The name MARTIN KAKOSIAN will be familiar to many of you in relation to the loss of C-130 60528 on 2 Sept 1958. On that date, Martin, an Armenian college student, was on a class field trip traveling by small bus near the village of Sasnashen when Soviet MiG-17 fighter pilots were shooting down our recon plane. Seeing the MiGs firing on the C-130 (up close & at low altitude), the bus driver stopped & Martin and his classmates watched in astonishment as the C-130 crashed.
Martin was a well known sculptor & all-around artisan in Yerevan, with sculpted monuments at the Yerevan train station and other locations, and some of the Armenian currency in the old days had his graphics on the bill & coins. I never discussed politics with the Kakosians, but he apparently has some connections during the Soviet era and managed to send his oldest son and daughter to the USA for their education. Today, that son is a dentist in NJ and daughter Irene is an OB/GYN in NYC. The son & daughter brought their parents and younger brother to Long Island, NY, in the early ‘90s, and I tracked down Martin during my research into the shoot down of 60528. I visited the families on Long Island in early 1997, and we remained friends to this day.
Martin has a soft spot for the Americans who perished in the shoot down, and he sculpted a “Khashkar” (memorial) and set it up at the crash site after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. When I tracked him down in early 1997, he agreed to travel with a Big Safari team to the crash site, acting as a tour guide & translator. I tagged along with the Big Safari team — Paul Martin (Retired Maj. Gen./ESC commander), Mike Patterson (former USAFSS AMS/Big Safari Assistant to Col. Bill Grimes), Horace “Red” Haire (L-3Com Staff), and Martin Kakosian. I met up with the BS Team at Frankfurt Flughaven & traveled with them to Armenia in July 1997. Because I was an extra who was paying my own expenses during the trip, Martin took me under his wing and put me up in his personal home that he still owned in Yerevan, while Martin, Patterson, and Haire stayed in a hotel in Yerevan. When we arrived at the crash site on the edge of Sasnashen village, Martin’s eye’s teared up when we saw that his Khashkar memorial had tipped over & broken (cows ran loose in the area and may have knocked it over). Anyway, Martin vowed to create a new memorial at the crash site, and with Bill Grime’s support, he produced a new memorial that was dedicated at the site in 1998. Later, he sculpted another identical memorial that is proudly on display in an outdoor area at our National USAF Museum in Ohio.
Martin & Maksena were honored guests at the 60528 Memorial Dedication at Ft. Meade on 2 Sept 1997, and he later sculpted an American Eagle display that sets in a memorial courtyard at L-3Com in Greenville, TX. In addition, in the last decade, some of his sculpted memorials have been dedicated in Italy & other international areas — I had a personal invitation to the dedication in Italy, but could not attend.
Larry Tart