ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, July 23, 1996 TAG: 9607230084
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Above
MONTOURSVILLE, PA., lost 21 people in the explosion of TWA Flight 800. Dan Wright knew all but one of them.
Roanoke native Dan Wright spent the first part of July with his wife and children at the family's vacation house at Smith Mountain Lake.
They swam, water-skied and shopped, activities that left Wright, his wife, Linda, and their sons, Brian, 14, and Greg, 11, relaxed and rested when they returned July 17 to their home in Pennsylvania.
When they awoke the next day, their town of Montoursville was a completely different place.
The evening before, TWA Flight 800 left New York's Kennedy Airport for Paris. Twenty-nine minutes after takeoff, the Boeing 747 exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, carrying 230 passengers and crew members to their deaths. Included were 16 students from the Montoursville Area High School French Club, with five adult chaperones.
Wright, a 1970 graduate of William Fleming High School in Roanoke, knew them all, except one of the adults. He had taught 10 of the students in his ninth- and 10th-grade American history classes at Montoursville Area High. He had coached one of the boys on his Warriors football team.
The Wrights heard the news on the radio Thursday morning.
"Your immediate reaction is shock," Wright said Monday in a telephone interview. "Those kinds of things always happen to someone else."
He went immediately to the school, where he found crying students and probing reporters seeking answers; guidance counselors and mental health workers offering consolation; phones ringing with calls from everywhere.
Wright jumped in and helped however he could. He did so for the next several days, getting little sleep. He spoke Monday when he came home for lunch.
The school's lobby and a connecting hallway had become a collection point for cards, flowers and Internet messages from across the world, he said. Summer school classes had been transferred to the middle school.
By Monday, fewer students were turning up, but some reporters remained on hand.
Also remaining was the void left by the victims.
``I remember something about all of them," he said. "Rance Hettler was a senior who had just graduated. He played split end and defensive back. He was a good, solid player, a real team player."
Wendy Wolfson, killed with her mother, Eleanor, was "a very gifted student." One irony: The day the Sun-Gazette newspaper in nearby Williamsport carried news of the crash, it also carried a photo of Wolfson in a piano recital at Carnegie Hall last spring.
Wright moved to Montoursville to teach and coach after graduating from nearby Lycoming College in 1974. The town, 90 miles north of Harrisburg on the Susquehanna River, is a suburban community of about 5,000 people, with about 800 students in its high school. Before the crash, its claims to fame were the two athletes it sent to professional baseball - Mike Mussina, a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, and Tom O'Malley, a former major leaguer who is a star for a team in Japan.
Wright hesitated when asked how he is holding up.
"That's difficult to answer," he said. "You have good moments and bad moments. Any teacher feels the loss of his students, because you're there with them every day. When you know everybody...''
It has been a terrible year. A student killed himself last spring; another died in an auto accident. In January, a flood ravaged the region, killing 17 people, six in Lycoming County, where Montoursville lies.
"It seems like the kids are talking about what else can happen," Wright said.
With the latest disaster, the town has become world-famous, bringing the world to town, mainly in the form of reporters.
"The media are like everybody else - there are good people and bad people, and I've seen both," said Wright, whose late father, Elwood, worked at Stephenson & Aldridge furniture store in Roanoke and whose mother, Ernestine, operates Styl-Rite Beauty Salon off Williamson Road Northeast.
"I've seen some very pushy people, and I've seen some real conscientious reporting, and reporters that were very aware of the people involved."
Prodded by the media, investigators at the crash site are working feverishly to determine whether technical failure or a terrorist explosion was responsible for the disaster.
"I don't think it matters," Wright said. "The end result is those people are gone. Whether it was an accident or an act of terrorism, we have no control over that."
A prayer service at the high school Saturday night drew 2,000 people, he said. A memorial service for the community has yet to be planned.
"We're waiting to see when the bodies are identified."
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Wright.by CNB