Family WWII history declassified, discovered in an email from France

The same plane in which my uncle would survive a crash during World War II lands next to a Flying Tiger during one of his Flying the Hump missions to China.

By Scott Beveridge

The wind was calm with clear visibility when a C-46 U.S. Army Air Forces plane left Mohanbari Airport in India Aug. 4, 1944, destined to deliver gasoline to China to assist in its defenses against Japanese invaders during World War II.

Air command immediately lost radio contact with the pilot after giving takeoff clearance to the cargo plane also carrying Pfc. Thomas L. Beveridge of Charleroi, Pa., and two other crew members en route to yet another dangerous mission to fly 500 miles over the Himalayan Mountains and on to Chenyi.

Thomas L. Beveridge

It would take four days for the pilot, John D. Akers of Webster Grove, Mo., to carve his way out of the jungle to safety after parachuting from the aircraft to reveal the plane had caught fire and crashed.

And, it took yet another 24 hours for Beveridge, who served on the plane as a radioman, and the crew chief, Edward R. Cronk of East Orange, N.J., to return to civilization and report their copilot had lost his life, according to the official military report on the crash marked “secret” and declassified in 1973.

Thomas Beveridge was the younger brother of my father, James, who had many unanswered questions about this plane crash before he died in 2007 at age 84.

His kid brother would need to be coaxed to talk about the plane crash, and he revealed only some glossed-over details to relatives before he died in 1989 at age 64 in La Mirada, Calif., where he made his home and raised two children after being discharged from the military.

My father even went as far as to place a Freedom of Information request to the Army a few years before he died seeking the crash report, only to be informed it was destroyed in a fire at a military records warehouse.

Eventually, Brewenn Chausset, an avid collector of War II memorabilia in France, located the crash report at the U.S. National Archives after finding the name of 2nd Lt. Frederick E. Brownewell Jr. on a laundry stamp inside a service hat he acquired that once belonged to the officer killed in the incident.

Chausset, after finding photos I had posted on the Web of my uncle, sent me an email in January seeking help in searching for additional information about Brownewell to add to his collection. He also passed along the report and photos of the plane taken before it crashed.

His inquiry, though, did more to solve some mysteries of my childhood hero and uncle about his service in the China-Burma-India Theater, which was considered among the most dangerous places to be in the war.

Thomas Beveridge, who grew up with a fascination for airplanes and had many models of them hand-built and strung from the ceiling of his bedroom, lied about his age to enlist in the Army before his 18th birthday to follow my father into the war.

Standing 5 feet 9 1/2 inches tall and weighing just 138 pounds, the younger Beveridge was a perfect fit for “flying the Hump.” His small frame would have allowed a plane to carry more supplies President Franklin D. Roosevelt promised Chinese ruler Chiang Kai-shek after Japanese forces overran Burma in 1942, closing the ground supply line to Western China and leaving air travel as the only option.

In summer 1943, thousands of planes crossed from India to China, delivering nearly 3,000 tons of supplies to Chiang Kai-shek. By the time this service ended in 1945, there were more than 1,000 Hump fliers listed as dead from crashes or missing in action, according to the 2003 book, “The Burma Road,” by Donovan Webster. These flights in thin air over the mountain ranges, Webster wrote, were met with freak winds of up to 248 mph, turbulence that would flip over planes and sometimes cause them to suddenly drop thousands of feet within a minute.

In the 11 months Beveridge “flew the Hump” in 1944, ending in November of that year, he completed 97 round-trip flights, according to a brief mention of him in the 1998 book, “China Burma India, Where I Came In, Vol. II,” by Robert James Kadel.

Once on the ground following the crash, he met up with Cronk and they returned to the crash site to discover their dead comrade.---- They found themselves in steep terrain with leech-infested swamps and seemingly endless bamboo thicket, Webster noted in his book, and with nothing more than one ant-covered chocolate bar to eat. Beveridge dropped 18 pounds, his war records show, while he and Cronk used their machetes to carve a path to a stream and followed its direction to a friendly air command base.

An Army air jungle rescue unit consisting of one officer and three enlisted men who volunteered for the mission set out three months after the crash in search of the missing plane and copilot, along with eight natives to assist them in the journey. It took them five days to cut their way through the jungle and reach the crash site, the military report shows.

They found the plane on its side, missing a wing and engine that likely “burned on contact with gasoline drums exploding,” Intelligence officer and 2nd Lt. of the Air Corps Donald B. Kelly noted in the report.

The bones of one man were found near the rear door of the inside cabin, along with melted silver believed to have once been his flight wings. They buried the remains with military honors Nov. 17, 1944, with a cross marked “unknown soldier,” while also destroying confidential matter and using .45-caliber slugs to destroy the plane’s transponder. The Army would use his false teeth to eventually positively identify the remains as those of Brownewell.

Meanwhile, Beveridge went home, saving the ripcord to his parachute that helped to save his life.

Monongahela Cemetery turns 150 with music

MONONGAHELA, Pa. – You don't often get a chance see a band performing in a graveyard.

And not every city has one as beautiful as historic Monongahela Cemetery, which celebrated it's 150th anniversary today with a performance by Too Many Tubas.

The band based in Finleyville and made up of musicians from across Southwestern Pennsylvania performs "Gettysburg" under the direction of Rich Pantaleo, a former music teacher in the Ringgold School District.

Oddly enough, the cemetery is holding a picnic tomorrow to honor the past when families actually packed lunches and spent the day in the cemetery off Route 88 in Monongahela.

This photo sparks a memory of a great family physician

             (Photo from the Kenneth Weight collection at Charleroi AREA Historical Society, Inc.)

By Scott Beveridge

CHARLEROI, Pa. – It wasn't the cool 1964 Mercury Comet that leaped from this old photograph taken decades ago in the town where I was born, but, rather, the top name on the door of the building in the background.

This address at 520 McKean Ave. in Charleroi, Pa., was the practice of our beloved family physician, Dr. Eugene E. Costa, the guy who welcomed me into this world at the local hospital's deliver room in 1956.

I remember him fondly, though, for his blunt bedside manner.

A typical office visit would begin with my complaining about pain in my joints.

He usually replied with the question, "How much coffee are you drinking?"

"Probably too much," I'd reply.

He'd tell me to cut back on the caffeine before asking if I was still smoking cigarettes.

"No, I gave them up in 1980."

Then he'd inform me that I was eating too much rich food.

"Really?"

"Well," I remember his saying next. "You are fatter than you were the last time you were here. You have the hives again."

He was right. He always was right. He gave me an injection of something and a prescription and in a few days I was myself again.

The last time I visited Dr. Costa was in the mid 1990s, when the health-care industry really began its so-called "revolution" long before Obamacare would become a dirty word among this president's advisaries.

He told me back then my health-care provider no longer accepted him as a participant in my plan and I'd have to seek out an insurance "approved" physician. Maybe it was something about his age. I'm not sure.

"So you are retiring?" I asked, disappointed at his announcement.

"You retire from a job. You don't retire from a profession," he said.

He kept his office open for several more years before hanging up his white coat.

And, for the next decade, it seemed as if everyone I knew was complaining about rude, overworked staffs at their doctors' offices and being treated there as if they were part of a cattle call hurried through the necessary steps to get a diagnosis or a prescription refill.

Dr. Costa was the kind of physician who knew and seemed to care about his patients, and they didn't have to first show proof of medical insurance before reaching his exam room. His fee was affordable.

 I miss him.

Harry's, a razor worthy of praise

Harry's delivers a month's worth of great shaves at affordable price. (Scott Beveridge photo) 

By Scott Beveridge

Lately I have been finding all kinds of excuses to avoid shopping in big-box stores.

It's not the stores themselves, or the mostly Chinese products they stock, but it's the rude and inconsiderate shoppers they attract that annoy me the most.

You know who you are; the lazy ones who leave their empty shopping carts in the stall where they parked their SUVs or people who block the isles with their unruly kids and belongings while they gab away or stare too long at the toilet paper selection.

When I am there I catch myself with clenched fists mumbling expletives under my breath until returning to the peace within my Ford sedan.

One of the ways to avoid this frustration, as most shoppers know, is to pay more for your groceries and household supplies at competing stores.

And, then there are such innovative companies as Harry's, which make the online shopping experience fun, affordable and, thankfully, rewarding.

I stumbled on the company selling stylish razors last month while reading the briefs in a GQ magazine.

It credits Harry's products to the same group of friends who gave the world Warby Parker, a company supplying botique eyeglasses at highly competitive prices.

Intrigued by what I had read in the magazine, I went to Harry's website and ordered a shaving kit known as The Truman with a white handle to match my bathroom. For $15, it provides a month's worth of shaves, and arrives in a stylish package delivered free of charge at my local post office. Better yet, you can sign up for automatic delivery of its German-engineered blades, which cost just $1.88 apiece if you buy eight at a time.

Seriously, this is the best razor I have used in my entire shaving life. I mean this razor cuts so close it almost feels as if it might remove a thin layer of skin along with the facial stubble, and it requires a steady hand and concentration. One blade gave me eight clean shaves, and it probably could have delivered more of them by the time I opted to replace the blades.

And then, you get a followup email from a company representative promising to help deliver to you all your shaving needs, an employee who doesn't come off as a robot at a computer and even politely returns your emails.

Best of all, I actually now look forward to shaving and feel better, too, knowing I'm helping to reduce fossile fuel and taking one small step to save the post office.

(Note: This blog does not accept invitations to write about or endorse products. It just occasionally publishes this sort stuff about things worthy of praise, such as Sour Patch Extreme Soft & Chewy Candy.)

Nice guy Musial a no-show in "42"

An illustration created when a bridge was renamed after baseball legend Stan "the Man" Musial in his Donora hometown. (credit: Badzik Printing)

By Scott Beveridge

DONORA – The venerable Donora Mayor John Lignelli asked me the other day if Stan "the Man" Musial was mentioned in the new movie "42" about Jackie Robinson and the racism he experienced after becoming the first black man to play Major League Baseball.

I replied to the 91-year-old mayor by saying the movie was really good, but that Musial, a native of Donora who played 22 seasons for the St. Louis Cardinals, didn't show up in the movie.

Disappointed, Lignelli said Musial should have been mentioned in the movie as being among the first white ballplayers to endorse Robinson after Robinson broke the color barrier when he debuted in 1947 for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

As it turns out actor David Stanbra had been cast in the roll of Musial, however, his scenes ended up on the editing room floor to shorten the film, the actor stated on his Facebook page.

That's a shame, even though there are differing versions of the story about the day Robinson, a first baseman from a sharecropping family in Cairo, Ga., made his initial appearance on the baseball diamond in St. Louis.

It has often been written that Musial refused to join his teammates in their threats to refuse to play on the same field with Robinson, although, Musial would deny such a strike was ever considered before he died Jan. 19 at age 92.

Often remembered as the nicest man to have ever played baseball and one to have avoided controversies and scandals, it's easy to conclude that Musial mostly stayed out the debate and possibly could have done more to encourage integration in baseball.

He's often been quoted as having said he didn't like "rough and racist" talk in the clubhouse and did earn Robinson's respect.

Lignelli, who developed a long friendship with Musial, said the ballplayer became a "regular guy," while playing sports as a youth in the Mon Valley steel town alongside black children, including Buddy Griffey, the father and grandfather of baseball greats Ken Griffey Sr. and Ken Griffey Jr.

The color of a man's skin "didn't make a difference to him," Lignelli said.

The movie "42" released April 12 has met with mixed reviews and criticism from some uber baseball fans who feel it didn't bring anything new to light about Robinson.

For a fan, like me, who went to the theater without much knowledge about Robinson, it came as somewhat of a shock to hear so, so many racial slurs directed at him on the playing field, especially the verbal abuse lodged by Phillies manager Ben Chapman.

That, in itself, was enough to cause me embarrassment to belong to the same race as Chapman.

Agent 99 visits Pittsburgh museum highlighting 1968

Actress Barbara Feldon reflects in her hometown of Pittsburgh on the time she spent in the 1960s as Agent 99 with actor Don Adams on TV's "Get Smart." (Scott Beveridge photo)

By Scott Beveridge

PITTSBURGH, Pa. – TV's wildly popular 1960s situation comedy "Get Smart" began as a cartoon about the famously handsome fictional spy James Bond, said Western Pennsylvania native Barbara Feldon, who starred as the show's beautiful and witty CIA Agent 99.

Then the spoof that aired from 1965 to 1970 morphed into an extreme satire on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and some of the foolish things its agents were doing in a decade when a paranoid America dealt with the Cold War, Feldon said Saturday during a speaking engagement at Sen. John Heinz History Center.

"Everybody was spy conscious," Feldon, 80, said at the event in Pittsburgh timed for the center's special exhibit, "1968: The Year that Rocked America." 

The exhibit highlights a tumultuous year that saw assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy also welcomed an explosion in zany pop culture.

To capitalize on the buzz 1968 has been generating, the staff at the Heinz center on Saturday hosted dealers with Pittsburgh Vintage Mixer who specialize in selling mod collectibles ranging from Pyrex Ware to vinyl records.

The dealers who spread their wares across the first floor reported good sales from customers who stood in lines that stretched out the front doors of the museum at 1212 Smallman, and brought inside young faces that otherwise might never have visited this attraction.

In the seventh-floor library, Feldon drew 200 fans eager to hear the former model discuss her life and acting career.

She said her costar Don Adams, AKA as Maxwell Smart, was all business during their time together on the show, and that they didn't become close friends until years after it was cancelled.

Adams felt uncomfortable at around her because she was a lot taller than he, forcing her to slouch and use her crossed ankles as support to stand in order to make them appear to be the same height in screen.

"I was the only actress in Hollywood with callouses on my ankles," joked Feldon, who was born in Butler County and graduated from Bethel Park High School.

She also graduated from Carnegie Tech and soon relocated to New York and the opportunities in offered young actors in search of stardom.

Pittsburgh, today, "is much more cultural" than it was in the early 1940s, she said.

"I was ready to leap off that diving board and see the world."