{"id":14235,"date":"2025-02-07T13:46:14","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T13:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/?p=14235"},"modified":"2025-02-07T16:17:51","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T16:17:51","slug":"will-bunch-writes-about-a-child-who-dreamed-of-flying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2025\/02\/07\/will-bunch-writes-about-a-child-who-dreamed-of-flying\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Bunch writes about a child who dreamed of flying\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter,<\/em><\/a> delivered every Friday in your inbox.<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Dear Storyboard community, <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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When the world is in chaos, focus on one person at a time. Here’s the opening passage from a column by the Philadelphia Inquirer\u2019s Will Bunch<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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From the age of 3, growing up on the densely packed streets of a neighborhood called Gravesend in the ever-bubbling cultural gumbo that is south Brooklyn, a young Jonathan Campos dreamed of flying planes like the jumbo jets that soared over the Belt Parkway on their final approach into JFK.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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By the time he was a 14-year-old freshman at John Dewey High School, Campos didn\u2019t pause for a second when his new girlfriend Nicole Suissa asked what he wanted to do with his life. He was going to be a pilot. \u201cHe wanted to do all things fast, all things badass, all things nearly impossible,\u201d she told me by phone Saturday.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Campos, 34, went on to live his dream, becoming an American Airlines pilot. He was one of the 67 people killed<\/a> in the collision between a passenger plane and a helicopter over Washington, D.C., on Jan. 29.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Bunch has been an Inquirer columnist since 2017 and shared a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting with Newsday. I asked him how he came to interview Suissa, and he told me: \u00a0<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I started thinking about writing the column almost the moment that President Trump made his offensive and totally unsupported remarks about “DEI” as a principal cause of the crash. I poked around and saw some scattered commentary on social media that the American pilot Jonathan Campos was Puerto Rican (actually, it turned out, half Puerto Rican on his dad’s side) and had grown up in working-class south Brooklyn. It struck me that Campos was the kind of American Dream story we ought to celebrate and not denigrate from the Oval Office.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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“I was actually on a vacation-aided long weekend, checking in on my elderly parents who live alone in the Hudson Valley,” Bunch said. After “a futile 24 hours or so trying to find his high school science teacher and a few other folks,” Bunch located Campos’s ex-girlfriend, Nicole Suissa, through a “very poignant Facebook post”:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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We connected by Facebook DM and she agreed to call me later, but I was driving back to Philly that afternoon. So I put my digital recorder in the front seat, and when she did finally call, I had my left hand on the steering wheel and my right hand with my iPhone on speaker and my recorder and talked with her for a half-hour as I whizzed down the Pennsylvania Turnpike at 70 mph. It was an experience I will never forget! But I was able to tell the story that I wanted to tell.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Sometimes you get weeks and months to report someone’s story, and sometimes you get little more than a phone call in the car. The snapshots are no less important in helping us remember. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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