Mid-Air Collision Over Sag Harbor, Part 1

Man, this is an unusual story that my mother use to relate to me years ago when I was growing up in Sag Harbor. The story goes like this. One morning while she was doing her household chores, she heard a tremendous boom, and ran out of the house. In the sky overhead she could see pieces of planes coming down and dudes in parachutes. She said it happened sometime in the 1940's but couldn't remember exactly when. She said some Air force guys were killed. Oddly I never heard mention of this accident from anyone else in Sag Harbor.
So in the late 1980s I decided to do some research to see when and what exactly happened. My first stop was the local library on a Thursday evening. Ms. Dorothy Ingersoll Zaykowski, an expert on local history let me go into the library basement where they had every Sag Harbor Express dating from about 1850 to present. Sad to say, I visited the John Jermain library this past summer and was told they got rid of all the old newspapers. The library worker did not know where they ended up, but I hope it wasn't the dumpster. Talk about stupid, a week to week history of Sag Harbor down the drain for research purposes. I could ask Bryan Boyhan, who runs the Express, and he would probably be kind enough to look up something from his archives, but he's a busy man and I don't want to really bother him. I do know the East Hampton library has a lot of Sag Harbor Expresses on microfilm, so I will have to look into if I need to so more research, Anyway, back to the story.
Sitting in the library's basement with a single bare lit bulb, I skimmed through some boxes of papers for a while, looking at the front pages only of each one. Finally on the Thursday, August 18, 1949 issue I found the story. Two Army Air Force F-82 Mustangs had indeed collided over Sag Harbor that very same day. The fighters were twin engined with a crew of two each, and were on a weather mission, departing out of Mitchell Field at 9am. At about 10:40 am the aircraft were seen flying southwest over Sag Harbor at about 8000 feet. One person who witnessed the crash stated one of the planes appeared to be in trouble, as it was flying unevenly and the engines seem to be backfiring. The noise from the impact drew the attention of hundreds of Sag Harbor and North Haven residents instantly. Firemen rushed to the scene, even as debris was still falling from the sky. Many Sag Harbor residents rushed to the foot of the North Haven bridge on foot and in cars, and stood aghast at what they were seeing. William Miller, working in the yard of Mrs Marie Hodenpyle on North Haven, was one of the closest eyewitnesses. Mr. Miller stated, "I heard the backfiring of an engine and looked up to see an airplane disintegrating right over my head. There were pieces of aircraft scattered everywhere in the sky, and it started falling all around our place and Maycroft. An engine or something fell into the bay with a terrific splash, Then I saw parachutes coming down. I thought there was only one plane and that it had exploded, but they told me later there were two." Part 2 tomorrow
An F-82 twin Mustang in the foreground