Summer was coming to an end. For those at their Westerly beach cottages, the Labor Day weekend would be their last hurrah of the year. Ellen (McCarthy) Sweenor, daughter-in-law of the famed candy company founder, owned the Savoy guest cottage on Atlantic Avenue in Misquamicut.
On that holiday weekend of 1929, she had rented rooms to 31-year-old Marie Antoinette (Gamache) Hunter of Westfield, Mass. and her 9-year-old daughter, Phyllis; 20-year-old Marie Day of West Springfield, Mass.; 31-year-old private nurse Theresa McCarthy; and Phyllis’ little friend, Anne Ashe, also of Westfield.
Marie’s husband, Frederick Augustus Hunter, was manager of an automobile sales agency in Westfield. Miss Day was a bookkeeper for the West Springfield Telephone Company. Between the Savoy cottage and Shore Road stretched the Saunders farm, which was being used as a seasonal airfield.
A sign had been erected stating that short airplane rides over the beach would be given for $3 per person. Lieutenant Arthur Manning of Hartford was the licensed pilot levitating excited passengers high above the shoreline. Having flown with the 118th Observation Squadron, he’d gone on to become chief pilot and manager of General Airports Inc.
in New York. He’d been carrying passengers for eight years without a single accident. That summer he was using the Travelair two-passenger plane owned by W.
H. Collins, of Charlestown’s Atlantic Airport, to thrill the Westerly summer crowd. On the afternoon of Sept.
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