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Memory can be a curious phenomenon. We like to think of it as a simple record, imperfect perhaps, but reasonably immutable and accurate. We even base some aspects of history on it, if not on our own memory than that of someone else’s memory.

As you age through, and hopefully gain experience, you recognize that time edits, as writer Colin Fletcher has noted, it “edits in two ways. It removes insignificant material and it tidies up.”
This is where you have to be careful. Memory tends to eliminate almost immediately routine matters of no importance. (Can you remember which sock you put on first this morning?) But it tends to retain events that cause great pain or pleasure.

If you are old enough, you can probably still remember what you were doing when you learned of John Kennedy’s assassination. On the other hand, you may encyst rather than “repress” profoundly traumatic events. The images are there vividly recorded but in self-protection you tend to avoid bringing them up into awareness. I can think of a nasty divorce or early retirement compelled by circumstances beyond your control as fitting that category. Most adults acknowledge that kind of elasticity in our memories. We find it less easy to accept that memory, our sole subjective source of history, our personal librarian, can be less than trustworthy.

A decade ago psychologist Elizabeth Loftus wrote, “Our memories are continually being altered, transformed and distorted.” Recently in a technical paper she quoted the case of Jack Hamilton, California Angels pitcher, who on August 18, 1967 in Boston’s Fenway Park, effectively ended the potentially brilliant career of 23-year-old Tony Conigliaro when he “crushed the outfielder’s face with a first-pitch fast ball.”

More than 20 years later, Hamilton (now over 50) can’t forget: “I’ve had to live with it; I think about it a lot. . . . It was like the sixth inning when it happened. I think the score was 2-1 and he was the eighth hitter in their batting order. With the pitcher up next, I had no reason to throw at him!”

In actual fact, it was the fourth inning, no score, two out, nobody on. Tony was batting sixth . . . Hamilton remembered it was a day game because he recalled trying to see Tony in the hospital later that afternoon. The truth is different: The game took place at night.

That such errors commonly occur in what one might expect to be vivid “flashbulb” memories is confirmed by Ulric Neisser, an Emory University psychologist.

The morning after the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, he asked his students to fill out a questionnaire: Where were they when they first heard the news? What were they doing at the time? Who were they with? And who first told them the news? Almost three years later, when the students were seniors, he got them to answer the same questionnaire — with one extra question: How sure were they of their answers?

Dr. Neisser’s technical paper on the experiment reports that of 44 students who completed both questionnaires “none of the enduring memories was entirely correct. Only three subjects (7 percent) remembered the details correctly but with minor discrepancies . . . 11 subjects (25 percent) were wrong about everything . . .” What’s more, the students who got everything wrong were just as likely as the others to be confident of the accuracy of their recall, and no amount of prodding would convince any of them that the “phantom” memories were false — even after they’d seen the original questionnaire in their own handwriting.

In other words, our brains can play tricks on us. Despite scientific research, however, and for all its weight, I am willing to bet that most readers will agree that many times certain vivid personal experiences totally engrave themselves on our memories, and even make you wonder how you can recall so much detail, especially if the experience was many years ago. The following indelible echoes from my own memory is a case in point. The year was 1941, Europe had been embroiled in a bloody war since 1939, and its prospects of escaping Hitler’s cold-blooded conquest was in serious doubt. This village was still recovering from the worst depression in history that choked the economy and took a bitter toll as well as created unprecedented unemployment and low wages. Nevertheless, it was a happy, harmonious community, a wonderful place in which to live, and LIFE WAS GOOD!

One of the big “moments” for local youngsters in those days was a Saturday matinee at the local theater just for kids. Remember, there was no television in those days, and money was hard to come by, so you didn’t often go to the movies, but if you did your chores (and were awarded your allowance), or found enough soda bottles to turn in for the two-cent deposit, kids could usually come up with the fifteen cents needed for admission and it was a “big deal” and certainly something that was looked forward to eagerly.

The particular day I am talking about was in late October, a dull, chilly, wet day with spitting snow and heavy clouds. My friend, Floyd Hutchins, and I stood in a long line with the other kids in town, a line that stretched past the Holland House (bar, restaurant, and hotel), formerly the Futterman building to the A&P Store (now Guido’s Pizzeria), waiting impatiently for Mr. Olivey, the manager, to open the theater.

As we stood there, we could hear an airplane, its engines throbbing heavily, circling the main street. On one of those numerous circuits it suddenly broke through the cloud cover, and looming above us was the largest airplane that I am almost certain any of us had ever seen (it was rare enough to see even a small plane in those days). The plane was only scant feet above the Martin Bros. grocery store across the street from the theater (now Nice Twice) and an astonished wave of oohs, aahs, and wows resonated up and down the gaggle of kids waiting in line. (I can hear today’s kids saying, “Awesome!” or “Cool!”)

It continued flying over the village like this, trying several times unsuccessfully (I was later told) to land on the golf course fairways.

Finally the theater doors opened and we disappeared into the world of fantasy, little realizing the drama that was being played out in the doomed aircraft above was the real world. Nor could we have known that all too soon many of the youngsters in that movie theater audience would face similar drama where bravery, fear, and anxiety would become all too common a thread in the tapestry of their lives. America, in less than two months time, would itself be plunged into global war.

As we spilled out of the theater later that afternoon, the darkened street was alive with people, some almost in shock and disbelief as the word spread like wildfire that “the plane had crashed in the marsh near Moody.” (Actually to the rear and south of the glacial erratic which my generation knew as Green Island. This island is located in the marsh some distance in back of the present -day bowling alley and today is rapidly being clothed in a mantle of white birch trees, which somehow have found a foothold in the interstices of that great hunk of anorthosite.)
The following is what Louie Simmons was to relate in later years in his book, “Mostly Spruce and Hemlock”:

Tupper Lake had a grim reminder that war is a deadly business on October 25, 1941, when a Lockheed-Hudson bomber of the Royal Canadian Air Force, en route from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Toronto, Canada, carried three young Canadian flyers to their deaths here. The big bomber circled over this village, obviously seeking a landing area, for more than an hour during a driving snowstorm, which cut visibility to a minimum. Its desperate crew tried to land it in the marsh at the foot of Big Tupper Lake, the plane disintegrating in the crash and killing all three instantly. The tragedy saddened the community, but a lighter note was when a Canadian military salvage crew, especially trained for the work, spent weeks trying to retrieve the two big motors of the bomber, rigging powerful pumps to sluice away the mud heavy lifting tack and even bringing in a diver to set underwater explosive charges. The eleven-man party gave up after nearly a month’s work and returned to Canada.

Shortly after their departure, two Tupper men, Henry and Wilmer LaVoy, were given the green light to try their hand at the salvage job. Between hunting trips they retrieved both motors, devoting a total of five hours to the project.”

Item: Herb Trimm, who grew up in Tupper Lake and returned to retire on Racquette River Drive, remembers that day, crossing from his Stetson Road home to the family barn to do the milking. He watched in fascination as the low-flying bomber made its final approach turn over his father’s pasture (now Becky Avenue) in its attempt to land in the marsh, which must have appeared as a field.

Herb, an Air Force veteran, and later associated with the aircraft industry, feels that the plans was more likely a British Bristol Beaufort reconnaissance bomber and not an American Lockheed Hudson as indicated.

Item: A part of Henry’s Success in retrieving the motors was the ability to remove his crane from the back of his 2 1/2-ton Mack truck and place it aboard a huge scow belonging to the Villeneuve Lumber Co. He then towed the scow into the marsh directly to the crash site. Once he had located and hooked on to an engine (easier said than done), Henry would operate the crane, reeling in cable until the scow would heel over almost upending itself against the resistance tugging against the crane’s boom. At this point, Henry would scramble off the crane and row away in his guideboat (now part of the Adirondack Museum boat collection). He would return periodically, and during his absence some of the muck and suction would have released enough to allow the scow to return to level (and raise the engine that distance).

This was a delicate and dangerous technique and demanded great skill. Henry had to know the critical moment to cease working his crane and scramble down to his boat. He also had to have the patience not rush nature’s elemental assistance.

A self-taught mechanical genius who could intuitively employ many of Archimedes’ principles without ever having tread his works, he was able to complete many complex projects in his lifetime when often more lettered experts had failed.

Copyright William C. Frenette Collection