Vermont's Northland Journal - Where Is Your Airport

Where Is Your Airport

By Virginia Downs

It was mild and windless and Depot Street buzzed with chatting townspeople who had gathered to celebrate the Indian Summer weather. Suddenly an engine’s loud roar and cough broke the quiet evening. Heads jerked upward in alarm as a low-flying airplane skimmed the rooftops. In minutes Lyndonville was galvanized into a community rescue effort. The leaders of a rescue mission on that balmy Wednesday of October 18, 1939, were George Trefren and Bill Woods. The two young undertakers and their wives had finished supper and hoped that this would be one of those quiet evenings in a business that required 24-hour duty. Little did they realize the crisis awaiting them. Fifty years later they recalled the exciting turn of events.

“It was real warm that evening,” George recollected, “and we were hanging the curtains which Theda had washed.” The couple had a second floor apartment over the undertaking establishment on Church Street. Bill and Jeanne Woods had an apartment next door. “Theda and I were standing there by the window when all of a sudden we heard this plane right overhead, probably not more than 40 feet up.” They dashed downstairs and out onto the street. In the dusk they made out the plane in the lights reflected from the village. “The pilot had opened his window and was shouting, ‘Where is your airport? I’m running out of gas,” George related.

He ran next door and rapped on the Woods’ door for Bill, who had just sat down to listen to the nightly “Amos ‘n’ Andy” show. Then he revved up the funeral car’s motor. Bill jumped in beside his partner. They turned on the roof spotlight and kept blowing the horn and siren as they turned onto Depot from Church Street, motioning people to follow. “People were hanging around,” George explained. “Of course, we knew everybody. They got in their cars and followed.”

Bill Woods continued the talc. “The first one we saw was Gail Sherrer. He was going to work and had his ‘38 Ford car with a spotlight. We yelled at him to follow us and he kept making his spotlight go on and off. That way the pilot was able to follow our cars all the way to the St. Jay airport.”

Bill described the breakneck dash onto the airport road, by then in complete darkness, shouting to Sherrer to train his spotlight on the windsock. “All

this time the plane was sputtering, but on his turn to the airport the pilot was able to pick out the windsock with our lights on it.”

At the undertakers’ shouted directions, the drivers of 25 Lyndonville cars following them careened into position along both sides of the runway, making a landing path. “He made a perfect landing,” Bill said, shaking his head in amazement at the recollection. “Just prior to his touching the ground his motor had cut off.”

It was an emotional moment for all present. As he alighted from his craft, pilot Nelson Gordon knelt down and kissed the ground, Bill recalled. “He asked us, ‘have you got a stick or something?’ We got a splint out from the back of the hearse and he stuck it into the gas tank. It didn’t even get wet.”

Bill explained that the reason they carried a splint in hack of their vehicle was that undertaking was only part of their business in those early years. The two became mortuary partners in 1936, “The same day King Edward abdicated the British throne for Wallis Warfield Simpson.” They also had the only ambulance in town, a brand-new Bender Cadillac. Accidents, as well as deaths, were human crises they were prepared to respond to round-the-clock. So on that October evening in 1939, pilot Gordon couldn’t have chosen a better location to shout for help than over the Woods and Trefren Funeral Home.

Asked how the pilot lost his way, the retired fineral directors explained that those were the years when night airplane traffic was practically nil. Pilots in those years followed lighted beacons from town to town. In Gordon’s case, returning to Augusta, Maine, from a flight to Boston, he had confused the Passumpsic with the Connecticut River. Realizing he was on his way to Canada and running low on gas, he changed course and spotted Lyndonville’s illuminated Catholic Church clock.

As for morticians saving a life, the irony was not lost on some reporters. The Washington, D.C.

Evening Star carried a playful article entitled “Unprofessional Conduct.” In a tongue- in-cheek vein, it described two undertakers “on the call of duty—surely here was a customer, if they could keep him in sight—then it happened.. .down came the pilot to a safe landing, and out went all the profits they might have made.”