Push continues to remember doomed Flight 629

Conrad Hopp and his family were finishing up supper on Nov. 1, 1955 when a loud boom shook the windows of their farmhouse in southwest Weld County. Some as far as 20 miles away from the 160-acre Hopp beet farm reported hearing a rocket blast and seeing a fireball cross the clear, dark sky.

The Hopps and their neighbors did not know it at the time but they were witnessing the fiery remains of United Airlines Flight 629 hurtle toward earth and near their front doors. The flight —  also known as the Denver Mainliner — had been blown to bits with the help of 25 sticks of dynamite carried on board by an unsuspecting passenger. 

The flight took off from Denver’s Stapleton Airport only 10 minutes earlier. Hopp and the other farm families near the crash would later learn that all 44 passengers and crew of Flight 629 were victims of the first plane bombing on U.S. soil and at the time, the worst mass murder in American history.

“This is something we just couldn’t imagine at the time,” the 85-year-old Hopp said. “There are times when I still can’t believe it.”

Hopp said he is only now talking openly about the aftermath of the crash of Flight 629 and what he and other volunteer first responders found among the wreckage on the beet fields they had known and worked on for years. 

“I’ve never really been able to talk about it,” Hopp said. “I just kind of kept it close to myself. It just bothers me so much. Especially when I try to sleep.”

Hopp said he began opening up a little bit about the crash during its 50th anniversary in 2005. Recently, he found emotional kinship with Marian Hobgood Poeppelmeyer, whose father Marion Pierce Hobgood was one of the doomed passengers of Flight 629.

Poeppelmeyer is pressing local municipalities to memorialize Flight 629 and the people who never hesitated in scrambling to recover the bodies and help investigate the bombing.

“Your community rose to the occasion and displayed American spirit and heroism,” Poeppelmeyer recently told the Longmont city council.

On the night of the crash, Hopp and his older brother Kenneth only knew that they had to help in any rescue efforts. Hopp said they sprinted out from the warm security of their home with their flashlights and headed to give aid.

“My brother yelled at me to grab some coats to keep people warm at night,” the 85-year-old Hopp said recently. “He headed out and I didn’t see him for two days.”

The younger Hopp wandered onto a hellscape. The airplane had split in two with the tail and nose landing nearly a mile–and-a-half from each other, Hopp said. Most bodies were found near the nose and tail. 

Hopp, already a member of the Colorado National Guard, was ordered to use a tractor to mark where the bodies were located so someone could be stationed there to ward off looters. The next day he returned to recover the wildly contorted remains of the passengers.

Hopp is stooped over but still is broad shouldered with thick hands. He and his wife Martha both have easy smiles and they have raised a big family that includes prominent local lawyers and accountants.

He is surrounded by a huge family. Still, he’s mostly kept to himself about what he found and did the day after the bombing. 

“Picking them up and putting them in a body bag was something you can’t forget … ever,” Hopp said. “You just pick up a five-foot hunk of jelly. It’s hard to describe how that feels.”

His brother Kenneth, who helped the FBI during the recovery efforts, also kept to himself about what he experienced after the crash. “We just never really talked about it,” Hopp said. “We just never could get there.”

His whole family heard the echoes of the Denver Mainliner crash for years even though they tried to keep the memories bottled up, Hopp said. “My dad never really went out into the dark after the crash. Something out there scared him.”

“And my brother said he thought there were ghosts out there,” Hopp said, nodding at the few remaining fields near his house in Firestone. “I think he was only half-kidding.”

His reluctance to say much about the Denver Mainliner does not surprise longtime Johnstown resident Rick Tittle. He heard about the crash when he was 7 years old and has been fascinated with it ever since.

Hopp and the other farmers who responded to the crash are used to rolling up their sleeves and doing work others cannot stomach, Tittle said. They are not that interested in disclosing their feelings, he said.

“When you are a farmer there are a lot of ruddy chores you have to deal without complaint,” Tittle said. “When this happened (the plane crash) this fell into that category. It was just something that had to be dealt with.”

“I am glad Conrad is talking about this a little bit more,” Tittle said. “I am hoping other families will come out and talk about what they saw. It can only help them.”

Poeppelmeyer said her 31-year-old father met his doom when the company he worked for as an electrical engineer, the Philco Company in Philadelphia, Pa, decided to send him to Oregon on Nov. 1, 1955.

Philco debated between sending Poeppelmeyer’s father and another man to a worksite in Oregon. The company knew his wife was pregnant with a second child (Poeppelmeyer) but opted to send him anyway.

 “As a young man in his 30s you just don’t argue with bosses,” Poeppelmeyer said in an email . “My mom shared with me that she was a little hesitant with him leaving at this time, but didn’t know why.”

Poeppelmeyer was born two month premature due to the stress put on her mother after her husband’s death, she said. “... And I never knew my father, never felt his touch, or heard his voice. His and my mom’s dreams have been shattered forever.”

Poeppelmeyer said she struggled for much of her life due to her father’s death and recounts her pain in her book “Finding My Father.” In the book, she describes the Flight 629 crash and its aftermath relying on interviews and research. She said of particular help was a book written by a Denver lawyer Andrew J. Fields — “Mainliner Denver — The Bombing of Flight 629.”

The Mainline Denver bombing introduced many firsts including how the FBI changed its forensics techniques, Poeppelmeyer said. Also for the first time, photographers and film cameras were allowed in a courtroom for the trial of John Graham, who was convicted and later put to death for his role in the bombing.

Graham wanted to kill his mother, Daisy King, and put 25 sticks of dynamite with a homemade timer in her suitcase.

“What goes through somebody’s mind who does that,” Hopp said. “I don’t understand it.”

Poeppelmeyer wants to concentrate on the 200 or so first responders who arrived at the crash scene and the work they did over the next several months. Farmers, local residents, police and firefighters joined the FBI and the Civil Aeronautics Board to recover bodies and do other work at the scene.

“They did not hesitate or think twice about what to do — they just did it,” she said.

Mead Mayor Colleen Whitlow said the town will recognize the work of first responders, which she hopes will get more people to recognize events around Nov. 1 1955. “I just think there are a lot of people who have never heard of this,” Whitlow said. “We need to get the word out.”

Remnants of Flight 629 remain stuck deep in the fields hugging Mead, a town of 5,000 people, Whitlow said. “Farmers are always bringing chunks of metal or something else from the airplane. They will always be digging something up,” she said. 

Longmont Mayor Joan Peck said the city also will produce a proclamation surrounding the work done after the plane crash. “This was a huge historical event. We should recognize it,” Peck said.