The American bomber was making its way home to South Dakota when it crashed into side of a mountain in Burgoins Cove, Newfoundland. The weather was awful; a ferocious March storm had struck the coast and there was no visibility. According to Dick Ellsworth the crew never knew what hit them and that gives him some comfort. But as an experienced pilot his trained eye estimates that if the plane flew five hundred feet to the left, or a hundred feet higher, twenty-three men would not have perished that day and that gives him no comfort at all. For one of the victims was his father and Dick was thirteen years old when it happened.

That was in 1953 in the middle of the cold war when the bomber known as the Peacemaker was flying back from Europe. Dick's father Brigadier General, Richard Ellsworth, died at the age of forty-three when his planed crashed into that remote mountain. Dick himself went on to become a pilot first in Viet Nam then thirty years with TWA. He flew over Newfoundland many times during his career but saw it only as a rock in the ocean and a place where his father died. That was all until he got an invitation to attend the fortieth anniversary of the crash and the erection of a monument at the site.

However, the invitation got lost in the mail and showed up a year later. Dick decided to take up the invitation anyway. When he and his family first came to Newfoundland from their home in Vermont, it was all about his father's death. But that has changed. The Ellsworth family bought an old house in Maberly not an hour's driver from that mountain top and they've been coming back every summer since. The place has now become a retreat, where the simplicity of life, the people who have embraced the family as friends are now the reasons they return.

The place that caused such loss to the family, is now giving something back.