Four airmen in a B-24 Liberator bomber couldn’t find their way through heavy fog as they headed east seeking Lovell Field. At 136 North Crest, young Josephine Houston was talking on the phone. Her parents were in the living room and her sister Mary David was in her upstairs bedroom in the limestone block home. Suddenly the phone went dead. A few seconds later, the bomber’s left wing seared the roof of the Houston home and the right wing demolished the massive front porch at the house next door. The burning fuselage crumpled to the ground between the two stately homes. Three airmen were killed outright, and the other died shortly thereafter.

Just eight days earlier, for Christmas, Mary David had gotten new bedroom furniture. It didn’t fit in her right rear bedroom, so she had moved to the front left bedroom. The plane made her former bedroom a fiery deathtrap, but Mary David was able to exit in safety from her new digs."

Here are some more points of interest to add to this narrative:

• The pilot was a battle-hardened WWII aviator named Gilbert Portmore who had earned the cushier duty of piloting brand-new B-24 Liberator's from the Ford plant at Detroit's Willow Run to the Bechtel Factory in Birmingham, AL, for additional fittings.

• "Gilly" as he was known, had flown over 100 missions and been awarded the Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart and two Air Medals. This clearly classifies him as an unusually distinguished war hero.

• In this time before advanced altimeters, the weather that evening had shut down visibility above 300 feet, yet portions of Missionary Ridge are higher than that. Captain Portmore had tried four times to land at the nearby airport, without success.

• "Gilly" was also a talented professional musician. He played trumpet with and arranged music for the well-known Bob Crosby (Bing's brother) and his swing band, "The Bobcats".

• The Dartmouth graduate had just married a 19-year-old Australian girl who was four months pregnant with his child at the time of his crash.

Flying brand new aircraft to final armament assembly SHOULD have been a job that tilted the survival odds in his favor. Did Portmore angle for the duty because of his new wife? Or was he placed in the job because of sinus problems he had developed that prevented him from flying any more high-altitude missions? What swing band hits did we miss hearing because of this man's early death?

I hope to be able to add pictures of the crash and an actual transcript of the airport tower operators trying to talk the plane in. For now, here is a 1944 picture of Captain Gilbert Portmore, USAAF.