Barber County ? Don Castle had always wanted to come here. And he had wanted never to come here.

A B-25 bomber on a training mission in 1951 had crashed into the bottom of a ravine several miles southwest of Sharon in the remote Cedar Hills of southern Kansas, killing all three people on board – including Castle’s older brother, Maurice Jr.

“I thought he was indestructible,” Don Castle said of his brother, who died the day before he turned 22. “He was my hero … It just changed my life forever.”

The crash has long been a part of Barber County folklore, but there had never been a formal acknowledgment of the crash or its victims.

Until Veterans Day.

About 100 people, including several of Maurice Castle Jr.’s siblings and relatives, gathered on a gravel road near the ravine Nov. 11 to dedicate a memorial to the B-25 and its crew: air cadets Castle and Garth Bishop and Capt. Melvin Farber.

Charlie Swayze of nearby Isabel had heard so much about the crash from old-timers through the years that he decided to learn more about it. The fifth-graders at Medicine Lodge Middle School were learning to use the Internet as a research tool, and Swayze asked teacher Guy Hauck if they would be willing to help him look into the crash.

The students eventually found relatives of Castle, but records for the other two were lost in a fire that destroyed a military warehouse in St. Louis many years ago. The children also raised money for the memorial and read poems they had written at the Veterans Day ceremony.

Family members of Air Force Cadet Maurice Castle Jr. walk over the site near Sharon, where Castle lost his life when his B-25 bomber crashed during a training exercise in 1951. A memorial was dedicated near the site Nov. 11.

It’s appropriate that children who never knew the men helped make the memorial possible, said the Rev. Jack Pilgrim, an Air Force veteran.

“These three young men, the pride of America, were training together to protect their country, their freedoms and people like you and others that they never knew,” Pilgrim said.

The class has yet to find any relatives of Bishop and Farber, but Castle had six brothers and sisters who grew up with him on a farm in Iowa.

“It was rural countryside, a lot like this,” Helen Castle Moress told the crowd.

He worked hard on the farm, teased his younger sisters frequently :quot; but also made sure they earned perfect attendance awards at Sunday school.

The day he was accepted into the air cadet program “was truly the happiest day of his life,” Moress said. “He was just so happy flying the plane.”

She still has the last letter he wrote to her, from Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Okla., which she received in the mail after his death.

Trumpeter Mark Watts plays taps during a memorial dedication near the site of a 1951 B-25 crash in which three men died. The ceremony was on Veterans Day near Sharon.

He told her he would be going on a “buddy flight” the next day, testing skills in maneuvering the B-25.

“He was expecting anything to happen,” she said.

No one is sure just what happened to the plane, which crashed 52 minutes after takeoff on a crisp, sunny Monday splashed with clouds, “a lot like today, really,” Harvey Mathews said.

Mathews watched the plane lumber low over his house a few miles from where it crashed.

“You could tell he was in trouble,” Mathews said. “It was flying really low, and the engine was sputtering … and you could see smoke coming from it. There had to be a fire on there somewhere.”

Witnesses said the plane tried to loop around as if to return to the air base, then attempted to crash-land in the long ravine.

A crop duster flies over a crowd during a memorial dedication for three airmen who lost their lives when their B-25 crashed near Sharon in Barber County during a training exercise in 1951.

But the plane hit nose-first and burst into flames. Debris was scattered throughout the ravine. Little red flags now mark where pieces of the plane came to rest.

Soldiers guarded the wreckage for weeks. The military salvaged what it could and pushed the rest into a hole.

The memorial to the three men local folks never knew stands next to a meandering gravel road in a region so remote deer stare at passing traffic as if in disbelief.

A chorus of pheasants nearly drowned out Pilgrim’s comments, and three volleys of a gun salute echoed in waves as they passed over the canyons.

“These were real people, who had real lives,” said Swayze, the man who helped make the memorial happen. “It’s important to remember things like this.”