A Plane Crash in 1961 Devastated the Boston Skating Club. Then It Happened Again.
The New York Times
Two months after the D.C. plane crash killed 67, including six people affiliated with the Boston club, the members had to prepare for the world championships. Unfathomably, they had a blueprint.
One floor above the ice rinks at the Skating Club of Boston, there’s a lounge that would have hosted a party after January’s U.S. Figure Skating national championships.
Its glass doors would have been thrown open, and its fireplace set aglow, as several hundred people gathered to toast the club’s latest champions, the pairs skaters Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov, who had won their first national title.
But that celebration never happened. It couldn’t, and it wouldn’t, after six of the club’s members died in a plane crash on Jan. 29 in Washington. Twenty-eight passengers involved in skating, including 11 young athletes and four coaches, were among the 67 people killed that day.
Jinna Han, 13, and Spencer Lane, 16, two of the organization’s up-and-coming skaters, were traveling home with their mothers from a development camp held after the nationals in Wichita., Kan., when an Army helicopter collided with their passenger jet above the Potomac River. No one survived. Two of the club’s coaches — Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, a married couple who were the 1994 world champions in pairs — were also on the plane.
Yet the lounge at the Boston club did not remain empty. In the hours and days after the crash, one by one, or arm in arm, people arrived and filled the space, drawn to the beloved club that has existed for more than a century, and to a community that many consider a second family.
