Choosing to give thanks

In the video, a child bicycles through the snow in a Las Vegas neighborhood. The date reads Feb. 7, 1989. We do not see where the boy goes.

There's another scene, one from Christmas 1988, where all the girls scream "Grandma and Grandpa we love you!" into the camera.

And there are earlier scenes of RaeAnn's 35th birthday, which turned out to be her last.

Almost everyone in the video has been gone 20 years now, victims in a random string of events that no one could have seen coming.

The video runs on haphazardly. Its sound is muffled to the point that it is often difficult to make out what people are saying.

It is rarely watched, this video. It is one keepsake among many in the house of Raymond and Rudolphine Pranske. Keepsakes are mostly all they have left.

Rudolphine keeps a glass case full of ceramic figurines and knickknacks. Things from her daughters' wedding days, for example. She used to make ceramics, but after the accident, her hands shook too much. She took up other crafts, making decorations for the nine graves, crafting Christmas tree angels for the poor and sick, or for the church bazaar.

Anything, really, to fill the hole that the loss left behind.

"I think," she says, "the hole is still there."

Back to the video. It jumps to later in February 1989, another birthday. Everyone is gathered at the Pranskes' house in North Las Vegas. It is the last time they will all be together.

The girls hover around the kitchen counter, eating. They act silly. They preen for the camera.

James makes fun of whoever is operating the camera. Two of his nieces kiss him on the cheeks, which provokes giggles.

There is very little story in this video. It is a random collection of moving snapshots. The planting of a tree. A trip to the snow in Utah. The opening of Christmas gifts long since forgotten.

The Pranskes watch the video on a large flat screen from their matching recliners. Their dog, a miniature Doberman with a heart problem and a hefty torso, skitters about.

Raymond is 80, slim and short of stature, with slick gray hair and hooded eyes behind thick glasses. A stack of crime novels sits beside him.

Rudolphine, 78, is also thin, with bright white hair and equally thick glasses. She recently realized while helping a little old lady cross the street that she, too, has become a little old lady. She laughs when she says this.

A gallery of framed photographs faces the couple from up high on the living room's front wall.

PLANE CRASH

"Fifty-nine years, never had a serious argument," says Raymond. "Never even yelled."

"Oh, I've given him a few dirty looks," Rudolphine shoots back.

They are like this, back and forth, with her more than a few times correcting his memory.

His bladder cancer? No, that wasn't last year. It was more than a decade ago.

"She took care of me like a baby," Raymond says. "It was -- I'll tell you, it was really bad."

"We've been pretty much confined to the house for the last 10 years," Rudolphine says.

Raymond is the son of an Illinois coal miner, who was the son of Polish immigrants. Raymond's mom died when he was 4. He was raised in a Catholic orphanage until high school. He says he's had seven near-death experiences.

"It'll make a grown person cry if he had all of the experiences in my lifetime," he says.

The worst was the plane crash.

"Losing the kids so young," he says. "It just tears your heart out."

Mike Cranson and the Pranskes' oldest daughter, RaeAnn, had been childhood sweethearts. They had five kids, three girls and two boys.

Mike was a Las Vegas cop. He had been seriously injured in a motorcycle wreck. When the settlement check finally came in, he pitched a trip to Disneyland to celebrate on Presidents Day weekend. It just so happened that the birthday of RaeAnn's little sister, Cindy, was coming up, so Cindy and her husband, James, decided to tag along.

Instead of buying nine plane tickets, the group chartered a plane. It was a 10-seater, set to take off early on a Sunday morning in late February 1989.

The kids promised to call when they landed, scheduled for shortly after noon. Hours passed. The Pranskes heard nothing.

"I kept making excuses for them," says Rudolphine. Maybe they couldn't get to a phone. Maybe they were having so much fun they forgot.

The airline called at 7 p.m.

The plane, the Pranskes were told, hadn't landed. It was found the next morning smashed into an Orange County, Calif., mountainside.

The phone rang again at the Pranske home. As far as they can recall, it was someone from the government.

"All of them?" Raymond asked.

"I'm sorry," came the response. "They're all gone."

There was Mike, 37, and the Pranskes' daughter, RaeAnn, 35. The couple's kids, Shauna, 15, Stephenie, 14, Nicole, 12, Joshua, 11, and Kyle, 7, the boy on the bicycle in the video. There was Cindy, the Pranskes' other daughter, who would have turned 25 in a few days, and her husband, James Montano, 28.

It turned out, according to an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, that the pilot, Hassan Barro, 34, ignored warnings that he shouldn't fly because of bad weather.

Rudolphine believes to this day that both of her daughters were pregnant. They had said they had big news for her, but would tell her when they got back.

STORY OF HOPE

There is another video, this one taken on the airplane and recovered in the wreckage. RaeAnn narrated.

"The last thing she said was, 'Now we're going into the clouds,'" Rudolphine says.

The investigators didn't let them watch any more.

"You don't want to hear the rest of that tape," they were told.

The Pranskes still had -- still have -- a son and grandson, but everyone else was gone.

Rudolphine "fell off the deep end." She quit her job as a financial secretary. She stopped making the ceramics.

They struggled through it, together. They clipped an Ann Landers column from the newspaper a few days after the accident. It contained a poem that comforted them with the thought that their kids were "at home" with God.

They walked a lot, to clear their heads. They prayed. They made a decision: They would lean on one another, as they always had.

Today, they still often take trips to the graves. Every birthday, all the major holidays. Those trips and short walks around the neighborhood are the only times they get out of the house.

The Rev. Jim Houston-Hencken, their pastor from First Presbyterian Church of Las Vegas, visits them frequently to give them communion.

He learned about the accident through his conversations with the Pranskes after his arrival in 2003.

He sees their story as one of hope.

"If there was ever anybody who you expect to be angry, to be depressed, it would be the Pranskes," he says. "But that's not how it is for them. They try to help people as much as they can. It's an amazing story of the human spirit.

"The world is a better place because the Pranskes are here."

Rudolphine says there's no grand design to what they do. It's not like they're out saving the world. Sure, they give food to the Boy Scouts, the handcrafted angels to the church. Why not? What is the point of all of this otherwise?

"It's easier to smile than it is to cry," she says. It is not something she picked up off a greeting card.

"You can't sit around and cry," she says. "That'll put you in an early grave. And I ain't ready for that yet."

And so they age together. They watch TV most of the day, every day. They walk their dog, Windy, around the neighborhood. They reflect, now and then, on how the world has treated them.

They tell a story about a neighbor they did not know. They were walking around the block with Windy when Raymond got too tired to continue. Rudolphine asked this neighbor whether her husband could take a seat on his short block wall. Of course, the man said.

The next time they were out and Raymond got tired again at the same spot, there was a space cleared in this neighbor's yard. In that space was a new marble bench, put there for Raymond by this neighbor they did not know.

This is the story about a string of events that the Pranskes choose to tell. The one in which the world gives them reasons to be thankful.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.