Morris brought a recording of the Paris memorial service home to Atlanta; it was played on-air upon his return several days later.  Mayor Ivan Allen held a press conference when he arrived at Atlanta airport; it, too, was broadcast on WSB.  And Morris himself was debriefed on the “Nightbeat” evening talk show, admitting he’d felt the weight of history over the preceding days.   

The WSB program schedule returned to normalcy; indeed, it was barely four months before the station was plunged into another major crisis:  Russia installed nuclear missiles on Cuba, and WSB executives granted the U.S. government’s request to use station facilities for propaganda broadcasts to the Cuban people. 

For the nation, however, the Orly crash wasn’t so quick to fade into memory or history.  The disaster led to the largest-ever legal settlement of its kind in U.S. history to that time, $5,200,000.  The screaming newspaper headlines—even in faraway New York--were so traumatic Andy Warhol turned one into a painting, 129 Die In Crash.  It became the first of the famous Warhol “disaster series”; one of these works fetched some $7,000,000 at auction in 2007.   From Paris, the Louvre sent Whistler’s Mother to Atlanta as a goodwill gesture, and later the French government presented the city a Rodin sculpture.  In a sign of the times, there was even a civil rights spat stemming from the calamity.  Martin Luther King, Jr. cancelled a planned Atlanta “sit in” protest, out of respect to his city’s loss.  But from Los Angeles, militant black leader Malcolm X publicly called the deaths of the all-white victims “a beautiful thing”, announcing, “We hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.”  Malcolm later claimed to regret his statements, but the dustup was nevertheless the first many Americans had heard of this more strident alternative to the non-violent King movement.

Hear journalist Mark Gresham discuss the crash’s importance to 20^th century Atlanta’s history. [2:22]

Hear Penny Hart discuss the disaster and its aftermath.  Her mother died aboard Air France Flight 007. [1:37]

For the metro itself, the days and weeks after Orly were some of the most traumatic of the 20^th century.  “People don’t realize that in 1962, Atlanta was an overgrown small town,” says author Abrams.  The Buckhead community, home to the largest number of dead, was literally devastated.  The crash had orphaned 31 children.  Penny Hart (then Penny Armstrong, 19 years old) lost her 44-year old mother on Flight 007.  “I have missed so much good stuff, because she was a remarkable woman with lots to share and give,’ she told WSB’s Chris Chandler in 2012.  Hart says she chose a more “adventurous” path for herself than she might if her mother had lived, becoming a Pan Am flight attendant rather than immediately continuing her studies. 

Also ravaged, less tangibly but with equal completeness, was Atlanta’s cultural and arts infrastructure—wealthy civilian dabblers, many of them, “southern belles” in many cases, who donated their time and money to the symphony or the High Museum because it was “proper”, an acknowledged duty in the social stratosphere.  Their deaths marked a sea change.   “The next people to oversee what was happening in the arts were business executives who did not necessarily have strong connections to the arts like these 106 Atlantans did,” says music journalist Mark Gresham, who writes at ArtsATL.com and elsewhere.   In 1968, after a debate (itself racially-tinged) about where to build it, the decidedly-more-large-than-southern-quaint Memorial Arts Center opened on Peachtree Street.  It was renamed Woodruff Arts Center, for its patron, in 1982.   Result:  Atlanta became a nationally-renowned center of music and art, with the Woodruff Center--along with trusts in the name of Flight 007 victims--funding much of the activity.  At the same time, the crash’s aftermath sparked decades of complaints that the moneyed interests’ insularity or national ambitions have kept local artists and organizations from breaking through under the “new order”. 

In other words, it’s not 1962 anymore.  Though a historian, lifelong Atlantan Ann Abrams shrugs her shoulders at dwelling in the past:  “When you think about what happened in 50 years, it is rather amazing that we’ve gotten what we have today.”  And many analysts agree Orly simply accelerated, rather than caused, changes that would have happened anyway--and which have happened elsewhere.  “Some people said we lost ‘Old Atlanta’ with the Orly plane crash,” says journalist Mark Gresham.  “I’m not convinced it was the end, but I believe it hastened all the social transformations that took place during that next decade.”

Atlantans who lived through these grim days tend to agree on one thing, that the cataclysm of fifty years ago is slowly being forgotten.    “Because we are now a city mostly of people from elsewhere, there isn’t so much of an interest in making that kind of a connection,” Gresham says.  Author Ann Abrams finds that disappointing.  “It was the beginning of the changes that were to happen, and I think it’s important to know where they began.”  And Penny Hart, who on June 3^rd marks half-a-century since her mother’s death, says, “Olympics can happen anywhere.  This was very much an Atlanta story.”  And she hopes its memory does not fade.  “Atlanta doesn’t do good job of promoting its history and therefore it doesn’t do a good job presenting its soul,” Hart says.  “And I feel that if we don’t do a better job, pretty soon we won’t have a soul.”

Hear WSB’s Scott Slade’s March, 2008 interview with the late Aubrey Morris about the Orly crash. [6:47]