A Plane Crash in Brooklyn Overshadowed Her Childhood

New York Times

20-05-2025

Good morning. It's Tuesday. Today we'll meet a woman who wrote a memoir about how her life was affected by a midair collision over New York Harbor nearly 65 years ago. We'll also find out about graduation day for Mohsen Mahdawi, who led pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University — and was arrested by immigration officers last month.
Also, watch your inbox. Coming your way later today will be our limited-edition newsletter, The Sprint for City Hall. It will look at how tensions over the war in Gaza have made their way into the mayor's race and even affected a parade over the weekend. It will also look at how another time-tested political tool, candidates' children, are being deployed as the June 24 primary approaches.
Marty Ross-Dolen went to Green-Wood Cemetery to stand by a monument that her grandparents' names are on. The monument is 'hidden back there,' she said. 'You don't know that people even know about it.'
She herself didn't know much about why her grandparents' names belonged on the monument until nearly 20 years ago, when she was in her mid-40s and finally read up on something that was almost never talked about when she was growing up: a midair collision over New York Harbor in December 1960.
Her grandparents — her mother's mother and father — had been passengers on one of the two planes.
'The plane crash had been a part of my life since I asked my mother where her parents were,' Ross-Dolen said. 'I must have been 4. I knew who they were because there were pictures around the house, and I was named for my grandmother. But my mother raised me in silence. In the 1960s, there was no language for processing grief.'
Ross-Dolen, who learned that language on her way to becoming a child psychiatrist and a writer, has processed more than grief in a just-published memoir, 'Always There, Always Gone: A Daughter's Search for Truth' (She Writes Press). It is a very personal account of the aftermath of a disaster that captured attention for a few days. Then the world moved on — for everyone else.
Her mother's parents, Garry and Mary Myers, ran the magazine Highlights for Children, which Garry Myers's parents had started after World War II. Ross-Dolen said the trip to New York, with another Highlights executive, had a purpose. Her grandparents wanted to see about getting Highlights for Children on newsstands.
They boarded a Trans World Airlines plane in Columbus, Ohio, where they lived and the magazine had its headquarters. New York was little more than 90 minutes away on the propeller-driven Super Constellation, and as it pushed through sleet and fog, air traffic controllers cleared it to descend to 5,000 feet on its way to landing at LaGuardia Airport.
A different plane heading toward a different airport was also preparing to land — a United Airlines DC-8, bound for what was then known as Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International Airport). The two aircraft should never have been less than three miles from each other. But the jet, which had transceiver trouble, was not over New Jersey, where the pilots and the air traffic controllers assumed it was. It was already over Staten Island.
And then the two dots on the radar screen merged into one. In all, 134 people died — 128 passengers and crew members on the two planes, and 6 people on the ground in Brooklyn, where wreckage from the United plane landed in Park Slope.
'There was one time in high school when I discovered my mother looking at old newspapers,' Ross-Dolen said. 'I didn't inquire. I didn't try to find those articles.' But in 2008, with a little time on her hands, 'I decided to sneak, almost like a kid, and see what had happened.'
And by 2008, there was Google, which made her search easier.
'I'm sure I was shaking when I was reading about it,' she said.
Then, in 2010, as the 50th anniversary of the accident approached, she and her mother talked about it — to a reporter from The Columbus Dispatch, who had asked to interview her mother. 'We were trying to hold ourselves together,' Ross-Dolen said. 'It became less a mother-daughter thing and more partners in mourning.'
In The New York Times's articles about the anniversary, I wrote that it was 'almost a ghost disaster, one without the universally shared imagery of the Titanic or the Hindenburg, one that is, in a strange way, nearly forgotten by those who weren't there or touched directly by it.'
Ross-Dolen was touched by it, even though she was born six years after it happened. She began working on her book after the monument was unveiled on the 50th anniversary of the crash. She said that seeing it again last week was 'profound,' because she had a feeling of coming full circle.
'Fourteen years ago, I was standing there with people who had been connected to the story of the accident,' she said. 'This time, I was standing by myself, but I was also putting my story into the world.'
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Mohsen Mahdawi, who was detained by ICE, graduates from Columbia
He walked across the stage wearing the graduation gown he had ironed himself. He bowed. He held his mortarboard above his head with one hand. He flashed a peace sign with the other.
Only then did Mohsen Mahdawi collect his bachelor's degree from Columbia University.
My colleague Sharon Otterman writes that it was a moment of happiness for Mahdawi that the Trump administration had tried to prevent. Mahdawi is a green card holder who led pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia and was arrested by immigration officers last month in Vermont. A federal judge ordered him released two weeks later in a setback for the Trump administration's effort to crack down on student demonstrators.
Mahmoud Khalil, another Columbia student who was a prominent figure in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Columbia campus, was supposed to receive his graduate diploma from Columbia this week. But Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was detained in March, remains in a detention center in Louisiana.
His wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, spoke an at unofficial alternative graduation ceremony on Sunday at a church on the Upper West Side, saying that graduation was another milestone he had missed since his arrest. He was not allowed to leave the detention center when she gave birth to a son last month.
Tosca
Dear Diary:
We were returning from a vacation in Spain. Our first stop was on West Broadway to retrieve our African gray parrot, Tosca. From there we took a taxi to our Nassau Street home.
As we exited the cab in front of our building, we were greeted by the familiar cacophony of horns, sirens and bustling people. My wife spied a fresh fruit cart on the corner near Pace University.
'I'll be right back,' she said as she walked away with Tosca on her shoulder.
Suddenly, I heard her yell, 'Tosca, Tosca,' and saw her running down Park Place with people following her and yelling, 'Oscar, Oscar.'
A gust of wind had apparently lifted Tosca off her shoulder and was carrying her down the street.
She soon landed and began to screech: 'Taxiiii, taxiiiiiii.'
'Is that pigeon calling a taxi?' a woman who appeared somewhat bewildered said.
Yes, indeed. We had taught Tosca to say 'taxiii' when she wanted to be carried around our loft.
Luckily, my wife reached Tosca before any harm came to her, offered her a finger and then carried her home amid cheers and laughter from those who had gathered to watch.
— Penny Bamford
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Ama Sarpomaa and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [e-mail].
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