‘She’s still 19’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/12/2016 (3447 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Note to readers: On Dec. 9, 2006, Free Press reporter Kevin Rollason talked to family members of Winnipeggers who had perished fifty years earlier in what was then Canada’s worst air disaster, the crash of Flight 810. Ten years after that article was penned, we republish Kevin’s article to mark the 60th anniversary of the crash.

Fifty years ago today, Denise Beernaerts boarded a plane in Vancouver three times to fly to Winnipeg for her father’s funeral, and three times she got off before finally getting on a fourth and final time.

Fear of flying for the first time or premonition?

We’ll never know, because the 19-year-old Beernaerts was one of 62 passengers and crew — including several Canadian Football League all-star players — who perished in what was then Canada’s worst air disaster, the crash of Flight 810 on Mount Slesse in British Columbia.

“She’s still 19 years old to me and always will be,” recalled her older sister, Winnipegger Angela Huyghe, now 71.

“I didn’t know her any other age after that. She’s just 19.”

Trans-Canada Air Lines (now Air Canada) Flight 810, carrying 59 passengers and three crew, took off from Vancouver on Dec. 9, 1956, en route to Calgary, with further stops at Regina, Winnipeg and Toronto. The crew of the plane was scheduled to be relieved in Winnipeg.

According to reports in the Free Press at the time of the crash, the four-engine North Star was about an hour into the flight over the Cascades mountain range in B.C. when one of the engines caught fire and the plane turned back for Vancouver.

In radio transmissions, pilot Allan Clarke was calm and had just told air traffic control he had received a message to cross Hope, B.C., at 8,000 feet.

Despite repeated attempts to contact the plane, that was the last transmission.

A massive search for the wreckage in the weeks to come was unsuccessful.

It was finally discovered the following May by a team of mountain climbers.

The plane had been off course and slammed into the side of the mountain at a high rate of speed. Its debris was scattered below.

The bodies and wreckage were left on the mountain because it was too dangerous to mount a recovery effort.

The flight claimed the lives of several star players with the Canadian Football League, who were heading back to their home teams after playing in the then-annual all-star game.

Calvin Jones, a guard with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers for a single year and originally from Steubenville, Ohio, died in the crash.

The Free Press reported at the time that Jones was originally booked on an earlier flight, but slept in and was “squeezed aboard” the fatal flight.

Several Saskatchewan Roughriders were also killed: Gordon Sturtridge and his wife, Mildred, former Winnipeggers 28 years old; and Mel Becket, Ray Syrnyk, and Mario DeMarco.

The CFL’s DeMarco-Becket Memorial Trophy, handed to the West Division’s most outstanding offensive linesman, is named after two of the players killed on the plane. The Roughriders also retired the numbers of their four football players.

A spokesman for the Bombers said nothing was named after Jones and the team has never retired any player numbers in its history.

Huyghe said the day her sister died was already a tragic day for her family. Her father had been stricken with a brain aneurysm at 11 p.m. the night before, and passed away at 3 a.m. The family sent an urgent telegram to Denise telling her to come home.

“We sent a telegram telling her our dad had died and we told her to fly home on the first flight and we’d tell her what happened when she got here,” Huyghe said.

“We all went to the airport and we waited for hours. It was snowing and we kept straining our eyeballs looking at females coming in. At 5 a.m., we finally went home and a few hours later a CEO from Air Canada came to my mother and said the plane was missing.”

Huyghe said for months, the anxious family waited with no word on what had happened to the plane.

“We just were in the dark. It was five months of nothing. Now you would get counselling, but not then.

“I still am coming to terms with it.”

Huyghe said the family later found out from her sister’s roommates, all Winnipeggers who had moved to Vancouver together two months before, that Denise had been skittish about getting on the plane, getting on and off three times.

“They said she didn’t want to get on, but they said you have to go on for your mother. It was her first plane ride.”

Marcel Beernaerts, Denise’s older brother, said although it has been 50 years, to him “it’s pretty fresh yet.

“She was always my favourite. She was always a happy-go-lucky girl. She was pretty daring and she was never scared of anything.

“I don’t know if she knew something when she didn’t get on the plane at first.”

He said about 10 years ago, he went with his daughter and his wife’s niece to the crash site.

Marcel’s daughter, Paulette, said she took photos of the crash site after hiking ahead into a valley where the wreckage has ended up after sliding down the side of the mountain through the years.

“I saw a wheel and there was a lot of steel from the plane,” she said.

“It was a clear day and it was so serene and quiet. We saw the mountain top.”

Vicki Sturtridge, who was six at the time her parents were killed, now lives in Winnipeg.

Sturtridge says she was too young to remember her parents. She said she and her younger sister and brother were raised by her maternal grandparents, Ted and Amy Allford, after the crash. They moved to British Columbia but returned to Winnipeg in the 1960s after her grandfather died.

“What’s too bad is that was my mom’s first time flying,” she said.

“My father wanted her to go to that game, but if she hadn’t gone she’d still be with us.”

Like the members of the Beernaerts family, Sturtridge said she has been to the mountain to see the site where the wreckage is.

“I didn’t go there for closure,” she said. “It wasn’t curiosity. It was something I felt I had to do. Once I got there, the feelings overwhelmed me.”

Sturtridge, her sister and other relatives of people killed in the crash had a memorial ceremony at a marker erected at the site.

“We, as children, weren’t allowed to go to the memorial ceremony in 1957… so being at the monument was really nice.”

Sturtridge said she was at a ceremony last month when her dad and his earlier football team, the Norwood-St. Boniface Legionnaires, were inducted into the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame.

“When I was younger, people would recognize my last name and bring it up, but that doesn’t happen anymore. It’s just so long ago.

“Life goes on. I’ve certainly had a fine life.”

About 10 years ago, the British Columbia government made the mountain a restricted area after surviving relatives feared logging was going to be done in the area.

“I’m glad it’s off limits to trespassers now,” Huyghe said. “We put her name on my father’s tombstone because we thought we would get her remains, but we never did. But at the mountain, it’s a memorial grave site.

“And I know, my sister is there.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca