The article stated that “an unofficial investigation disclosed that the control was on the right side and the wheel in the lap of Red Graham would indicate that the student-pilot had taken control.” The story ran with pictures of the Waco and of Dean’s pilot license photograph.
11, 1935, the story of the crash appeared on the front page of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. Part of the red fabric covering the top left wing had ripped away. When William saw what the crash had done to his brother, one of the Graham kinsmen overheard him say, “Hell, Dean, is that you?”Īt five o’clock that afternoon, after the bodies had been taken to the funeral home in Pontotoc, a crowd was still standing around the plane, many of them Dean’s fellow pilots, staring at the crash site in disbelief. The impact had driven the engine through the cockpit and smashed into the passengers. William went to the plane and looked inside. They had been hastily covered with bed sheets.
Under a towering oak, the bodies of the Graham cousins and Bud Warren lay in a flatbed truck. It had gone down in an open spot in a wooded area about ten miles from the Pontotoc airfield. The Waco had been almost completely destroyed, its nose buried deep. He found men working with blowtorches and hacksaws, racing against darkness to remove Dean’s body from the wreckage.
William drove by himself to the crash site at Thaxton. My wife and I visited the crash site at the Graham farm at Thaxton, where we were told what happened when William arrived on the scene, eighty years ago today.ĭean described her uncle’s reaction in her memoir, Every Day by the Sun: Three teenage passengers also died in the crash that day: Bud Warren, Henry Graham and Lamon Graham. William Faulkner was devastated by his brother’s death, especially because he had given Dean his Waco II bi-plane. Today is the 80th anniversary of the death of my late wife Dean’s father, Dean Swift Faulkner, who died in a plane crash in Thaxton, during an air show on Nov.
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