Obituary Substitute: Sally Yopp Ellis

 

Sally and Robert wuth their two children at the time and his sister Ann,

now Ann Ellis Blake. Taken in May 1960.

 

What happened to the plane that crashed near Bolivia on June 18, 1965?

THE TRIP

Early Friday evening of June 18, 1965, the family of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Ellis was en route from Beaufort, S.C., to their former home of Wilmington in a private plane, N1838D. That Sunday would be Father’s Day.

Five people were aboard — Robert William Ellis, 30, pilot; his wife, Sally Mae Yopp Ellis, 28; and their children, Robin Susan, 9; Robert W. Jr., 6 years and 2 days; and Glenn Phillips, 3. Mr. Ellis was manager of the Beaufort County Airport. He had logged 275 hours in the air. Mrs. Ellis was planning on obtaining her pilot’s license also.
The Ellis family had left Beaufort at 7:30 p.m. on this 75-minute trip in order to attend the wedding of Mrs. Ellis’s sister, (Clara) Frances Yopp, the next day at 4 p.m. Daylight Savings Time was not federally mandated until the 1967 year, but our area did observe DST, so sunset would occur at 9:30 DST. Thus they had an all-daylight trip ahead.

About 9:30 p.m., one of the Ellises radioed the FAA tower at Wilmington for landing instructions.

THE CRASH

Their trip had now taken them into a stormy area, and the cardinal rule of non-instrument flying is that you must be able to see the ground in order to keep the airplane trimmed right. The aircraft crashed, nose-first, into the Green Swamp about seven miles northwest of Bolivia. Two people living in the area had heard a noise, above the rain and thunder, about 9:30 p.m., which they thought might be a plane crash.

Search parties of Highway Patrolmen found the wreckage early Saturday morning, about 12 hours after the Ellises had begun their journey. Southeastern North Carolina had experienced record rainfall in the two weeks prior to this trip. The engine, passenger area, and tail section had tunneled deep into the swamp, leaving the wings behind on the ground. There are photographs of this in The Sunday Star-News of June 20, 1965. No bodies were to be seen.
It was not until Saturday evening that the family could be recovered. A dragline from Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point, 22 miles away, opened a hole 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep, enough to get the family out of the wreckage. The engine was deeper still.

(A dragline is an earth excavator. A backhoe or a dozer might be used also, but would get mired in a swamp. A dragline has its bucket at the end of a cable on a boom, so that the main tractor unit can be on firm ground and still reach out into the muck.)

THE FUNERAL

(The following information was taken from a newspaper article by the author, David Covington, StarNews)

The wedding was postponed, and finally occurred on July 11, 22 days later.

The four parents of the deceased couple, all living in Wilmington, made the funeral arrangements.
Five ministers, including one from Beaufort, S.C., conducted the funeral service on Monday, June 21, at 4 p.m., in the Oleander Chapel of Coble’s Funeral Service, 3915 Oleander Drive. According to Frances Yopp, now Frances Y. Hill, and others, it was a very, very largely attended funeral.

Services featured a semicircle of five white coffins, and the trip to Greenlawn Memorial Park was accomplished by five white hearses. The family is lined up, oldest first, just east of the flagpole of the “FG” section. The cemetery plots required to bury five souls, in a line together, were arranged via a swap offered by a family friend.

The bronze emblems on the memorials (Greenlawn has no tombstones) were chosen from a vendor’s catalog of such items, provided by Greenlawn. The airplane featured on each emblem is almost the same as the one they died in, Beechcraft Corporation’s Bonanza V-Tail 35. The emblem shows a rectangular passenger window, but the Ellis aircraft was a model 35C, new in 1965, and had a teardrop-shaped window there.

 

WEBMASTER INPUT: Robert and Sally had previously flown to Columbia, SC, to have lunch with my wife and me. I knew Robert and Sally were coming that weekend and waited as long as I could before I had to leave to return to my home in Columbia, SC. Upon hearing I immediately returned to Wilmington at the request of Robert's parents to serve as a pallbearer.

Bill Teague, webmaster for www.nhhs1954.com and Sally's classmate.

 

MEMORIAL RECORD : COBLE FUNERAL SERVICE