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Ring points to lost flier
0 Comments | Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), August, 2004
Byline: Winston Ross The Register-Guard
MAPLETON - The news came by telephone.
A young Wayne Johnson was working at the U.S. Forest Service outpost in Mapleton when he got a call from military officials. His childhood buddy, U.S. Army Air Corps Sgt. Edgar Plowman Loomis, had gone down in the foggy mountains of Southeast Asia after a successful bombing run in Lashio, Burma. His body wasn't recovered.
It was June 3, 1942, and the first World War II casualty to hit the tiny logging town. Johnson had to deliver the message to Loomis' parents. Their only son was gone.
"It was tough," Johnson remembers. "What can you say?"
Not much, for the next 62 years. All that his family and friends would learn about the crash came from another...