Decades after a Pittsburgh plane crash, a family found its way back to each other
The story of the North Side plane crash hit the front page of every Pittsburgh newspaper on June 6, 1947.
William R. Check, 25; his wife, Naomi, 20; and one other passenger took off from Buck’s Seaplane Base on the Ohio River, at the foot of Pennsylvania Avenue in Manchester. When the sputtering plane couldn’t make the altitude to get over the West End Bridge, it turned inland and crashed into a Page Street rowhouse, killing all aboard.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a photo of the couple’s 13-monthold baby, Donna, left orphaned at Conneaut Lake. That girl would wonder for most of a half-century why none of her father’s kin came to find her. She didn’t realize her relatives here never forgot her.
But to understand the happy ending, it helps to know more about the sad beginning.
That baby’s half-cousin Eileen Connelly, of Churchill, remembers her Aunt Betty holding baby Donna under the kitchen faucet in the late spring of 1947, while 13year-old Eileen incanted:
“I baptize you Donna Louise Check, in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.”
She didn’t want her sweet cousin spending eternity in Limbo, a place Catholics then believed to be the destiny of unbaptized babies. And with Donna suddenly an orphan, her mother’s side of the family was coming to take the child back to Kentucky.
The baby’s parents were in that plane because her father — a glider pilot who’d flown in the Normandy invasion and other battles of World War II just a few years before — had launched a business flying passengers to and from Conneaut Lake. The couple and business partner Jack Kubanek, of Crafton, had flown from the lake to Pittsburgh the morning of June 5 so
Mrs. Check could shop Downtown. She bought a yellow blouse she’d never get to wear.
A photo on the nightstand
The young couple had met when Mr. Check was stationed at Bowman Field outside Louisville, Ky. After a whirlwind courtship, 16year-old Naomi Bethel ran off to marry Bill Check in November 1943, before he was shipped overseas.
Then, after Mr. Check’s funeral in 1947, Naomi’s older brother drove to Pittsburgh from Louisville “and, I would say, stole me,’’ Donna Check Livingston explained matter-of-factly, 72 years later.
Nobody on the father’s side knew if they’d ever see that child again. “As a little girl,” she said, “I never really knew anything about my father.’’ But she kept his photo on her nightstand — and still does.
Now an interior designer in Los Angeles — “I wound up making beautiful homes for other people’’ — her childhood was of no one’s design. Her maternal grandparents hardly knew her father and “didn’t really know what to do with me.” She understands that now.
“If you lost your 20-yearold daughter, you would mourn,’’ she said. “Every Sunday we went to my mother’s grave to put flowers on it.”
She was 10 when her grandmother died. Soon after, her grandfather moved to Florida with another of his daughters. “I was kind of left behind again.” She spent a year and a half in a Catholic orphanage and, at 12, moved in with a great aunt and uncle in Wheeling, W.Va.
She stayed until she was 16, moving back to Kentucky for her junior year of high school and then returning to Warwood High School near Weirton to finish school. She would graduate from West Virginia University in 1968.
‘Your Aunt Dorothy’
As close as she was to Pittsburgh all those years, she never connected with anyone from her father’s family. She didn’t think much about it then. “I’d gotten myself raised,’’ she said.
Her father’s entrepreneurial drive was in her genes. She moved to New York after graduation, became a model with Eileen Ford’s agency but couldn’t make a living. After doing social work with abused and neglected children in Harlem for four years, she moved to Los Angeles for love.
By the time she started her design business in 1981, she had a daughter and a son. She was well into a career that had her named four times as an Architectural Digest AD100 Top Designer when an assistant told her, “There’s a woman on the phone — and she says she’s your Aunt Dorothy.”
Nobody can remember exactly when that was, but it had to be the mid-1990s.
In those pre-Google, preFacebook days, Dorothy Check Roney, now 95, had been writing letters and making phone calls in search of her long-lost niece. She finally had landed her number through Architectural Digest. It took some time, but Donna arranged a meeting in a Las Vegas casino VIP lounge.
“She came barreling into that little office,’’ Donna recalled. “I’m fairly tall and she’s very short. She said, ‘Yes, I’m your Aunt Dorothy, and you’re Billy’s little girl.’ In some ways, it’s just the greatest gift I ever had.’’
Other relatives, like Cousin Eileen, wrote after that. A few years later, Donna flew into Pittsburgh, booked a room at the Renaissance and proceeded to meet a family that stretched from Beaver to East McKeesport. That was April 2000, the birthday month she shares with her father.
Her Aunt Elsie in Beaver gave her a box of letters her father had written during the war. She also was handed her parents’ wedding ring, inscribed “Bill and Omi, 11-10-43,” the only item recovered from the fiery crash in Pittsburgh.
Donna read the letters aloud to her rediscovered family, all of them wearing name tags.
“You grow up your whole life sort of wishing and hoping you had a family,” Ms. Livingston said, “and then walk into this big wonderful family.”
15 Thanksgivings
She has flown into Pittsburgh from Los Angeles for at least 15 Thanksgivings since.
“In a way,’’ cousin Eileen Connelly said, “Donna brought us all together. Even though we all lived within 20 miles of each other, everyone was so preoccupied with everyday lives that, except for weddings and funerals, we rarely got together.”
Reading those letters written before she was born, Donna was struck by how much she shared with her father, from his pragmatism to his sense of adventure.
He’d joined the Army shortly after graduating from Duquesne High School in 1940, but he’d spent years in the Holy Family Institute orphanage in Emsworth with his younger sisters,
Dorothy and Elsie. In his letters home during wartime, he offered his sisters fatherly advice.
He told Dorothy, then 20, that “on that marriage deal,’’ she ought to wait until she was sure she had a man who loved her and she loved back. And he told “headstrong” Elsie, then 17: “Don’t admit defeat and give up everything because you didn’t make the grade on the [nursing] entrance exams. She needed “to be able to say ‘I’m ‘Elsie Check’ and I support myself and buy these beautiful clothes with money I earned myself.’’
That’s pretty progressive for 1944.
Bill had a GI’s bravado, too. On July 15, 1944 — five and a half weeks after he flew his glider in the invasion of Normandy — he wrote home:
“Well, gang, your brother (and Mom, your son) is a veteran and seasoned fighting man of World War II now. Yes I was in on the Big Show ... I wonder if you were really and truly praying for me when the invasion came, because when I got there I think someone must have been watching over me. I was so close to getting it ...”
“He would have been a great father,’’ Donna Livingston said. “I think he still is a great father. Somehow, he’s looking down on me. Just when I think I’m in a nose dive, he pulls me out.”
Her father’s life insurance “helped me get through college,’’ she said.
And every Thanksgiving, she returns to Western Pennsylvania to steep herself in the love of his blood kin.
“I stepped into a dream,’’ Ms. Livingston says. “And I keep the dream going. I captured a treasure, and I didn’t let it go.”