DENVER (KDVR) — When United flight 629 was bombed and fell to pieces over Weld County 70 years ago, Dr. Susan Morgan says her family was destroyed.
“That’s actually the only word for it. It was just wiped out. We were wiped out as a family,” Morgan told FOX31.
She was just 12 years old when it happened. Her sister was 14. Their parents, Stewart and Suzanne, had just moved the family to Illinois so her father could start a new job.
“And part of that job was a business trip. My mother went with him because she was from Vancouver, so they were going to stop off in Vancouver and visit her mom,” Morgan said.
The Douglas DC-6B had just departed Denver’s Stapleton Airfield on the night of Nov. 1, 1955, when it exploded just 11 minutes into the flight, killing both of Morgan’s parents and 42 others.
“The thing about my parents being killed that way, murdered, (is that) you lose yourself and you become a different person. I became Susan Morgan, the orphan. I stopped being Susan Morgan, the happy younger child in this nuclear family. You lose your entire identity,” Morgan said.
“It’s more than a 12-year-old can deal with. What was going through my head was, of course, denial, confusion. And we had just moved to a Chicago suburb. Been there like two months. We knew no one. When they died, we were really alone,” she said.
With no close family relationships, they were sent to live with a grandmother who couldn’t take care of them.
“We became wards of the state, and I spent the next five years in the welfare system in Vancouver,” Morgan said.
It was in Vancouver that she would finally learn what brought down the plane in the Colorado farm field that night, a dynamite bomb placed by John “Jack” Gilbert Graham in the suitcase of his own mother in an effort to collect on her life insurance policy.
Morgan learned those details from the local paperboy.
“(He) came running down the alley behind our house and into our backyard, yelling at me, ‘Guess what, guess what, they know who did it. It was a bomb and it’s this guy!’ I remember him looking at me and expecting a reaction. And I just didn’t have one. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter to me that it was a bomb. It didn’t matter to me that they caught them. None of that changed anything in my life,” Morgan said.
The ripple effects of the first-ever bombing of a commercial airliner in America touched every part of Morgan’s life and every relationship for decades to come.
“(I) Trusted no one. Believed that nothing good would happen from getting close to anyone, that it was too dangerous,” she said.
That is, until she married her husband, author Eric Goodman. Among his books, a novel based on the bombing of Flight 629, and the love story that Morgan’s parents shared. The book is called “Cuppy and Stew.”
His research material for the book included diaries Morgan had written during the heartbreaking five years that followed the bombing.
“Each one was a one-year diary, and I kept five of them. I suddenly remembered in the middle of the night that I had written those diaries,” Morgan said.
Despite the life-altering setback she endured starting the night Flight 629 was bombed, Dr. Morgan has led an accomplished life and career as an English professor at Cornell University and a founder of their Women’s Studies program.
Morgan and her family will be in Denver this week for the first time ever, attending the dedication ceremony for a monument bearing the names of her parents and the 42 others killed in the bombing of Flight 629.
“I’ve carried the grief around for, what is it now, 70 years. But you never get over it,” Morgan said.
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