Published: July 06, 2007 11:57 pm      

‘How much I miss her’

Latest in a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood



Judy Strittmatter can’t help but recall the sunshine before the storm.

Two cars packed with family members on a sojourn to Shawnee Park, a day filled with swimming, fishing and warm conversation with her sister, Mary Ann Luther.

They finally parted that evening in Johnstown as storm clouds gathered.

It was July 19, 1977. It was the last time Strittmatter would see her sister, and only hours before floodwaters would tear a family apart, leaving a void that persists three decades later.

“How much I miss her,” Strittmatter said. “She was just at that age, and I was just at the age, where we were friends.”

Mary Ann Luther, her husband, Barry, and their three children - Tom, Jim and Julie – were living in Birmingham, Ala., at the time. They had come to Johnstown for a visit, staying with her parents – Ralph and Rita Erlinger in the city’s Old Conemaugh Borough section.

The young family was scheduled to depart early July 20 for Washington, D.C., where Barry had a meeting scheduled.

But hellish, relentless storms struck Johnstown the night before.

“The thunder and the lightning and the rain - no one slept, you didn’t sleep,” Strittmatter recalled. “It was god-awful.”

She lived in the same Southmont home where she now resides, high above downtown Johnstown. What had happened in the valley below was not apparent until her husband, Thomas, tried to leave for work the next morning.

“We had no idea,” Stritt-matter said. “And I immediately thought about my sister.”

The Luthers had departed earlier that morning after the storms ended, making their way to Route 56 as it began to climb out of Johnstown. They did not know that a section of the highway had been undermined by Solomon Run, a small stream that had become a raging torrent.

The family’s car crashed into the water. News accounts from that time say the vehicle was pummeled by the current and by a tree that smashed its windows.

Mary Ann and 8-year-old Julie were swept away.

Barry Luther was transported to Somerset Hospital for treatment. A stranger in a Jeep drove the two young boys back to the Erlingers’ house.

And then a grim search began. Julie’s body was found the next day in a yard, but no one could locate Mary Ann.

A frustrated Rita Erlinger undertook her own search.

Strittmatter still has a short letter issued to her mother by U.S Rep. John Murtha.

“This is to certify that Rita Erlinger is to have free access to search and/or to identify one Mary Ann Luther,” the typed note reads. “She should be given entrance at any time to any part of the flood-stricken community in order to find the family member.”

Through it all, Strittmatter’s mother worked hard to hold her surviving family members together. They usually gathered at Strittmatter’s home for meals.

“My mom was very insistent that we all eat together because, really, no one was hungry,” she said.

“So if you sat at the table, you might be hungry.”

Mary Ann’s body finally was found weeks later in debris near a Johnstown church, less than a mile from where her car had fallen from Route 56. She was dead at age 36.

Strittmatter and one of her brothers were called to a temporary morgue along Scalp Avenue in Richland Township. They were not allowed to see their sister’s body, and they didn’t need to.

“They showed me her wedding band, and I knew it was her wedding band,” Strittmatter said.

The rest of the family had made it through the flood. But even as relief crews began to breathe life back into the city, emotional wounds endured for those who had lost children, siblings, parents and friends.

“My dad would just sit out on the porch, and then he’d get the lawnmower out, and he’d cut everybody’s grass. He would just go up and down all the yards,” Strittmatter said.

Her father had his first heart attack later that year. Rita Erlinger was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1982 and died in 1986, just six months before her husband’s death.

Strittmatter, though, believes her parents’ demise was rooted in the floodwaters of 1977.

“Truly, it killed both of them,” she said.

Strittmatter has not tried to push away memories of the flood. She keeps stacks of old newspaper articles and family pictures, including a snapshot of her smiling sister taken not long before the disaster.

She has found peace through her Catholic faith and in the memories of time spent with her big sister, including that last afternoon in the sun.

“We had a good day,” she said.