Munson: Super Sleuths' epic class project never stops
AMES, Ia. – It began nearly 73 years ago when Bill Cherry was forced to ditch his B-17 in the Pacific Ocean.
The World War II bomber had strayed off course and run out of fuel. The Army Air Corps captain and his crew of seven survived the violent water landing on Oct. 21, 1942, but were left adrift on three rubber rafts in the middle of 64 million square miles of churning sea.
For three weeks the men subsisted on a handful of oranges and other scraps. Cherry's nose was broken by the tail slap of a 10-foot shark. They devoured, raw, a sea swallow that happened to alight on one man's head. They debated whether to sacrifice their ear lobes or other bits of flesh for fish bait. Their skin baked and soon was pocked with painful ulcers in the unrelenting sun. Eddie Rickenbacker, the famous World War I flying ace who was among them, swore profusely at the other men to help boost morale.
One of the soldiers died and was buried at sea. Another tried to commit suicide by flopping overboard but was dragged back into the raft.
Yet another — Lt. James C. Whittaker, who would go on to write the 1943 account "We Thought We Heard the Angels Sing" — hallucinated that he met mythic underwater devil Davy Jones at the bottom of the ocean.
You can see how such a dramatic war story would set ablaze the imaginations of a roomful of impressionable sixth-graders.
A Dallas County farm girl named Suzanne Kelly was one of those captivated students when her sixth-grade teacher first read Whittaker's book to her class in 1955 in Adel. By then Kelly already had resolved to grow up to be a teacher — if not a detective like her favorite fictional children's book heroine Nancy Drew.
Thus the dramatic first-person, 139-page memoir became a central story in Kelly's life. Eventually she referred to it simply as "the book."
STORY UNFOLDS
The story around the book has continued to unfold. Its threads have stretched across decades to weave a complex web of connections between Iowans, islanders and World War II veterans.
Kelly, 71 and now retired in Ames, first heard the story 60 years ago. She oversaw a remarkable class project based on the book 30 years ago. This week she and her students will gather for yet another special reunion.
When Kelly in 1966 began her own 42-year teaching career — 37 of those at Meeker Elementary in Ames — she read the book annually to her sixth-grade class.
By the fall of 1984 it was long out of print, but her dedication to the story never flagged.
"She was so energetic," said Douglas Haynes, a sixth-grader that year who now teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. "I can't remember a time when I felt like she wasn't just brimming over with enthusiasm."
Kelly was "a master at reading everything with suspense," said Christy Franco (then Christy Scott).
The Nancy Drew curiosity also had endured in Kelly's teaching methods. She continually prodded her class to be inquisitive about every nook and cranny of a richly told tale.
That lesson rubbed off with the 20 students in the 1984-85 academic year. There also was a trigger: That fall Kelly missed a couple of weeks of school for surgery to remove a thyroid tumor. The lump had grown fast, but doctors were reasonably sure it was benign. To reassure her students Kelly asked them to ponder what sort of project they might tackle when she returned.
The book provided the spark: What had happened, the students wondered, to those guys rescued from the rafts?
TENACIOUS WONDER
One student in particular, Travis Senne, was persistent. He wouldn't let Kelly or his classmates drop the idea.
"It pretty much defined that whole year of our lives," said Senne, who now lives in Waukee and works for an insurance company.
The students formed committees, delegated work and focused on each other's strengths. Some drew maps of the South Pacific while others researched the soldiers' biographies.
Franco, who now teaches first grade in Ames, was in charge of tracking down Cherry. All she knew was that the pilot was a Texan who had lived in the Fort Worth area. She couldn't benefit from Google.
"I just remember how time-consuming the job was," said Franco, "because we didn't have anything like the Internet that we could just type something in and find an answer in a minute."
So she went to the Ames Public Library and consulted its rows of phone books from major cities. She copied down all the names, numbers and addresses for Cherrys in Fort Worth.
She ended up hand-writing and mailing letters to numerous Cherrys who might have some connection to a "William" or "Bill."
One of them turned out to be the captain's son.
"We were just kind of in awe that we could put the pieces of this long-lost puzzle back together," Franco said.
PERSEVERANCE PAYS
By today's digital standards the class's research would have been excruciating, painstaking. But the club's perseverance and far reach for its time was amazing. Kelly's students even obtained a general's report on the men's rescue that was declassified for them.
The class came to be known as the "Super Sleuths."
The Register published a front-page story in 1985 after the students had found the four men from the rafts who still were alive.
Three of the survivors — Cherry the pilot, radio operator James Reynolds and engineer John Bartek — ended up flying to Ames in April 1985 for a three-day "Rescue Reunion" organized by the kids. A media mob helped greet the veterans at the Des Moines airport.
"It was one of the early experiences I've had," Haynes said, "where I felt like I was reaching out of my world into another."
Haynes contacted a man named Toma who had found one of the rafts that had washed ashore on the island of Nukufetau — less than one square mile and part of a scattered chain known as the Ellice Islands (now the nation of Tuvalu).
For the next decade Kelly's sixth-grade classes fleshed out more of the story, whether researching military doctors or the island children.
"If you were in my class, you found people," Kelly said of the reputation she developed in the halls of Meeker Elementary.
MORE CONNECTIONS
Press coverage prompted even more revelations and connections.
The classes mined the text in almost Biblical detail, compiling a paper trail that eventually filled 14 filing cabinet drawers in Kelly's house. (She and her husband, Bob, a fellow retired teacher and guidance counselor, have lived in the same home near Jack Trice Stadium since 1971.)
Kelly became friends with the fiancee of the soldier, Sgt. Alex Kaczmarczyk, who had died at sea.
A writer for Reader's Digest, Jack Fincher, trekked to Ames in the fall of 1986 to write a story for the magazine. Kelly enlisted him to help teach her class for the week. (Fincher's son, David, is the Oscar-nominated director of "Fight Club," "The Social Network," "Gone Girl," "House of Cards" and more.)
Cherry even returned for the 1991 high school graduation of the Super Sleuths.
He continued to phone Franco on her birthday for years. When the pilot died in 2000 in California, the Iowan composed a poem for him that was printed in his funeral program.
The connections continue. Kelly sews doll clothes as a hobby and recently sent a batch to Cherry's great-granddaughters.
Kelly retired in 2008 and eventually decided to write a book as she stared at her mountains of notes and documents. She had to make sense of it all.
"I was going to throw it away, but I just couldn't," she said.
BEYOND THE WAVES
All the stories, all the people who have been threaded through her life because of the book had become too precious to her. Every teacher helps to shape generations of minds whose effects go global. This class project tremendously magnified that effect.
So Kelly wrote "Reaching Beyond the Waves," which includes some 100 photos and more than doubles the length of the novel that inspired it.
"I don't care if anybody reads it," she decided. "I just want to write it."
Today her students are the same age she was in 1985 when the Super Sleuths were forged.
Many of them will gather Saturday at Ames Public Library, the same place where Franco and her classmates embarked on their research 30 years ago.
They also will take a final tour of Meeker, which is due to be demolished.
Talk to Kelly about her favorite subject and occasionally she'll pause and chuckle to ask how many more stories you want to hear. She seems to have an endless supply.
"Life's journey is a combination of chosen pathways and unexpected side trips," is the first sentence of Chapter 1 in Kelly's book.
That's true. It's just rare for a life to be so wonderfully consumed by a single war story, from sixth grade on.
Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook (/KyleMunson) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).
"Reaching Beyond the Waves: Live the Journey" will feature retired Ames teacher Suzanne Kelly and her sixth-grade students from 1984-85. The book release party is from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday, May 2, in Farwell T. Brown Auditorium at Ames Public Library, 515 Douglas Ave. Admission is free. Also go to amespubliclibrary.org.
The book "Reaching Beyond the Waves" also is available through Amazon .