PHOTO ESSAY: SUNRISE BIKE RIDE BEGINS MEMORIAL FOR MARK BIXBY
By Dave Wielenga
A large contingent of cyclists pedaled out of a glorious sunrise at the U.S. Sailing Center at Alamitos Bay Friday morning on a memorial bike ride for the late Mark Bixby, who died March 16 in a private plane crash at the Long Beach Airport.
Bixby, 44, was a member of one Long Beach’s founding families and avid sportsman, who recently had lent his influence to making the city’s Bike Master Plan a reality. He was among five high-profile Greater Long Beach businessmen who set out on a ski vacation to Park City, Utah, aboard a plane owned by one of them, Tom Dean.
But trouble intervened almost immediately after they left the ground. Investigators are still trying to find out why the plane suddenly turned sharply left toward the west, then dived into the airfield, where it burst into flames.
Rescuers pulled Mike Jensen from the wreckage, but the impact and fire killed Bixby, 44; Tom Dean, 50; Jeff Berger, 49; and Bruce Krall, 51, as well as the plane’s pilot, Ken Cruz, 43.
Friday’s bike ride, which began at 8 a.m. at the U.S. Sailing Center at Alamitos Bay and went to the Gerald Desmond Bridge and back, was the first of three events scheduled in remembrance of Bixby.
It was to be followed by a 10 a.m. public memorial service at the U.S. Sailing Center, and then by a 12:30 p.m. traditional Hawaiian paddle-out on Alamitos Bay between the Sailing Center and Gondola Getaway.
Bixby’s ashes will be scattered at sea in a private family service.
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Citizen Journalist Quote of the Day – Here’s to the Morticians
”Some days the worst that can happen happens.
The sky falls or weather overwhelms or
The world as we have come to know it turns
Towards the eventual apocalypse
Long prefigured in all the holy books —
The end times of floods and conflagrations
That bring us to the edge of our oblivions.
Still, maybe this is not the end at all,
Nor even the beginning of the end.
Rather, one more in a long list of sorrows,
To be added to the ones thus far endured,
Through what we have come to call our history:
Another in that bitter litany
That we will, if we survive it, have survived.
Lord, send us in our peril, local heroes,
Someone to listen, someone to watch,
Some one to search and wait and keep the careful count
Of the dead and missing, the dead and gone
But not forgotten. Sometimes all that can be done
Is to salvage one sadness from the mass of sadnesses,
To bear one body home, to lay the dead out
Among their people, organize the flowers
And casseroles, write the obits, meet the mourners at the door,
Drive the dark procession down through town
Toll the bell, dig the hole, tend the pyre.
It’s what we do. The daylong news is dire —
Full of true believers and politicos
Old talk of race and blame and photo ops.
But here brave men and women pick the pieces up.
They serve the living tending to the dead.
They bring them home, the missing and adrift,
They give them back to let them go again.
Like politics, all funerals are local.”
(Source: “Local Heroes” by Thomas Lynch, Michigan mortician turned writer/poet. Lynch wrote “Local Heroes” following the 2005 Katrina Gulf Coast catastrophe with an estimated death toll of 1,277.)
Thanks for posting the story and all the wonderful stories – great job!