Playlist below.

By the way, I need to throw a shout out to my ace radio volunteer, Good Rockin’ Derral Campbell (he hosts Late Night Blues on JPR almost every Saturday from 10 p.m. to midnight), who came into the station earlier this week and asked me if I’d heard the story about the family who’d crashed a plane in the Trinity Alps 50 years ago and survived for months waiting to be rescued. If you’re interested in reading more about the story, aviator and novelist Ross Nixon collaborated with Alvin Oien Jr. to write an entire book about the doomed flight and the Oien’s incredible fight for survival and its lasting impact on aviation. Finding Carla, published a year or two ago, can be found through numerous booksellers, and soon should also be available at the Shasta Public Library, thanks to a grant that helps pay for books just like these that have a deserving place on the bookshelf of the local history section.

[/s2If]