Thank you for remembering the Moose Mountain plane crash from 1968. The repercussions of this crash were felt in New Hampshire and in places beyond.
One of the victims was a young Long Island, N.Y., woman, not quite 17, named Patty Allen Indence. She was on her way up to a Dartmouth weekend of fun when her life ended suddenly, unexpectedly and violently. Her parents and mine were high school friends and both families had gone through the pregnancies and birth of their eldest children together.
Patty Allen and I were born in December 1951. I was young enough and in the midst of my own serious health crisis at the time not to have fully grasped the devastation this event wrought on her family and their friends, including my parents. I couldn’t conceive what losing a child whose full life of promise was incinerated in a flash. Her family never recovered.
There’s no moral or lesson here, simply an appreciation for the remembrance and acknowledgement that it was not just a number of 32 who died, but people with lives and families forever changed.
N.L. NEEDHAM
Hopkinton