Milan Vrekic

“Why didn’t they make a toboggan out of airplane parts? Why didn’t they lay out some sort of signal? It’s easy for us, warm and dry and in no pain, to look at a map and wonder why three cold, hurt, starving people, lost on a mountainside in the snow didn’t do certain things.”
― Ross Nixon, Finding Carla: The Story that Forever Changed Aviation Search and Rescue

“After World War Two most Americans had a vision of a better life just ahead. At the core of it was owning one’s own house—and as Henry Ford’s invention and a rapidly improving network of roads and highways opened up the vast spaces of farmland surrounding American cities, the vision started to become a reality: Suburbia. Indeed, people knew even what they wanted to pay for their first house: $5,000, which was then roughly equal to an average family’s wages for two years.”
― David Halberstam, The Fifties

“Whoever finds this wreck—please mail these letters for us. We waited so long for you—where were you? Our daily log is here for you to see in the folded Airman’s Guide.”
― Ross Nixon, Finding Carla: The Story that Forever Changed Aviation Search and Rescue

“So Alvin F. Oien, Sr. died hard and alone. He’d pushed himself to the end the way he pushed himself throughout his life. Though he’d not made it more than a half-mile from his beloved Viking and family, he died the way a man should die: trying.”
― Ross Nixon, Finding Carla: The Story that Forever Changed Aviation Search and Rescue