Obituaries
Henry John Heinz
October 23, 1938 - April 4, 1991
Interment:
Homewood Cemetery, Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
Henry John Heinz, III
Birth: Oct. 23, 1938
Pittsburgh
Allegheny County
Pennsylvania, USA
Death: Apr. 4, 1991
Montgomery County
Pennsylvania, USA
US Congressman, US Senator. A member of the Republican Party, he served in the US House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district from November 1971 until January 1977, followed by service in the US Senate from the state of Pennsylvania from January 1977 until his death in April 1991. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania his father was Henry John Heinz II, the heir to the H.J. Heinz Company. Following his parents' divorce in 1942, he moved with his mother and stepfather to San Francisco, California where he was primarily raised. In 1956 he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, a private college preparatory boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire, then attended Yale University at New Haven, Connecticut and graduated in 1960, majoring in History, Arts and Letters. In 1963 he graduated from Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts and joined the US Air Force Reserves, remaining with them until 1969. He served as an assistant to Pennsylvania Republican US Senator Hugh Scott and played an active role as assistant campaign manager during Scott's campaign for re-election. Between 1965 and 1970 he worked in the financial and marketing division of the H. J. Heinz Company, after which he became a professor of business at the Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration in Pittsburgh. In 1971 he entered politics after Robert Corbett, who represented Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district died in office. After winning the Republican primary, Heinz won the special election in November 1971 to fill the vacancy created by Corbett's death and was re-elected to Congress in 1972 and 1974. He opted not to run for re-election to his seat in the House of Representatives, choosing instead to run for the open Pennsylvania US Senate seat, created by the retirement of incumbent Hugh Scott in 1976. He won the election and was subsequently re-elected in 1982 and again in 1988. During his time in the US Senate, he was a member of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, the Committee on Finance, the National Commission on Social Security Reform, the National Commission on Health Care Reform, the Northeast Coalition, and the Steel Caucus. He also served as chairman of the Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policies, the Special Committee on Aging, and the Republican Conference Task Force on Job Training and Education. On April 4, 1991 he and six other people were killed when a Bell 412 helicopter and a Piper Aerostar with him aboard collided in mid-air above Merion Elementary School in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania. All aboard both aircraft, as well as two children at the school, were killed. The helicopter had been dispatched to investigate a problem with the landing gear of his plane, and while moving in for a closer look, the helicopter collided with the plane, causing both aircraft to lose control and crash. He was 52 years old. Several institutions bear his name, including the H. John Heinz III College at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington DC, and the Senator John Heinz History Center, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum, Pennsylvania was named in his honor. (bio by: William Bjornstad)
Family links:
Parents:
Henry John Heinz (1908 - 1987)
Cause of death: Helicopter crashed into his plane
Burial:
Homewood Cemetery
Pittsburgh
Allegheny County
Pennsylvania, USA
A Fiery Midair Collision Claims the Life of a Senator—and Brings Death to a Pennsylvania Schoolyard
BY PAULA CHIN
POSTED ON APRIL 22, 1991 AT 12:00PM EST
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Dawning clear and bright across Pennsylvania, Thursday, April 4, began as a typical day in the life of United States Sen. John Heinz, 52. The popular Republican—known for his tireless hopping from one small-town gathering to another—had started his rounds at 8 A.M., discussing environmental laws with business and community leaders in Williamsport. Then came a press conference at the Lycoming County Courthouse before he headed to the airport en route to Philadelphia and nearby Media for yet another meeting with constituents. He was upbeat, engaging and folksy as always—never a man whose manner would remind people that he was the sole heir to the Heinz pick-le-and-ketchup fortune and one of the country’s richest politicians. Chatting at the courthouse with Lycoming Planning Commission Director Jerry Walls, Heinz said he was looking forward to going trout fishing with him. “I asked, ‘When are you going to set a date?’ ” says Walls. “And he said, ‘Twist my arm.’ So I twisted it, and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll be back.’ ”
Around noon, as Heinz’s chartered twin-engine Piper Aerostar neared Philadelphia International Airport, the day was in full bloom, the air warm with the promise of spring. Some 10 miles north, in the suburb of Merion, first-and second-grade students at the Merion Elementary School had just finished their lunch in the cafeteria. Casting their jackets aside, they went out to play as bright sunshine fell on the school’s Tudor-style buildings, its pine trees and well-tended lawns.
In the sky above, the pilots of Heinz’s plane were coping with an in-flight emergency. They had reported trouble locking the landing gear, and despite assurances from the airport control tower that the equipment looked fine, they were still concerned. Overhearing the Piper’s radio transmission, the pilot and copilot of private Bell 412 helicopter flying in the area offered to pass by and make a visual inspection. After receiving the go-ahead from an air-traffic controller, they did so once and reported the landing gear down. But the Piper pilot asked them to look again. At 12:11, one of the chopper’s rotor blades apparently slashed into the right wing of the Piper Aerostar. The midair collision ruptured a fuel tank on one of the aircraft, unleashing a fireball that blasted both out of the sky.
“There was an enormous explosion of black smoke, out of which dropped the helicopter,” says Jill Bressler, a therapist who was driving to her office in Bala Cynwyd. “The copter came off intact, but the plane, it seemed, exploded.” She slammed on her brakes and jumped out of her car. Then, suddenly, the nightmare image came to her—the flaming wreckage would fall over Merion Elementary. By the time Bressler ran to the grassy field behind the school, it was all ablaze. The helicopter had crashed there and the plane in front of the school, raining fire and debris over a five-block area of the prosperous Main Line suburb. On one side of a huge wall of flame and smoke, she immediately spotted a little girl facedown, her body burning. “When I came to her, she was already gone,” says Bressler. “I thought it was someone from the plane. I didn’t even think there might be anybody on the playground.”
Teacher Ivy Weeks, 49, was sitting at her computer desk, waiting for her fourth graders to come to reading class, when she heard the terrifying boom and ran into the hallway. “I looked left, down the ramp, and the double doors to the playground opened,” she recalls. “There was this horrible wall of orange flame.” Then she saw an even more ghastly sight: 7-year-old David Rutenberg emerging from the inferno. “He ran, and I ran toward him and tried to smother the fire. I hugged him a lot, we rolled on the ground, I patted and tried to beat it out. But I’d look and it was back again,” says Weeks. “I had a silk sweater on, and it was starting to melt.” Custodian John Fowler, 48, heard Week’s screams for help. “David had flames from the ankles to his chest. He was lit up like a candle,” says Fowler. “I don’t know what this stuff was on him—I think some kind of fuel—but even when it was out, it was hot.” Finally, Fowler was able to extinguish the flames with his jacket. “All this time, the boy didn’t scream. He was just whimpering and pleading for this whole thing to go away.”
Firemen soon arrived on the scene and began searching the school grounds for students, while panicked parents helped lead the children to safety over the back fence and off the property. Then came the grisly body count. Heinz and his two hired pilots, Richard Shreck and Trond Stegen, both 30, were burned beyond recognition. Michael Pozzani, 43, and Charles Burke, 42, the pilot and copilot of the Bell helicopter—which was owned by Sun Company, a Radnor, Pa.-based oil and coal firm—also perished. And two first graders, Lauren Freundlich and Rachel Blum, were missing. After their names were called over the school loudspeakers—to no avail-police found their bodies near the site of the crashed helicopter. For more than an hour fire fighters hosed down the smoldering wreckage and charred ground as the sun eerily burned through the smoky haze. A helicopter arrived to take young David Rutenberg, who was burned over two-thirds of his body, to Crozer-Chester Medical Center in nearby Upland. “He never cried,” says Weeks, who suffered third-degree burns on her hands. “He just kept asking where his mommy and daddy were. He was such a brave little boy.”
Back in Washington, D.C., stunned staff members stood outside John Heinz’s darkened office, where a black ribbon hung on the door. By the weekend, hundreds of friends and relatives had gathered in the downstairs rooms of the Heinzes’ five-story brick colonial home in Georgetown. His widow, Teresa, 53, remained behind closed doors, tearily telling loved ones, “If only I could see his blue eyes again.” She stayed in Washington with son Christopher, 18, while 24-year-old Henry John IV and 21-year-old Andre left for Philadelphia to escort their father home. The funeral was planned for April 10 at the Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh, and all who knew him were sifting through their memories of the Senator as devoted family man and tennis buff and as a lawmaker who defended the elderly and the environment.
Born in Pittsburgh, Heinz was the only child of Henry John Heinz II and Joan Diehl, who divorced when he was 4. Heinz graduated with honors from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, earned a B.A. in arts and humanities at Yale and graduated near the top of his Harvard Business School class in 1963. After serving in the Air Force Reserve, he spent five years in the financial and marketing departments of the Heinz food company founded by his great-grandfathers in 1869. But his heart was in politics, and in 1971 he easily captured the vacant congressional seat in his home district. Five years later, Heinz won a tough race for the Senate-thanks in no small part to the $2.5 million he personally spent on the campaign. He was re-elected in 1982 and 1988 by handy margins.
Although Heinz was the largest individual shareholder in his family’s company, with a personal worth of some $560 million, he resented being regarded solely as a man of privilege. Indeed, much of his congressional career seemed aimed at dispelling that image. He worked endlessly for legislation to protect steelworkers, children and the aged. “John was absolutely kind, a gentleman,” says Colorado’s Democratic Sen. Tim Wirth, who met Heinz at Exeter and remained his closest friend in Congress. “He was extremely polished and informed. But under it all was a Little Boy Blue kind of naïveté—a wide-eyed, innocent belief that the world could be a better place. That was his feeling of mission.”
By Monday, the scene at Merion Elementary School appeared deceptively normal. The wreckage and debris were cleared away, and landscapers had worked through the night, uprooting charred trees, bulldozing the scorched earth, planting new sod and fresh flowers in front of the main building. Parents and children had returned to the site of the tragedy—some to count their blessings, others to grieve for little Lauren Freundlich and Rachel Blum. “We came back here because we really need each other,” said Mary Frances Connelly, a close friend of Lauren’s mother, Andrea. Tears welled in her eyes as she looked down at the yellow daffodils strewn on the ground. Meantime, David Rutenberg, who was splattered with burning fuel, underwent a four-hour skin graft operation; he now has a 50-50 chance of surviving. “He’s covered head to toe with bandages and has a breathing tube in,” says his father, Joel, a neurologist at Delaware County Memorial Hospital. “But he can shake his head yes or no, and his personality comes through.” While David remembers what happened, neither his father nor mother, Rebecca, has told him of the seven lives lost that afternoon. Both are keeping vigil and hoping for the best. “We’re asking everyone to just pray,” says Joel, “as much as they can.” Custodian John Fowler is doing just that. “The only image that’s going through my mind is of this boy on fire, lying on his back, looking at me,” he says. “If I could will him to live, he would live.”
Everyone at Merion is struggling to move on. A support center has been opened at Lower Merion High School and a telephone hotline set up to advise parents on how to help their children cope—but the wounds of memory will not heal easily. Scampering about the school grounds, Karl “Scooter” Pettit, a classmate of Rachel’s who ran for cover in a gully alongside the field as it erupted into flames, extends his hand to show a small burn caused by what he calls “little bits of fire” that filled the air. “I saw my best friend’s stuffed bunny blow up, and I thought, ‘Wow. cool! ” he says with a 7-year-old’s bravado. Then, as a plane buzzes overhead, Scooter squints upward, squeezes his hands over his ears and shakes his head to banish the sound. “It’s going to crash!” he cries. “I’m afraid another one will happen. I had a bad dream last night.” Scooter isn’t the only one. “The worst thing was seeing the kids screaming,” says Andrew Martella, an electrician who witnessed the tragedy. “I can deal with death, but some of these children—they won’t sleep well for a long time.”
—Paula Chin, Andrea Fine and Eileen Dzik in Merion, Jane Sims Podesta in Washington and Jane Beckwith in Pittsburgh
A Fiery Midair Collision Claims the Life of a Senator—and Brings Death to a Pennsylvania Schoolyard
BY PAULA CHIN
POSTED ON APRIL 22, 1991 AT 12:00PM EST
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TWEET
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Dawning clear and bright across Pennsylvania, Thursday, April 4, began as a typical day in the life of United States Sen. John Heinz, 52. The popular Republican—known for his tireless hopping from one small-town gathering to another—had started his rounds at 8 A.M., discussing environmental laws with business and community leaders in Williamsport. Then came a press conference at the Lycoming County Courthouse before he headed to the airport en route to Philadelphia and nearby Media for yet another meeting with constituents. He was upbeat, engaging and folksy as always—never a man whose manner would remind people that he was the sole heir to the Heinz pick-le-and-ketchup fortune and one of the country’s richest politicians. Chatting at the courthouse with Lycoming Planning Commission Director Jerry Walls, Heinz said he was looking forward to going trout fishing with him. “I asked, ‘When are you going to set a date?’ ” says Walls. “And he said, ‘Twist my arm.’ So I twisted it, and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll be back.’ ”
Around noon, as Heinz’s chartered twin-engine Piper Aerostar neared Philadelphia International Airport, the day was in full bloom, the air warm with the promise of spring. Some 10 miles north, in the suburb of Merion, first-and second-grade students at the Merion Elementary School had just finished their lunch in the cafeteria. Casting their jackets aside, they went out to play as bright sunshine fell on the school’s Tudor-style buildings, its pine trees and well-tended lawns.
In the sky above, the pilots of Heinz’s plane were coping with an in-flight emergency. They had reported trouble locking the landing gear, and despite assurances from the airport control tower that the equipment looked fine, they were still concerned. Overhearing the Piper’s radio transmission, the pilot and copilot of private Bell 412 helicopter flying in the area offered to pass by and make a visual inspection. After receiving the go-ahead from an air-traffic controller, they did so once and reported the landing gear down. But the Piper pilot asked them to look again. At 12:11, one of the chopper’s rotor blades apparently slashed into the right wing of the Piper Aerostar. The midair collision ruptured a fuel tank on one of the aircraft, unleashing a fireball that blasted both out of the sky.
“There was an enormous explosion of black smoke, out of which dropped the helicopter,” says Jill Bressler, a therapist who was driving to her office in Bala Cynwyd. “The copter came off intact, but the plane, it seemed, exploded.” She slammed on her brakes and jumped out of her car. Then, suddenly, the nightmare image came to her—the flaming wreckage would fall over Merion Elementary. By the time Bressler ran to the grassy field behind the school, it was all ablaze. The helicopter had crashed there and the plane in front of the school, raining fire and debris over a five-block area of the prosperous Main Line suburb. On one side of a huge wall of flame and smoke, she immediately spotted a little girl facedown, her body burning. “When I came to her, she was already gone,” says Bressler. “I thought it was someone from the plane. I didn’t even think there might be anybody on the playground.”
Teacher Ivy Weeks, 49, was sitting at her computer desk, waiting for her fourth graders to come to reading class, when she heard the terrifying boom and ran into the hallway. “I looked left, down the ramp, and the double doors to the playground opened,” she recalls. “There was this horrible wall of orange flame.” Then she saw an even more ghastly sight: 7-year-old David Rutenberg emerging from the inferno. “He ran, and I ran toward him and tried to smother the fire. I hugged him a lot, we rolled on the ground, I patted and tried to beat it out. But I’d look and it was back again,” says Weeks. “I had a silk sweater on, and it was starting to melt.” Custodian John Fowler, 48, heard Week’s screams for help. “David had flames from the ankles to his chest. He was lit up like a candle,” says Fowler. “I don’t know what this stuff was on him—I think some kind of fuel—but even when it was out, it was hot.” Finally, Fowler was able to extinguish the flames with his jacket. “All this time, the boy didn’t scream. He was just whimpering and pleading for this whole thing to go away.”
Firemen soon arrived on the scene and began searching the school grounds for students, while panicked parents helped lead the children to safety over the back fence and off the property. Then came the grisly body count. Heinz and his two hired pilots, Richard Shreck and Trond Stegen, both 30, were burned beyond recognition. Michael Pozzani, 43, and Charles Burke, 42, the pilot and copilot of the Bell helicopter—which was owned by Sun Company, a Radnor, Pa.-based oil and coal firm—also perished. And two first graders, Lauren Freundlich and Rachel Blum, were missing. After their names were called over the school loudspeakers—to no avail-police found their bodies near the site of the crashed helicopter. For more than an hour fire fighters hosed down the smoldering wreckage and charred ground as the sun eerily burned through the smoky haze. A helicopter arrived to take young David Rutenberg, who was burned over two-thirds of his body, to Crozer-Chester Medical Center in nearby Upland. “He never cried,” says Weeks, who suffered third-degree burns on her hands. “He just kept asking where his mommy and daddy were. He was such a brave little boy.”
Back in Washington, D.C., stunned staff members stood outside John Heinz’s darkened office, where a black ribbon hung on the door. By the weekend, hundreds of friends and relatives had gathered in the downstairs rooms of the Heinzes’ five-story brick colonial home in Georgetown. His widow, Teresa, 53, remained behind closed doors, tearily telling loved ones, “If only I could see his blue eyes again.” She stayed in Washington with son Christopher, 18, while 24-year-old Henry John IV and 21-year-old Andre left for Philadelphia to escort their father home. The funeral was planned for April 10 at the Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh, and all who knew him were sifting through their memories of the Senator as devoted family man and tennis buff and as a lawmaker who defended the elderly and the environment.
Born in Pittsburgh, Heinz was the only child of Henry John Heinz II and Joan Diehl, who divorced when he was 4. Heinz graduated with honors from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, earned a B.A. in arts and humanities at Yale and graduated near the top of his Harvard Business School class in 1963. After serving in the Air Force Reserve, he spent five years in the financial and marketing departments of the Heinz food company founded by his great-grandfathers in 1869. But his heart was in politics, and in 1971 he easily captured the vacant congressional seat in his home district. Five years later, Heinz won a tough race for the Senate-thanks in no small part to the $2.5 million he personally spent on the campaign. He was re-elected in 1982 and 1988 by handy margins.
Although Heinz was the largest individual shareholder in his family’s company, with a personal worth of some $560 million, he resented being regarded solely as a man of privilege. Indeed, much of his congressional career seemed aimed at dispelling that image. He worked endlessly for legislation to protect steelworkers, children and the aged. “John was absolutely kind, a gentleman,” says Colorado’s Democratic Sen. Tim Wirth, who met Heinz at Exeter and remained his closest friend in Congress. “He was extremely polished and informed. But under it all was a Little Boy Blue kind of naïveté—a wide-eyed, innocent belief that the world could be a better place. That was his feeling of mission.”
By Monday, the scene at Merion Elementary School appeared deceptively normal. The wreckage and debris were cleared away, and landscapers had worked through the night, uprooting charred trees, bulldozing the scorched earth, planting new sod and fresh flowers in front of the main building. Parents and children had returned to the site of the tragedy—some to count their blessings, others to grieve for little Lauren Freundlich and Rachel Blum. “We came back here because we really need each other,” said Mary Frances Connelly, a close friend of Lauren’s mother, Andrea. Tears welled in her eyes as she looked down at the yellow daffodils strewn on the ground. Meantime, David Rutenberg, who was splattered with burning fuel, underwent a four-hour skin graft operation; he now has a 50-50 chance of surviving. “He’s covered head to toe with bandages and has a breathing tube in,” says his father, Joel, a neurologist at Delaware County Memorial Hospital. “But he can shake his head yes or no, and his personality comes through.” While David remembers what happened, neither his father nor mother, Rebecca, has told him of the seven lives lost that afternoon. Both are keeping vigil and hoping for the best. “We’re asking everyone to just pray,” says Joel, “as much as they can.” Custodian John Fowler is doing just that. “The only image that’s going through my mind is of this boy on fire, lying on his back, looking at me,” he says. “If I could will him to live, he would live.”
Everyone at Merion is struggling to move on. A support center has been opened at Lower Merion High School and a telephone hotline set up to advise parents on how to help their children cope—but the wounds of memory will not heal easily. Scampering about the school grounds, Karl “Scooter” Pettit, a classmate of Rachel’s who ran for cover in a gully alongside the field as it erupted into flames, extends his hand to show a small burn caused by what he calls “little bits of fire” that filled the air. “I saw my best friend’s stuffed bunny blow up, and I thought, ‘Wow. cool! ” he says with a 7-year-old’s bravado. Then, as a plane buzzes overhead, Scooter squints upward, squeezes his hands over his ears and shakes his head to banish the sound. “It’s going to crash!” he cries. “I’m afraid another one will happen. I had a bad dream last night.” Scooter isn’t the only one. “The worst thing was seeing the kids screaming,” says Andrew Martella, an electrician who witnessed the tragedy. “I can deal with death, but some of these children—they won’t sleep well for a long time.”
—Paula Chin, Andrea Fine and Eileen Dzik in Merion, Jane Sims Podesta in Washington and Jane Beckwith in Pittsburgh