For most, Nov. 15, 1987 has little meaning on the calendar. Few will remember that it was a raw, snowy day in Denver. Or that 28 of 73 passengers on Continental Airlines Flight 1713 bound for Boise died when their plane crashed on a runway at what was then Stapleton International Airport.
But I remember.
I was a passenger service agent for Continental Airlines at the time. It was my job to assist arriving, departing and connecting passengers.
I worked Flight 1713.
I remember a 9-year-old boy who wore no socks, just deck shoes and a thin pair of pants. As an “unaccompanied minor,” he was my responsibility until he was safely on the plane.
“Where’re your socks?” I asked him as we returned from the restroom to the boarding area. “Never wore ’em,” he told me.
There were plenty of standby passengers for Flight 1713. A man with two small daughters was first on my list. He constantly approached the podium about getting on my flight. He never made it on the plane. He could have, however. Moments before the plane was to depart, I boarded the aircraft to do a seat count. He was in luck – I had three open seats. Send the family down, I said. At that moment, however, a ticketed passenger arrived.
The father and his daughters stayed behind. He wasn’t happy about being trapped in Denver in a snowstorm while the plane he wanted to be on taxied toward the deicing pad. It was 1:45 p.m. Not long after, the plane was a mass of metal lying upside down on a runway, the result of too much ice on the wings.
I continued to work Flight 1713, which was changed to Flight 6713, the week following the tragedy.
During that week, I entered a restroom and saw a woman standing at the sink cleaning blood from her heel. She said someone struck her foot pushing a food cart. I told her we had bandages and antiseptic spray for her wound. As I cared for her heel, she told me she was in Denver from Boise because her husband was in the hospital recovering from severe injuries he had suffered when Flight 1713 crashed.
I worked for Continental about eight more months following the accident, when I left to begin a career as a newspaper reporter.
Fast forward to autumn 2007. I was the editor for a newspaper in Albuquerque. I received a flurry of e-mails from survivors of loved ones and victims of Flight 1713. The Internet has, obviously, brought us all one step closer.
One came from the Band-Aid lady.
“We are nearing 20 years now,” she wrote in her e-mail. “And why I was surfing Google, located your article for the Seattle paper and after countless minutes, tracked you down, I don’t know. Other than to say I applaud your writing at the time, and your sensitivity to those delicate details of other survivors. It just compelled me to contact you and say thank you for that Band-Aid.”
I began to correspond with Jan. Her husband spent four months in the hospital. He recovered as well as one could given his head injury, she told me. He was an academic dean at their Alma Mater. His career, however, ended after 1713.
The father of those two little girls must be nearing retirement now, his daughters grown with lives and families of their own. I remember how angry he was at me. Yet I wonder if the sense of relief he felt that they never made it on that plane has since been a watermark of time.
My unaccompanied minor still enters my mind whenever I board an airplane. I take my seat, remembering how cold it was that day. I have no image of his face, only a vague recollection how thin his pants were. I think about the socks he said he never wore.
And I wonder, as I often have over the years, if he ever made it home.
Betta Ferrendelli is a freelance writer living in Lakewood. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
