In the last few weeks, virtually every news source, online, television and in print, has carried the story of the mother in Arizona who found a jaw bone in the rock collection her son inherited from his grandfather. She turned the bone over to police in 2002, but only recently it became possible, due to advances in DNA testing and genetic genealogy, to determine who the bone belonged to.
It turns out the bone belonged to Capt. Everett Leland Yager, who died in 1951. But what caught my attention was the fact that the captain died in Riverside County. What a surprising connection.
Yager was born in Missouri and served during World War II in the U.S. Navy. He married wife Betty in January 1944. After the war, Yager returned to his home town in Missouri and became the manager of a service station. Yager and his wife had a son and two daughters.
Yager rejoined the military and was training to become a pilot for the Marines and was stationed at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station when he died. He was on a routine training flight on July 31, 1951, with 2nd Lt. Robert Phillips flying as the instructor. The men were flying over the Lake Elsinore area in an SNJ advanced trainer aircraft when they crashed into the mountains at about 3,500 feet. Both men were killed instantly.
Planes and helicopters were deployed to find the wreckage. It wasn’t until a fellow pilot, who had flown with Phillips on the same route a few days earlier, decided to play a hunch and searched the following day on that flight path, the men and their plane were found. Yager’s remains (although apparently not all of them) were returned to Missouri, where he was buried.
There was less news coverage at the time of the crash than one might think. Much of the coverage focused on Yager’s fellow pilot. Phillips, just 22, had recently become engaged and was the second son of a military family to die in service in less than a year. No article that I could find from 1951 even mentioned that Yager had left behind a wife and three young children, one less than 6 months old.
Yager’s wife, Betty, does not appear to have remarried and she was buried next to her husband when she died in 1997. As to how Yager’s jaw bone came to be in Arizona, that appears to be a mystery. 色情论坛 reports say that now that it has been identified it will be returned to Yager’s family.
If you have an idea for a future Back in the Day column about a local historic person, place or event, contact Steve Lech and Kim Jarrell Johnson at backinthedaype@gmail.com.
