TOBIAS - At first glance, the group standing around cars and pickup beds Saturday morning on main street Tobias looked like they had gathered for a typical reunion.

But this group doesn't talk about how things have changed. They don't compare family photos or lament the loss of the old high school.

This is a reunion of strangers, tied by a single event.

Nearly 65 years ago, in September 1944, a group of P-47 fighter planes based at the Bruning Army Air Field in Thayer County intercepted a group of B-17 bombers from the Sioux City Army Air Field. The routine, simulated attack went wrong, and two of the planes collided in the air near Tobias and Milligan.

Seven people died.

Walt Divan was one of the crash's four survivors, thanks in part to members of this Tobias group, some of whom followed the parachutes in the sky that September day, found Divan in a ditch and stayed with him until help arrived.

None in the group ever knew what became of Divan until a Milford author and historian connected their stories last year and plans were laid for a spring reunion.

Divan and his wife, June, traveled from their home in Beloit, Wisc.

Others drove from Lincoln, Milford, Milligan and Tobias.

All made the reunion for different reasons - curiosity, closure, honor.

Bob Krupicka of rural Tobias brought a piece of one of the planes in the back of his pickup. His dad and uncle had witnessed the crash and debris fell on their property.

Merle Buzek of Milligan witnessed the crash as school let out for the day in Milligan. He drove in the direction of the fireball and found one of the planes had crashed on a pasture near his family's farm south of Milligan.

Ed Rut of Tobias and Emilye (Dlouhy) Dunn of Lincoln brought memories of the event that defined their senior year of high school at Tobias High School, as well as pictures of their class to show Divan the others who had helped that day. Rut had invited friends for a ride in his green 1929 Model A. When they saw a figure parachute from the plane and drift down, the car full of teens followed its path and found Divan unconscious, his parachute dragging him over a field toward a ditch.

Dunn and two other girls sat on the parachute to collapse it, while Rut ran to a nearby farm and called the base. The girls kept the parachute from Divan's neck, and they waited until a jeep from the Bruning Air Field shooed them away.

They couldn't have known at the time that Divan wasn't much older than they were, a recent Freeport, Ill., high-school graduate who a few hours earlier had climbed into the bomber with a plane full of buddies.

The youngest in the group Saturday was author Jerry Penry, a land surveyor who grew up listening to stories from WWII veterans. His latest work is "Nebraska's Fatal Air Crashes of WWII" - detailing each of the fatal crashes in Nebraska. The work led him to Divan and ultimately to the reunion.

The reunion got under way with a stop at the site where Divan landed.

Rut led a procession of cars to the site, stopping by a spot that looks to everyone else like all the other ditches of plum thickets and brome.

"You were here, on your back," Rut said, pointing to the spot. "You were dark - you must have been charred with smoke or something. We didn't even know if you were alive at first."

That matches Divan's memories of everything going red at the impact of the planes. It was only ingrained training that led him to the door and to pull the parachute cord, he said.

Talk bounced from banter to serious.

They joked about Rut driving around on the country roads with a car full of girls back in the day.

Divan's voice caught as he told them about visiting the families of some who didn't survive the crash; how it felt like he had lost family members.

"This is the most he's talked about this since I've known him," said June, Divan's wife of 60 years. For their wedding, she wore a dress made from the parachute that saved his life.

When Saturday's procession of cars pulled up to the next field, Buzek pointed to where the family farm used to be and how close the crash debris came to the house.

He described the search party, hundreds of people combing the ground, and the voice over the loudspeaker calling off the search when the missing body was found.

As the reunion group walked the field, author-researcher Penry, using a metal detector, found more debris from the crash, tiny pieces still working their way up through the soil. Penry put the pieces in plastic bags, sending some home with each person in the group.

Divan went home with much more than metal fragments in a plastic bag.

To him, the memories he felt looking out at the field weren't really about the crash. They were about the people who didn't make it out of the plane that day and the ones who did - the surviving four who spent the rest of their service together, completing 23 missions over Europe with the 8th Air Force.

Before Saturday, he really had no memories of the people who had helped him in Nebraska. After hospital personnel told him about two young girls who had helped save his life, the girls represented a presence, someone at his side at a time when no one wants to face alone.

The reunion reinforced that feeling, he said.

"What the people here represent to me is that they were there and they cared."

Reach Rebecca Svec at rebecca.svec@doane.edu.