The Bottom Dropped Out

Ex-A.A.F. Gunner Charles Gorman, who was shot down in Rumania during the war, was in a civilian plane crash last week. Returning from the Cleveland Air Races with a former Army flyer and two young women, the light plane cracked up in the woods near Kenton, Ohio. Charles Gorman's three companions were killed; for about 40 hours he lay in the wreckage. Later, in a Kenton hospital, still woozy from the narcotics which eased the pain of his shattered left arm, he tried to tell what it had been like:

"I remember the bottom dropped out, and then dropped out again, twice. It was the weather. It wasn't the pilot's fault and it wasn't the airplane's fault. I came to twelve or 15 times, I just don't remember. I knew where I was and what had happened, but I was kept so busy trying to keep the flies off and trying to move the body from me, and then I'd go back to sleep.

"The last time I woke up, I tried to move the woman off my chest, and the flies were so bad I could hardly stand them. There were millions of flies.

"I thought I had better look for a farmhouse. I stumbled from the plane and walked toward the edge of the woods. All I wanted to do was get away. It took me about 400 years to walk and crawl to a farmhouse [about a quarter of a mile away].

"It was not at all like being shot down. This was just nothing."

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