THE VALUE OF BEING BILINGUAL IN THE U.S., WORLD

By Juan Montoya

I was working the cop beat for the Saginaw News, an afternoon newspaper in Michigan on April 2, 1986.

I had filed my stories before the 10:30 deadline for the city edition and was ambling back to my cubby hole to prepare for the afternoon's assignments when the city editor and publisher walked by on their way to an early lunch. 

We put the News to bed at 11:15 and no matter how hot the story, everyone in the newsroom knew it was the absolutely drop-dead deadline for all the beats.

Almost as an afterthought, Paul Chaffee, the city editor, stopped in the corridor between desks and handed me a piece of scratch paper with a name scribbled on it.

"A bomb just blew up a plane over Athens," he told me. "There's probably nothing we can do for today, but there are supposed to be some local people on the plane. See what you can do."

The name was Paez, and I had come across someone with that name while doing a story on Hispanics in local politics and a person-on-the street interview over the Challenger space shuttle explosion earlier that year in January.

One woman I had interviewed had been named Eleftheria Paez, an unusual – though not uncommon – combination of Greek and Hispanics immigrants' surnames intermarrying in the Saginaw Valley.
I still had her number in my notes and I called the house on the outside chance that someone may be home. 

Miraculously, someone was. 

Apparently, everyone from the family of four had gone to visit their Greek family in Athens except for a teen who had stayed at home because he had school work he couldn't miss. It was, after all, April and classes were not out.

"Did your parents, by any chance, leave you a contact number with your grandparents in Athens?" I asked him.
"Yes," he answered. "Do you want it?"I said I did and then told him that the plane where his parents were aboard had been bombed, but that we had not ascertained they had been hurt. "Have they called you?"
"No," he answered.

I got the number, dialed Greece and a woman answered.

"Hello," I said. "I'm calling from Saginaw, Michigan, in the United States. I'm looking for Eleftheria. Is she there?"
"No English," she replied.
"Spanish?" I asked.

"Si, si hablo español,"(Yes, I speak Spanish) she replied.
"No le han llamado sus familiares del aeropuerto?" (Have your relatives called you from the airport?")
"Si, ya vienen para aca." (Yes, they're on their way.)

I called the brother who hadn't gone to Athens and told him his family was fine and that they were almost to their home. I asked him if I could have our photographer go over to his house (across the Saginaw River) and get photos of the family members who had gone on the trip. He acquiesced and photog Dave Sommer rushed to get them.

This took less than five minutes and I yelled over to the desk that we might be able to get the Saginaw residents on the line. They listened as I dialed and called. Eleftheria and her husband and daughter were already there. I quickly asked the perfunctory questions about what it had been like aboard the plane when the bomb exploded and we got a first-person interview that we tacked on to the copy coming over the wire.

The Saginaw residents had been three of 114 passengers aboard TWA Flight 840 who were nestled in their seats of the Boeing 727 cruising at 15,000 feet over the Peloponnesus peninsula, when the bomb went off.

Eleftheria and her husband said that they were descending when the next moment they noticed the passengers sitting in the row behind them were no longer there. "All of a sudden, while we are watching the beautiful scenery from the plane window, this great tragedy struck. It is horrible," she said. 

Paez hung on to her family and prayed they would not be the next to be sucked through the 3-foot-by-3-foot hole in the fuselage. "I didn't want to lose my husband or my daughter," she said. "I was praying all the way until we landed."

By now the area around the copy desk was a frenzy of activity as the front page was redone and the photos brought to us by the photographer were processed and pasted onto the national and local story next to the photo of the plane with a gaping hole in its fuselage.

In the middle of the hubbub I asked Eleftheria if they had thought of taking any pictures during the emergency and she said her daughter Melina, then 10, had.

"Could we have an international delivery service (DHL) send them to us overnight and we will pay for the processing of the prints and keep them for for you until you return?"

They agreed. By the time we arrived the next morning, the package was there.

In the meantime, it was getting right up to the deadline and the first city run was rushed to the newsroom for proofreading. To their credit, the folks at the copy desk and back shop had performed like the professionals they were and we had redone an entire new front page with sides and printed it on time.

It was near noon when city editor Chaffee and publisher Gunnar Carlson came back into the newsroom. They went to their individual offices to look over the early edition and bolted out in surprise.

"How did you do it?" Chaffee asked.
"They understand Spanish in Athens," said the copy editor.

The next day we had a follow-up featuring Melina Paez's photos of the airline stewardesses handling the crisis and oxygen masks dropped over the seats and a gaping hole can be seen far in the interior.

And the fact that I was a Spanish speaker in the newsroom and that Europeans are polylingual was the only thing that made the coverage possible.