PERRY POINT, Md. - Family and neighbors Monday spoke of Frank Corder as a quiet but helpful guy. But the more they talked, the more that image changed.
They remembered how he was arrested for drunken driving last year and had his license suspended. How he dabbled in drugs. That his marriage had recently fallen apart.
Monday, he died in spectacular fashion.
"To tell you the truth, I can't explain it. I don't know. It came as a real surprise to me," brother John Corder, 41, says.
Another brother, William Corder, told CBS that Frank Corder was not a violent man and never expressed any complaints about President Clinton or his policies.
In fact, one of the few times anyone remembered Corder expressing an interest in anything in the news was in 1987, when Mathias Rust, 19, of Hamburg, Germany, piloted a small plane past Soviet air defenses to a spectacular landing in Moscow's Red Square.
"He said, `If I'm going to check out, that's the way I'm going to do it,' " John Corder quotes his brother as saying, in today's Washington Post. " `I'm going to crash a plane into the White House.' We thought it was a joke."
Corder grew up in Aberdeen, Md., a town of 13,000 that sits on the upper reaches of the Chesapeake Bay. He dropped out of Aberdeen High School in 10th grade but eventually earned a GED, the equivalent of a high school degree. He never exhibited any strong political beliefs, relatives say.
"Frank has never said anything against this country or anyone else," says an aunt, Edith Dishman. "It was the drugs. That's the only problem that I know of that Frank had. It was just like the devil will get a hold of you and won't let go."
On Avenue C at the Perry Point Veterans Hospital, where for four years Corder lived with his wife, Lydia, neighbors are stunned by their neighbor's act.
"He's a very quiet person," says Joan Copeland, a neighbor and nurse who treated Corder in the hospital's detoxification ward.
Corder had an honorable discharge from the Army and worked as a truck driver at Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
He received one flying lesson five years ago from Joe Kesser, now airport manager at Harford County Airpark, where Corder's father once worked and where Monday's flight to the White House began.
"We didn't talk politics or past history," Kesser, 71, says. "At that first lesson I'm just worried about being puked on."
Kesser says he heard rumors of Corder's drug and alcohol problems and demanded he produce a medical certificate showing he was clean before giving a second lesson.
Corder never came back, and Kesser did not see him again until 18 months ago, when he was selling airplane parts at the field.
"He was questionable to me," Kesser says.
First cousin Dee George describes Corder as a "typical American Joe. He was a jeans-and-flannel-shirt type of guy. He was real friendly. He'd talk to anybody; he'd help anybody."
Corder had been distraught since the death of his father from cancer two years ago and the breakup of his marriage, relatives say.
Some of them say Corder had a drug problem that, coupled with his despondency, may have led him to commit suicide by crashing onto the White House grounds.
George says Corder was very shaken over the separation from his wife three weeks ago. The couple had met while Corder was in the hospital undergoing alcohol detoxification. She is a licensed practical nurse there.
"Frank has been down on drugs and alcohol before," George says. "He told me that sometimes . . . he just wished he had a gun."
Corder lost his commercial driver's license in April 1993 for 90 days after a conviction for driving while intoxicated, according to state records.
Although he battled alcoholism, Corder was a nice man who helped others when he could, Copeland says.
That leaves Copeland "wondering if I could have helped him" before he stole the plane.
Says Copeland: "It just shows how sad it is that you have to do something like this to get attention."
