EMOTIONAL, PHYSICAL DAMAGE STILL EVIDENT IN SURVIVING STUDENTS.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

As kids, they played together on the neighborhood schoolyard.

As adults, they haven't been able to drive by a schoolyard without looking up at the skies overhead.

It's a reflex triggered by a tragedy that occurred 50 years ago today, when a DC-7B and a F-89J Scorpion jet fighter collided at 25,000 feet, killing five of the six crewmen aboard.

The midair crash sent flaming debris and scalding oil raining onto Pacoima Junior High and Terra Bella Elementary schools and onto the junior high playground, where 200 or so boys were in gym class.

Falling wreckage killed three of the boys on the playground and injured 74 others -- many of whom suffered second- and third-degree burns, broken bones, internal injuries and mangled limbs.

Frantic mothers ran from nearby houses and apartments, searching for their children through the burning wreckage and thick smoke.

Hundreds of kids -- from kindergartners to ninth-graders -- didn't suffer physical injuries, but none escaped without scars.

They had seen too much carnage, felt too much fear to ever forget.

Their innocence was shattered at 11:18 that morning, they said, and there was no one there to help them heal. No grief counseling or professional therapy of any kind -- not in the '50s.

These were the children of those who had fought and lived through World War II vets. The adults had lived through much worse and figured their children could, too.

``We were expected to suck it up and get over it,'' said Paula Raissner, who in 1957 was in kindergarten at Terra Bella, which was torn down a few years later to make room for the Golden State Freeway.

``No one in our home ever talked about what happened after that day. No explanations -- nothing,'' said Raissner, who now lives in Sylmar.

It was that way with Patricia Galasso, Richard Berger, Orlando Salazar, Rosemarie Hall, Joan Gushin, Robert Richards and so many other kids there that day.

Get over it and move on. The nightmares will go away.

``Today there would be a team of shrinks at the school minutes after the accident,'' Raissner said. ``We were all so innocent back then.''

But they weren't innocent, not anymore, says Richard Williams, who was among the seventh-graders in gym class that fateful day.

``Imagine being a 12-year-old kid and looking up at the sky to see two fiery airplanes coming right at you,'' he said.

``A few seconds later your friends are lying on the playground crying and screaming in pain, and you're running for your life. How is a kid supposed to deal with that?''

One of his classmates became a psychologist, and even he can't deal with that day, said Williams, who is a pressman for a newspaper in Paso Robles.

``At our last reunion, he said he still doesn't remember what happened. He had repressed it all. I told him I remembered because he was right next to me, running for his life.''

Vito Galasso wasn't as fortunate. He was critically burned and spent almost a year in the hospital recovering.

``His heart stopped three times,'' says his wife, Patricia, who was in her first-grade classroom at Terra Bella when the planes crashed overhead.

She remembers her mother running up to her, crying, holding her baby sister wrapped in only a towel.

``She had been giving her a bath and didn't have time to dress her before she came looking for me,'' Patricia said.

It could have been worse, much worse, these former students say.

The engine of one plane crashed through the roof of a kindergarten classroom that happened to be vacant because the students were on a field trip that morning.

And even more students could have been on the junior high playground that morning, but they were in the auditorium practicing for their upcoming graduation ceremony.

Pacoima Junior High's most famous student, 15-year-old Ritchie Valens, was absent, attending his grandfather's funeral.

In the 1987 movie ``La Bamba,'' the disaster at his school was depicted in the opening scenes as a way to foreshadow the rock 'n' roll legend's death in a plane crash two years later.

There was only one local hospital at the time -- Sun Valley Hospital -- and it was quickly overwhelmed with the casualties.

``Every plastic surgeon in town was busy with skin-graft operations because of all the burns,'' recalled Berger, who spent seven weeks in the hospital for treatment of second- and third-degree burns on his back.

``I had two heart surgeons working on me because there were no plastic surgeons available,'' he said. ``They and the nurses who treated me did a great job.''

Another Pacoima Junior High student, Joan Gushin, started a Web site -- joan

gushin.net/thenandnow.html -- for former classmates to finally vent their feelings about that day.

``Emotionally, it was all swept under the rug,'' she said. ``It's been buried inside us for a long time.''

Fifty years today.

dennis.mccarthy(at)dailynews.com

[phone]

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Patricia Galasso looks at old newspaper clippings from 1957. Her husband, Vito, was injured on the Pacoima Junior High campus when two planes collided overhead.

(2) Patricia Galasso (not shown) looks at old newspaper clippings from 1957. The DC-7B's fuselage smacked into the ground at Pacoima Congregational Church.

John Lazar/Staff Photographer

(3) A old newspaper clipping from 1957 talks about the lives the Pacoima plane crash and fallout claimed.

(4) News of the plane crash over Pacoima Junior High School and Terra Bella Elementary made the front page of the Valley News and Green Sheet, the forerunner of the Daily News.

(5) Vito Galasso, critically burned by falling debris, receives kisses from his nurses as he celebrates his birthday in the hospital.