In a blur of seconds, the Air Force pilot wrestled with the failing controls of his aircraft as he struggled with the fast-approaching future.
Below him lay a rural French village. The split-second choices that Capt. Jim Walker made that day in 1960 would resonate through the decades.
For 47 years, his family would imagine this dilemma: Eject, and the jet could crash into homes. Remain in the pilot’s seat, and maybe he could steer the plane away from the farmers’ houses below.
It would take more than four decades, a kindhearted man in France, the efforts of American Airlines and a release of information from archives to finally bring peace to the Texas family who waited behind.
Aug. 22, 1960, began calm and clear in Saint-Jean-de-Niost, a village east of Lyon in the Rhone-Alpes region of southeast France. Twelve-year-old Patrick Dalmaz followed his grandfather, a grocer, on regular rounds to buy eggs and poultry from village farmers. Just after 12:30 p.m., a thunderous noise boomed overhead.
Just above the roofs
Patrick was riveted. He would run to the front gate of his home every time he heard so much as a tractor engine. But this! A jet with stars on its wings was skimming over the roofs of homes. As it passed, its engine appeared to start and stop, at times sending the aircraft swirling like a dead leaf in a high wind.
Patrick watched as the F-102 Delta Dagger crashed into an abandoned vineyard about 300 yards from the village.
“I can’t believe my eyes. I am shaking all over,” Patrick recalls thinking.
The boy ran toward the flames and smoke, arriving at the crash site before police and firefighters. Emergency workers found Patrick standing transfixed in front of the pilot’s remains.
Farther north, at Hahn Air Base near Wiesbaden, Germany, Dana Walker, 23, waited at home for her husband, Capt. William James Walker, 27. Everyone knew him as Jim.
One day in 1953, while stationed at Houston’s Ellington Air Force Base, Jim Walker strolled into a Foley’s department store and was instantly smitten with the pretty clerk with dark auburn hair and blue-gray eyes. That was Dana.
In 1955, the young man from an Iowa farm and the girl raised in Lufkin, Texas, were married. Four years later, Jim Walker was transferred, and the young family moved to Hahn Air Base.
In the summer of 1960, Walker and the 496th Fighter Interceptor squadron received orders to head to an air base in Tripoli, Libya, for training.
A few days before leaving, Walker filled out the standard next-of-kin form and listed his wife, Dana Ann Walker; his daughters, Kathryn Lynn, 4; and Kimberly Kay, 3; and son, William James Jr., 3 months.
And then he left on the mission, leaving a family that would wait a long time to know why he didn’t come home.
On the way home from Libya, Walker and his wingman stopped over in Italy, then headed back toward Germany.
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“The airplane did not break up upon falling,” reported a Catholic priest who had witnessed the accident and gave the pilot last rites. He wrote to Dana afterward to describe what he saw. “Rather, it alighted, giving the impression that your husband until the last moment tried in vain to pull out of the crash.”
A year later, Walker would be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
That, however, was only beginning for his family.
Within 48 hours of the crash, the Air Force sent Dana and her three children back to Dana’s parents’ home in Deer Park, outside Houston.
She was reeling, breathless with grief and confusion. Little information about the crash was provided by the Air Force, and the questions about it were still unformed in her mind.
She’d been told he was a hero. Through the fog of grief, she thought she’d heard that he’d decided not to eject so that he could guide the plane away from the village. Not eject? It seemed impossible he’d make that choice.
After the crash, the Air Force returned the watch he was wearing at the time of the accident.
Dana took the watch to a jeweler, who repaired it and then commented that it seemed impossible for a watch to go through such a horrible accident and still work.
Raised questions
That put a question in her mind. Had the Air Force told her the truth? Was there really an accident in which her husband chose to save a village instead of living and returning to his family?
The grief and doubt lingered through the years.
Her daughter, Kim, now Kim Christoforo, 50, of south Arlington, Texas, grew up barely remembering her father, yet feeling closely connected to him.
“I am so proud of my father,” Christoforo says. “Dad was this god, this perfect person. We idolized him.”
In her 20s, she began to have questions as well. Something powerful must have kept him from his family.
Jim Walker had, after all, been lost during the Cold War.
“I thought maybe he’d gone over Russia and his plane had gone down. I thought maybe it was a secret spy mission,” Kim says.
Recognition
It wasn’t until last year that the family finally got an answer.
The French boy who witnessed the crash had grown up to become the historian for the village of Saint-Jean-de-Niost.
One day in 2006, Patrick Dalmaz was going through town records when he came across a report of the crash. It was then that he and the people of Saint-Jean-de-Niost decided to dedicate the town square to the American pilot who saved the village. There would be a plaque and a ceremony.
Dalmaz contacted the French consul in Iowa, who, by locating an obituary in the Anita, Iowa, Tribune, found the pilot’s family.
Would they attend the memorial to Jim Walker set for Aug. 26?
Christoforo was ecstatic about the ceremony.
“It will honor him,” she says. “And maybe we’ll get some closure here.”
Christoforo told her friends and co-workers. No one could figure out how to get a dozen members of the Walker family to France. It would cost $20,000 for airfare alone.
A receptionist at Rattikin Title Co. where Christoforo works, contacted someone at American Airlines. Could the airline help?
American Airlines agreed to fly 12 family members to France and back for free.
The pending ceremony in France caused the family to discuss the crash again. They asked more questions. Why didn’t he eject?
They got an answer.
In response to a newspaper’s request, the Freedom of Information officer for the Air Force Safety Center in Albuquerque provided the official accident report in late July.
It revealed this:
Jim Walker had tried to eject. Evidence found on the crashed jet indicated that the ejection seat malfunctioned. He had tried to save his life and return to the family that loved him.
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He was a hero
And this:
Jim Walker was a hero who saved a village.
“Witness statements and general conversation around the crashed aircraft confirm the fact that the pilot in his last moment of flight, purposely slid his aircraft away from the village of Saint-Jean-de-Niost,” the report concluded.
Jim Walker had done both of the things that mattered.
“That is good to know,” Dana said when she heard the news. “I just couldn’t believe that if he had a choice to make, I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t have chosen us.”
Dana, now Dana Brinson, 70, of New Braunfels, Texas, is going to the ceremony. None of the family has ever visited the crash site.
Christoforo and her sister Kathy McMillen of Nacogdoches are going as well. Their brother, William James Walker Jr., died in a pickup accident in East Texas when he was 18.
“It gives us validation and closure, and he is being recognized for not being there with us when we were growing up,” Christoforo says of her father, the invisible hero who is always by her side.