Empty seats, full hearts: Flight 800 victims missed at Pa. school

By Pamela Ferdinand, Globe Correspondent

Montoursville, Pa.

Summer Seese will always remember her first day of high school as the time she could not look into her classmates' eyes.

If it was difficult finding a homeroom and locating her locker in strange surroundings, then it was twice as hard mustering the courage to speak to kids still grieving yesterday for their brothers and sisters who died in the July 17 crash of TWA Flight 800.

“I pretty much wanted to get it all behind me, but it was real hard to pay attention,” Seese said as she walked home at the end of the day. “I was kind of scared to say, 'Hi.' Before, they were just normal students.”

The return to school and the rituals of the season almost restore life's usual pattern to this borough in the Allegheny hills, cushioned by green rollercoaster ridges. The community lost 21 of its 5,000 residents in the crash, but now the black bunting on “Welcome to Montoursville” signs and satin blue-and-gold ribbons of mourning are finally coming down.

Yet routine is a poor substitute for rebirth. Girls in training bras reflect on death, boys too young to drive are scared of flying, and mothers leave the dinner table to sob at a child's grave. Not even teachers have been able to immerse themselves in timeworn back-to-school traditions: washing blackboards and arranging schedules.

On the advice of crisis counselors, they blacked out the names of 16 students from used high school textbooks and attendance rolls, yearbook files and library cards. But administrative sleight of hand could not shield 800 pairs of sorrowful eyes from the empty seats and unclaimed lockers of absent friends. French Club members and five chaperones died on their way to Paris.

“We're way too young to have to worry about this,” said Dana Smith, a 14-year-old who lost a close friend in the crash and entered Montoursville High School yesterday as a freshman. “I don't want to curl up in a hole, but I'm never going to forget them. I'm just not.”

The school was scrubbed clean by the time its doors opened yesterday. Gone were the wreaths and sheets of handwritten condolences that filled the school entranceway like a funeral parlor.

David Burns, a lanky tenth-grader with close-cropped brown hair, made a point of avoiding the stairwell where he used to meet his friend Rance Hettler before gym. Hettler, a star football player for the Montoursville Warriors at age 18, had planned to attend Northeastern University in Boston this year. His number will be retired.

“He took me into his group, and we all went out and stuff. He just made my freshman year really fun,” said Burns, 15, smiling as he recalled Saturday nights at Perkins restaurant with his friend.

As yellow buses drove up to the high school's arched entranceway in morning fog, pairs of students stole away for cigarettes, swinging brand-new knapsacks on shoulders and wearing stiff, white sneakers that needed a good breaking in.

They said it was a quieter opening day than usual and depressing to think of the people who weren't there, of the homerooms that would fall a student short. The last funeral took place only two weeks ago, and one girl's body is still missing. The day passed smoothly, but no one knew what to say to comfort saddened peers. Or how to cope with their own loss.

“I like my life right now because I have a lot of friends,” said Nathan Tillson, a 15-year-old sophomore. “The hardest part is watching other people missing their best friends.”

Like the girl who left a letter sealed in plastic on 17-year-old Amanda Karschner's grave. She tucked it between pink roses and a teddy bear with a flowery bowtie and, if it was a clear day, she would have seen the high school's spire from a hilltop corner where most of the students are buried.

Shade trees and a monument are planned, but for now typewritten cards on short metal stakes mark plots open to the sky and graced with trinkets -- from a plastic dinosaur and canister of Gap perfume to a bracelet of crescent moon and stars.

“I still can't imagine that you won't be sitting with us at lunch or I won't have you to talk to in the morning or we won't be in any of the same classes or we won't be going to any of the football games together or you won't be playing basketball or track or that we won't have our senior year together or that we won't graduate together,” Amanda's friend wrote. “I know everyone dies for a reason, but I can't figure this one out.”

Teachers, too, felt their way through the first seven hours of the school year, trying to master an unwieldy situation without appearing cold-hearted. At a private counseling session Monday, they learned to avoid inadvertently saying words like “crash” and “explosive” to discourage pained students from blaming all their social and academic problems on the tragedy, and to watch for signs of trauma.

Each year, news magazine covers line the top of the blackboard in teacher Donald King's social studies classroom, but none will illustrate TWA's story this fall. He taught most of the kids who died, knew all of them, and anticipated his class would wait for him to say something.

“I will picture exactly where the kids sat and that has always happened when I've lost kids, but this is a megathing,” King said. “I won't waste any time -- that's the worst thing you can do. I'll discuss it and allow them to say or write whatever they want. It will be businesslike, and it will be loving.”

Chuck Bowman, the school's football coach, brought a sports psychologist from the Pittsburgh Steelers to talk to his team when practice began several weeks ago.

“Rather than trying to force a kid to do something, you've got to pat him on the back and say, 'We've got to get our heads back on the game,'” Bowman said. “We're not as concentrated as we have been in the past, but we had no summer and I think the kids realize that it's time to move on.”

It was a rough year for Montoursville parents even before the July 17 crash. A school bus ran over and killed a 7-year-old as he crossed the road. Then a teen-ager died in a car accident, and another shot himself to death.

Parents here grew up together and know each other well. If anyone is unwilling or unable to move forward with the start of school, it is they. As Bill Geiser, who manages the town cemetery and knows all of the families, put it, “Hell can't be worse than this. It just can't be.”

Several who lost children are also sending a sister or brother to college for the first time, a letting go of a different sort just when they felt the need to hold on tighter than ever. Amanda Karschner's mother watched a younger daughter leave yesterday for classes in Montoursville, even as Cellini's Submarine House began to look for someone to fill Amanda's job.

“Now the kids are going back to school, and the cemetery is where we come,” she wailed as she sat on a wooden bench at the foot of her daughter's grave Sunday night. “Like good parents, we said, 'Sure, you can go to Paris.' How could you tell a straight-A student she couldn't go? It's the only time I should have said, 'No.'”