Rounding the elbow of a narrow mountain trail in San Mateo County on Wednesday morning, Grant Tischler caught a glimpse of the twisted aluminum in the ravine, dropped his hiking stick, then began to sob as he collapsed in the dirt.
This was, after all, sacred ground. It was on this steep hillside that his dad, Bernard, died exactly 55 years ago when an Australian passenger plane named Resolution lost its way in the fog on final approach to the San Francisco Airport, smashing into the thick weave of redwood and blood-red madrone and killing all 19 on board. Investigators estimated that from the moment it hit the trees to its final point of impact, Flight 304 continued on for another seven seconds.
“I’m counting seven seconds in my head, and it’s an eternity,” said Tischler, picking up a charred piece of the DC-6 from the scattered debris. “All of them “… going through that. If the plane had been just a few hundred feet higher, I might still have my father with me today.”
A troubling secret
He couldn’t have known it at the time, but Grant Tischler’s journey to this redwood sanctuary really began 65 years ago, in the southeastern corner of Australia where he was born in 1943. He never knew his biological father, Bernard. And he would only learn about him years after his dad had perished.
Bernard Tischler was a sailor in the Australian navy who had come home on leave in 1942 after his ship was sunk at Guadalcanal. “That’s when he and my mother got together and from that liaison,” said Grant, “little ol’ me was born.”
But the family refused to allow the 18-year-old girl to marry the sailor. His love denied, Bernard left to rejoin the war. And in 1948 when Grant was 5, he and his mother moved to the town of Mildura where she married Ray Carpenter, who quickly adopted the boy. “I grew up thinking Ray was my real dad,” he said. “I had my suspicions as I got older, but nobody ever told me anything.”
Years later, Grant would learn about his biological father and how he “had come home after the war looking to get back with my mom. But by then, she was already married to someone else, and it was too late.”
An unmarked site
Wednesday morning, Tischler arrived early at the trail head for a trek he hoped would lead not only to his father’s resting place, but to some emotional resolution for a life tormented by secrets and suspicions. He had come from Australia just for this hike, and was joined by Christopher O’Donnell, an Australian-born aviation buff from Half Moon Bay who has waged a tireless campaign to place a granite memorial at the crash site. For decades, aviation sleuths and the occasional hiker have come here to pick through the debris of San Mateo County’s worst aviation accident ever. One of its passengers was the renowned American pianist William Kapell, who was returning from a concert tour of Australia.
“I’ve got a plaque and I want to find a home for it,” O’Donnell said. “But the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District which owns the land won’t allow anything placed at the site. They just want us to go away.”
Worse, said Tischler, his dad’s family back home all assumed a plaque had been erected years ago. He didn’t have the heart to tell them it wasn’t so.
But in a significant turnaround this week, district spokesman Rudy Jurgensen said “we’re now willing to take another look at this, though we’d want to erect something that’s more interpretive in nature in addition to a memorial. It’s not a done deal, but we’re looking at it.”
As they headed up the trail, two hours through a steep, winding thicket of towering redwoods and plunging gulleys, O’Donnell and Tischler were heartened. Perhaps there would soon be resolution for the son — and maybe some good news to take back to the people his father had left behind.
A wedding photo
Grant Tischler worked in the gas industry and raised two daughters. He was 38 when he stumbled upon the key to his true identity that everyone had kept from him so long. He was visiting his grandmother when he noticed a wedding photo of his mom and Ray Carpenter on the wall. He’d seen it before, but this time his eye caught something in the corner of the frame.
“There was a small embossed logo of a photo studio,” he said. “And lightly pencilled in was 1948. I asked my grandmother, “Isn’t this a photo of my mom and dad on their wedding day? “She said, ‘Yeah.’
—‰’Well, this says 1948, but I was born in 1943. Is there anything you want to tell me?’
“She hemmed and hawed, then she told me the story.”
The wartime leave. The grandfather’s resistance to his daughter’s marriage. The move to Mildura. And the decades of deception that followed.
“Suddenly, all the pieces fell into place,” Tischler said. “I had always realized I didn’t look like anybody in the family, but I had just shrugged it off. But there were strange things that went on. I’d ring up home after I’d left, dad would chat a bit, then yell to my mom ‘Alice, your son’s on the phone.’ Not ‘our son,’ but ‘your son.’
“Still, I kept my suspicions to myself.”
But the whole story had not been told — because his grandmother didn’t know it.
One day, Grant took his mother aside. “I asked ‘Is he alive?’ and she said, ‘No, he was killed in an airplane accident in America.’ ” But no one on her side of the family knew the specific details.
Grant then asked: Was Bernard the man she had really wanted to marry?
“She told me ‘I’ve only loved two men in my life. Ray was one — and your father was the other.’ “
A familiar face          
Life for Grant Tischler would go on. But it was a life entangled in a snarl of loose ends.
After Grant implored his mother for a photo of his father, she finally mailed him one she had hidden for years behind her wedding photo with Ray Carpenter, tucked away beneath her bed. Standing in the middle of the post office that day, Grant took one look at the picture and burst into tears.
“I looked at my dad and realized, ‘I’ve been shaving that same face for years. I just cried and cried.'”
Yet that one lingering question tormented him: How had his father died? Grant tracked down his dad’s sister, who gave him a press clipping about the crash. He found two half-brothers, from Bernard’s eventual marriage to another woman. But beyond the weathered newspaper article, his father’s death remained shrouded in mystery.
“No one knew much about the plane crash at all, and so I sat on that for many, many years. That’s part of the reason that I’ve had a lot of demons in my life.”
After his adoptive dad died in 2007, Grant changed his last name to Tischler. Then last November, a breakthrough: one of his brothers had come across O’Donnell’s Web site, full of articles and photos about the doomed British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines flight. His father had been on his way to England to learn the travel agent business. Grant realized he had no choice — he had to come to America to finally find the father he never knew.
A distant drone
As he surveyed the rusting debris around him, Grant said, “I’ve come full circle, because I know in my own heart that dad would have wanted me to come up here and finally get closure.
“He was only 31 when he died, and I think in the back of his mind he must have thought, ‘I have a son out there somewhere, a son I can’t contact.’ And I think that hurt him. Just like it has hurt me.”
Sitting quietly beside the trail, Tischler slowly regained his composure. “I do feel a little more peace now, for me and for my dad. But I first had to see with my own eyes this place where he died.”
And in that place, just before noon, as a butterfly flitted above the Resolution’s pockmarked skin of rust and rivets, the pin-drop silence was gently interrupted. It was the distant drone of an airplane, maybe coming in for a landing at San Francisco International Airport, maybe heading out over the Pacific. But it was impossible to know for sure.
Contact Patrick May at pmay@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5689.
