I was seven years old when it happened. It was Sunday morning and my family had just left home, most likely going to visit relatives in Austin, as we often did, when we observed a small, yellow plane flying very low over the fields about a half-mile from our house.
Returning home several hours later, as we neared the place where we had seen the plane, we noticed quite a few people and vehicles in one of the fields, which, as it turned out, was directly behind, and only a few hundred yards from our house. I walked across our field, climbed through the barbed-wire fence and went over to the spot where, in a large, burned, grassy area I saw only the charred framework of what had recently been the light plane.
The Mansfield family lived in the house that still sits at the intersection of Blake Manor Road and Hogeye Road. As I later learned on Monday morning when I got on the school bus, the two Mansfield boys, Lonnie and Charles, who rode the same bus, were the first ones to get to the scene after the plane crashed, but it was too late for them to do anything to help. Apparently the plane had burst into flames immediately upon hitting the power lines and they were not able to get near it when they arrived.
As you might imagine, the Mansfield boys and I had a story to tell when we arrived at school that morning.
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