Montgomery had no idea who Larry was, exactly, or where Ruth might be living—or even if she was living. But the 31-year-old bus driver from Northern Ireland dedicated himself to solving the mystery. Montgomery already had the crew members' names—he had asked the U.S. Air Force for them in 1991. Going through the list, he found two Lawrences, and one. a Staff Sgt. Dundon, had been buried abroad. Montgomery learned that Dundon was from Kentucky by writing the military cemetery in Cambridge, England. Then the trail went cold: The state's wedding records for the period, which were incomplete, yielded nothing, and the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs could find no record of a Ruth Dundon applying for widows' benefits.
Then, in late 1995, the Air Force sent Montgomery a copy of Dundon's personal file, which included a 50-year-old Louisville address. "I knew it was a slim chance [that Ruth would still live there]," he says. "But I tried it anyway." When the letter he sent came back unopened, a determined Montgomery tried to take out an ad in Louisville's Courier-Journal. Luckily, his request came to the attention of columnist Bob Hill, who wrote about Montgomery's search on July 13.
"It was a shocker," says Ruth Gillespie, who was stunned when a relative told her about the column. Now 79 and the grandmother of 10, Gillespie, who is Larry Dundon's widow, called Hill, who gave her Montgomery's telephone number. That afternoon she dialed Belfast. "I believe you have a wedding ring belonging to my husband," she said.
Gillespie hadn't laid eyes on it since Larry Dundon went off to war, but she still recalls placing the ring on his finger at their wedding at Louisville's Baptist Tabernacle in 1939. Drafted in 1943, Sgt. Dundon, an Air Force radio operator, left for Europe at the end of May 1944. Routed to Belfast for refueling, his B-17 was told to circle, but the crew'lost their bearings in the fog, and the plane smashed into Cave Hill, killing all 10 aboard. "Larry was very kind, very thoughtful," says Ruth. But, she adds, "I had a house and bills to pay. I had to go on." Two years later, the 29-year-old widow married printer Woody Gillespie, with whom she eventually had four children.
If Ruth could push the plane crash to the back of her mind, Alfred Montgomery could think of little else. Raised in the shadow of Cave Hill, Montgomery first saw the crash site at age 10 when his father, Alfred Sr., a museum curator, showed him where the aircraft had gone down. Young Alfred was enthralled. "I was always asking to go there," he says. "It became my top priority." When he was old enough to drive, Montgomery made regular pilgrimages to Cave Hill, returning with an array of relics: seared bits of leather, shell casings, even burned chunks of cookies. "It was a place where time stood still," he says, "where I could get away from everyday problems."
Those problems seemed more pressing by 1992, when Montgomery, then 27 and newly divorced from his wife of four years, began to identify with the dead airmen. "I suppose I put myself in their category," he says. "The end of my marriage seemed like the end of the line for me as well." When he found the wedding ring in December 1993, Montgomery was determined to find new life in the ashes that haunted his imagination.
Two months after he first spoke to Gillespie, Montgomery took a plane to Louisville. Now twice-widowed (Woody died in 1995), Ruth booked the Baptist Tabernacle where she and Larry had married and invited 80 friends and family members to witness the return of the ring. As he handed it to her, Montgomery says he felt as though his lifelong obsession about the war and the men in the American B-17 had reached a perfect closure. "I feel as though I have done something completely useful, for once in my life," he says. "If I never do any more good, I know that I have done this."
PETER CARLIN
BRYAN ALEXANDER in Belfast and KATE KLISE in Louisville
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