Around 4 p.m., in the show’s closing hour, an experimental plane crashed near the Roehms’ car, spilling burning oil fuel over the vehicle. “Human torches,” a local newspaper headline blared.
In the end, Nina was the only one who survived the fiery crash that killed the pilot and four people on the ground — the only civilian deaths in Dayton air show history. It was a tragedy that forever changed air show safety in the United States — and forever changed the lives of three families.
Little Nina Lee owed her life to the quick thinking of close family friend Kathleen Eyre. According to family accounts, the 22-year-old Eyre tossed the newborn out of the car window before she too became engulfed in flames. Only Nina’s hands were burned.
Jack Darst of Beavercreek, then a high school student, watched the crash in horror.
“It was a low flyover from the west to the east, and the pilot did a moderate dive and high-speed pull up,” Darst recalled. “There weren’t any wild gyrations; it just didn’t climb. The plane skidded through a fence, and hit close to the Airway Road perimeter. The fire trucks couldn’t get through the fence to get to the scene. It was very chaotic.”
Nina Roehm Hampton, now 66, lives in Marysville, Ohio. She talked to the Dayton Daily News about her life and of the day it almost ended.
Hampton said her father, an engineer for a Dayton tool-and-die company, spent the day at the air show and had excitedly returned home to bring the rest of the family back with him, including Nina in her first public outing. The car had just gone through the ticket booth and pulled up along Airway Road when the plane burst into flames.
The pilot, World War II flying ace Capt. William Glasgow, was killed instantly. Wesley Roehm, 23, died at the hospital a short time later. Eyre died the next day and Nina’s sister, 20-month-old Donna Irene, died two days later.
Susan Roehm lived two more weeks, long enough to express her wishes that her husband’s parents, Grace and Vern Roehm, raise her surviving daughter, Nina.
“They didn’t tell her at first that my father and sister had died,” Hampton said. “She fought and fought, but after she found out the news, she lost her fight.”
It is an almost unthinkable tragedy — one that continues to reverberate in the Roehm, Eyre and Glasgow families more than 66 years later. Yet it’s also a powerful story of compassion and the staying power of family.
Hampton has been happily married for 47 years to her husband Tom, is the mother of two married sons and the grandmother of five. She shows a surprising lack of bitterness about the accident that claimed the lives of her family. She still has burn scars on her hands and as a child she endured several skin graft surgeries, but she carries no psychological scars. “I’ve had a wonderful life,” said Hampton. “I was raised by loving grandparents. The more I live, the more I realize God’s blessings. Because I lived, I have a responsibility to be a blessing to others.”
John Culdahy, president of the Virginia-based International Council of Air Shows, said the air show industry came under close scrutiny after the Dayton tragedy. “As a result of that accident, there was a close cooperative effort that developed a comprehensive set of air show regulations and rules that have done quite well at protecting spectator safety,” Culdahy said. Among the improvements: greater distances between spectators and aircraft, stringent qualifications for pilots and a prohibition against aerobatics while plane pointed at audience.
Since the new rules were adopted in 1952, not a single spectator has been killed at a North American air show. Air races, he noted, operate under a different set of flying rules. (Eleven people died Sept. 16 at an air race in Reno, Nev.)
None of the survivors has ever blamed the pilot. Glasgow’s mother, Margaret, sent baby clothes for Nina. Hampton, in fact, remembers visiting the Glasgow family in their hometown of Niagara Falls, N.Y. “How hard it must have been, to get him back safely from the war and then to lose him like that,” she said.
Glasgow’s cousin, Violet McIntyre, worshipped the war hero who had defied the odds by making it home after flying more than 80 combat missions over Germany.
“He was always a gentleman, and the ladies loved him, young and old,” McIntyre recalled. “If you met him for the first time, he could make you feel that you were the most important person in his life.”
The church was filled to capacity at Glasgow’s memorial service in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Pallbearers included fellow aces Capt. Don S. Gentile, and Major Richard I. Bong, Ace Pilot, who performed at the Wright Field air show alongside Glasgow and tipped their wings in tribute after he crashed.
Glasgow’s family now believes the experimental aircraft, the Curtiss-Wright XP-55 Ascender, should never have been permitted to fly in an air show. Because of its pusher design, it was known as the “Ass-ender” and only a few prototypes were ever produced The first crashed and further test runs revealed the plane’s excessively long takeoff run and poor stalling characteristics. “It never should have been used,” McIntyre lamented. “It was just a tragic thing; Bill got through the war only to die in his own country.”
Susan Roehm’s younger sister, Jane Davidson of Centerville, was only 13 when she lost her adored older sister, a star student in high school. “My mother and Dad spent a lot of time at the hospital in Dayton, and it was constant turmoil in our lives,” she said.
Yet she remembers many kindnesses, from neighbors bringing a parade of casserole dishes to the rationing board allowing the family to get more gasoline so they could make the trips to Dayton. “It was a summer you always remember,” Davidson said.
Beverly Dodds of Leesburg said her in-laws, Mildred and Ed Eyre, were never the same after the death of their daughter: “Kathleen was working as a secretary in Dayton. She was a little farm girl having her adventures in the city. She had been engaged to be married, and her fiance was killed in an airplane in the service.”
A U.S. District Court ultimately awarded $70,000 in damages for all five of the civilian victims, including $7,000 for Nina.
Because she had never known her parents or her sister, Hampton said, “It was never painful for me.” Her grandparents always told her the truth about the crash and didn’t shy away from telling childhood stories about her father. Hers was an idyllic childhood packed with music lessons, Sunday school, Farm Bureau Camps, and annual Fayette County Fairs.
Her grandparents made sure that she often visited her mother’s family and celebrated Christmas with them. “We are people who appreciate the value of family and getting together,” Hampton said.
She realizes now that her emotional resilience was the result of “being doted on by both sides of the family. I had everything a child could want in the way of love and support.”
When Hampton was a young mother, her grandmother lovingly compiled a scrapbook filled with photos of her family. “I will miss the photos of your Mother and Father but want you to have them,” Grace Roehm wrote. “They were a wonderful, happy young couple with great plans for the future. Little Donna with big brown eyes and dark hair like her Father’s was a beautiful child.”
“I didn’t dwell a lot on my parents being killed in an air show,” she said. “I was more focused on getting to my 4-H meeting.”
A woman of deep faith, Hampton believes she will meet her family for the first time in heaven. “I think that would be exciting,” she said. “I’ve got angels watching over me.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or mmccarty@DaytonDaily News.com.
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