V
The crash site lies a little more than a mile west of highway 177. The first time I visited it I had to be shown the way because you can’t see the marker until you climb the first ridge; a sign pointing the direction is long gone, the closest fence gate is now locked, and the present owner, an out-countian, discourages visits. At the spot stands a thick marble tablet atop a limestone base, all of it about ten feet high, inscribed ROCKNE MEMORIAL and below that the names of the eight men, with the coach, alphabetically last, listed first, and the pilot’s name at the bottom. The monument, fenced to protect it from scratching cattle, has been chipped at by souvenir vandals and shot here and there by gunners. The area is flattish but uneven upland, a piece of Chase County as faceless as you can find, a place visually ordinary except for its extreme austerity, and it is quiet and unmomentous, although it does have an apprehensible aura: the mystery of what actually happened on 3-31-31.
I went to the historical society in Cottonwood and looked at the relics: a large piece of the red fabric, a chunk of propeller, the pilot’s Indian-head insignia pin, the cockpit nameplate, a piece of seat belt. I read the newspaper accounts; columnist “Peggy of the Flint Hills” wrote a week after the crash: If Knute Rockne’s pockets contained all the articles which local souvenir fans claim to have removed from them, it must have been that extra weight which brought down the plane. An article four years later carried this headline: GOLD TOOTH IS FOUND ON SITE OF ROCKNE CRASH—VALUE $7.1 read a 1942 story: MISSING ROCKNE PLANE TIRE TURNS UP AS SCRAP RUBBER. I talked with a half-dozen people who had been at the scene right after the accident and others who had visited it only years later; I saw in one home a wastebasket made from a piece of the Fokker rudder, and everywhere I heard as many tales as truths: So-and-so carried off the coach’s head in a basket, and They tied a rope around Rockne’s waist to pull him from the ground with a team of horses, and What’s-his-name years later found a human jawbone with two teeth out there.
I noticed in the citizens a repugnance about the callous and cavalier keepsake hunting, about the distortions of celebrity and the proposals to capitalize on the horror: only days after the accident the local chamber of commerce, recognizing the most sensational thing ever to occur in the county, recommended constructing a big landing field so commercial aircraft could bring in sightseers; Emporia businessmen wanted a park on the site with picnic tables, a swimming pool, tennis courts; the Wichita Beacon suggested a colossal football stadium in the Bakers’ isolated pasture, where each year the Fighting Irish would play for the championship of the United States. Slim Pinkston, whose brother-in-law was one of the four to see the plane fall, said to me, I’m disgusted with it—it’s always “Knute Rockne and Seven Others.” Them other lives was worth just as much. And Edward “Tink” Baker, who was eighty-nine when I talked with him and recently retired from digging graves in the Matfield cemetery (his only souvenir of the crash was a pair of pliers from 99E that a trucker later stole when he learned their history), told me how his father set out the first monument, a small fieldstone. Tink said, The Catholics put up that marker out there now. They wanted to just forget everybody but Rockne. My dad owned the land then, and he told them he wouldn’t stand for that—if they wanted to include all the names, he’d let them put one up. The much newer monument in the Matfield service area on the turnpike, however, commemorates only Rockne and his football success and doesn’t even suggest that seven other men also died. But neither the monuments nor accounts of the accident say how aircraft history changed in the Baker pasture.
In all my looking, I couldn’t find what actually happened to Fokker 99E while it was struggling above old route 13, what had caused the wing to break off. Then one day I came across something called “Report on the Crash of Fokker F-10A Transport Near Bazaar, Kansas.” It contained excerpts from records held at Wright-Patterson Field near Dayton, Ohio. At the top of page one in parentheses this: “Formerly Classified Secret.” Within, hidden among all the official words, were things I hadn’t heard or read anywhere else, bits and pieces scattered about like debris from the crash itself.
Fragment one: at ten-forty on the morning of the accident, the wife of E. S. Chartier, an Emporia weather observer for the government airmail service, recorded a rapid drop in atmospheric pressure, and she looked out to see in the southwest, toward Bazaar, a dark cloud with a short pendant nearly in a funnel shape; although the sun was shining elsewhere, the cloud appeared to be an isolated weather cell called an upper-air tornado.
Fragment two: a week after the disaster, the supervising aeronautical inspector for the Department of Commerce, Leonard Jurden, wrote a confidential letter to the federal director of air regulation, saying he had definite confirmation from pilots (most of whom insisted on anonymity) that the F-10 series planes, particularly the long-winged job, do set up a decided flutter in the wing when the normal cruising speed is slightly increased and bumpy air encountered. One pilot told the inspector the flutter was so rapid wing tips would move up and down as much as eight inches and keep increasing if not corrected by pulling the nose up and throttling back; he said all TWA pilots knew about the problem but never discussed it because they were afraid of being fired or blacklisted. After examining the wing of 99E, he said that it had broken at the very center of the flexing; soon afterward the same flier brought in a nonpilot who also had observed the flutter in a Fokker wing, and, on one occasion after a severe jolt from turbulence, saw the plywood skin on the underwing actually open up. Another TWA pilot told Jurden his instructor would never allow an F-10 to exceed the cruising speed, being afraid of the roof coming off. Several fliers said they didn’t know a Fokker pilot who wasn’t afraid of the ship.
Fragment three: a co-pilot who had flown with Robert Fry many times said other aviators considered him one of the best blind fliers in the company, a man always capable of pulling through the fogs and clouds along the California coast; this man could not believe Fry became disoriented flying blind, and he was sure something unusual had happened.
Fragment four: a few months before 99E went down, an aircraft inspector complained about the difficulty of periodically examining the internal structure of F-10 wings, sealed up as they were, but Gilbert Budwig, director of air regulation, told him he saw no need for worry as long as the plywood skin stayed glued to the internal trussing.
Fragment five: a year before the crash, the U.S. Navy found the F-10 difficult to maneuver in certain situations and not entirely stable, and the service rejected it for naval use.
Fragment six: a TWA field manager at the crash site examined the throttles and found them closed and said the propellers apparently had not been turning when the plane hit: he could find no evidence the pilot had been flying at an excessive speed or had put the plane into a steep dive; to the contrary, he saw indications Robert Fry had the cool presence of mind, once he realized a crash was inevitable, to shut the engines down to lessen the chances of an explosion on impact. The spluttering and backfiring the four countians heard was likely Fry closing the throttles.
Fragment seven: Jurden wrote in another letter, The wing broke off upwards, under compression. Examination of these [wing] parts showed that in the upper and lower laminated portions of the box spars, some places the glued joints broke loose very clean, showing no cohesion of the pieces of wood. Other places showed that the glue-joints were satisfactory. Two pieces [revealed] definite compression breaks as well as poor glueing.
And this last fragment: federal inspectors, after stripping off the skin of one F-io wing, discovered moisture accumulating in the interior had caused deterioration of the glue, materially decreasing the strength of the wing, since this type construction is to a great extent dependent on glue.
VI
Now: assembling the shards of what happened after those desperate last words, Don’t know yet, don’t know yet! Following Paul Johnson’s mail plane, Captain Fry heads northwest, ninety degrees off course, in search of a way out of the murk and light rain
icing the wings and beginning to shut down his instruments and radio, everything happening rapidly; the trimotor catches the tailings of the cyclonic cloud, and the laden plywood wings begin to vibrate, the stress on the spar immense; the cabin fabric shudders terribly, and port-side passengers watch the wing tip flutter ever farther and faster until it appears to be flapping, and their terror—that fear of the novice air traveler of a wing falling off—is unspeakable: and then a loud, shattering report, and half the left wing is gone, severed as squarely as if this black mayhem of a cloud concealed massive shears: the plane turns over violently: cries of the helpless men, engines going silent, the hiss of wind, the ship turning over again: upside down, the five-hundred-foot plunge begun, Niner-Niner-Easy falls into the prairie snow.
On the Town:
From the Life and Opinions of Sam Wood, with Commentary (I)
THE HIGH-NOON WAGON
This is happening in north-central Ohio in 1849, and the young white man coming down the road in his four-horse wagon is about to put his cargo and himself at risk with a dangerous and rash yet logical boldness, but the young schoolteacher he is soon to meet—who will be standing in front of the small farmhouse with the decorative tomato plants (she knows them to be poisonous)—will say some forty years later when she lives in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, I think if I could have looked forward and seen what was in the future, I should have shrunk from it.
It is nearly noon, and the dust rises from the slow revolution of the wagon wheels as they press into the road from the burden lying covered by canvas. Sometimes the canvas moves as the load shifts, and sometimes it speaks softly to curse the road or the entrapped heat, and after every curse comes a shushing, and the burden goes still and jostles on another mile, mute and motionless. The young driver, as if addressing his team, calls a word of encouragement, and he sits surprisingly relaxed as if he wished for an encounter, a confrontation that will draw life right to the edge. The wagon jolts, the burden grumbles, and the driver calls, Steady! as if the horses were doing other than plodding in sweating silence. A man can be hanged for carrying such cargo, freightage most carriers transport only in the dead of night.
Then: five horsemen, armed, ride up to block the wagon. They are hunting runaway slaves who have crossed the Ohio River and are heading north. One of the riders, the largest, says in a calm that reveals sureness and strength, What’ve you got in that there wagon? The driver turns to look at his humped cargo as if to remind himself, and then he faces directly into the squint of the big horseman and says, I got me here a load of runaway niggers. The riders are used to men quailing before them, and such effrontery is a surprise. One aims a pistol at the canvas and pretends to shoot it, and the men laugh and ride away, and the wagon rolls on, and the burden remains dead-still. It is not the last time the driver will speak the truth and be taken for a liar.
The wagon groans up into the yard of William Lyon, whose farmhouse is a station on the Ohio underground railroad. Lyon, a Presbyterian, has been called before a session of his church for his abolitionist work. He knows the wagon driver, Samuel Newitt Wood, twenty-four years old, a Quaker whose parents are also fervid abolitionists; Wood is not a large fellow, weighing but 130 pounds, handsome in a boyish way, his hair deeply brown and thick; he habitually fixes his gaze on people and evaluates them so intensely that he unnerves them. He looks at Lyon’s petite and pretty daughter: her hair parted and drawn back, she stands beside the tomato plants with the lovely fruit she is afraid to eat. Her father uncovers the sweating burden of ten blacks and hurries them from the wagon, out of the high-noon sun and into hiding, and he comments on the risk of transporting runaways in daylight, but Wood believes in frontal challenge and the logic of the unexpected. He is a man whose conscience is not a shield but a weapon. The daughter, Margaret, a relative of Stephen Foster, hums as if her mind is far, far away and not listening to Wood tell of facing down the slavers with a misunderstood truth that saved him and the blacks. Years later in Chase County, she will tell her granddaughter, I said to myself, there’s a brave man—and a smart one. I’ll catch him if I can.
First Commentary In May of 1854, Congress passed the Kansas Nebraska bill, which repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise, legislation permitting that state to draw up a pro-slavery constitution while outlawing slavery north of about the thirty-sixth latitude. The Kansas-Nebraska Act permitted settlers of those two territories to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery, Congress assuming Nebraska would become free soil and Kansas, heavily influenced by neighboring Missouri, would go to the pro-slavery faction, thereby keeping a national balance between North and South. Thomas Jefferson’s firebell in the night was ringing again, and this time it would not go silent until eleven years later at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
THE SAM CLOON
This is in Mount Gilead, Ohio, 1854: one evening Sam Wood comes home to Margaret, his wife of four years, and their two sons. He works in a law office and is about to be admitted to the bar. Although he has only a common-school education, he has discovered he can get on a porch or stump and make speeches that people will listen to, his command of anecdote more useful than rhetorical flourishes. He is a mixture of fire and frost, passion and logic, impulsiveness and vision, and he can at once mock and take mockery. He likes politics and spends much time campaigning for antislavery candidates, and he has little interest in leaving for the California goldfields as others here are doing; Margaret says, Always he is reading, studying, trying to get new ideas of government.
This evening he comes home and begins talking about the Kansas-Nebraska bill and how he sees it as a federally sanctioned means to extend slavery into the West, and then he says without warning, As soon as that bill is passed, I’m going to Kansas, and Margaret sits quietly, not surprised really, and she knows that she must always expect things like this from Sam Wood, and she knows that, while he likes jokes that flush into the open a person’s character, he is not joking now. He asks, What will you do? She understands what he wants her to say, and she realizes he does not want to take her from the safety of Ohio to the tall prairie country of the border ruffians along the Missouri-Kansas line, just now the most dangerous place in the nation. Their boys are one and two years old. Margaret says, If you’re going, then I’m going too.
On the thirtieth of May, President Pierce signs the bill, and one week later Sam and Margaret and sons have sold out and are in a wagon headed for Cincinnati: of that June morning, Margaret will say later, The birds sang and the flowers bloomed, and the long, slender branches of the beeches seemed waving a farewell as the little family passed, going to the front, where the forces of freedom and slavery were soon to be marshaled for mortal combat.
At Cincinnati the family boards the steamboat Sultana for Louisville, where they change for passage to Missouri. (Nine years later the Sultana will sink in the Mississippi and drown more than fifteen hundred prisoners of war just released from Andersonville and Cahaba prisons.) The going is easy. At St. Louis they get on a crowded packet, the Sam Cloon, and head up the dark Missouri. Passengers at first talk about the dangers—snags and sawyers and sandbars—but, once well under way, they speak of their expectations. Aboard is a contingent of Mormons heading for Kanesville, Iowa, where they will start their thousand-mile walk to the new settlement on the Great Salt Lake. Margaret watches after the boys, and Sam is all about, strolling on board almost as many miles as the boat travels up the Missouri, and especially he questions the Mormon leader, Orson Pratt, one of Joseph Smith’s twelve apostles and his intellectual editor and proselytizer, sometimes called the gauge of philosophy, who is doing for Mormons what Wood wants to do for the Free State cause. He asks Pratt many questions about the western country.
Word comes that three passengers are ill, and, within hours, more travelers develop headaches and diarrhea, and they vomit often, bringing up something that looks like rice water, a fearful and telltale sign. Their thirsts are unquenchable, they become holloweyed, their skin wrinkle
s as if they were aging a year for every half hour, and their legs cramp, and the contractions move up to their arms and hands, and they collapse, and some slip into comas. Within hours of his first symptoms, a man dies, and then another. The passengers begin to panic, clamoring to be let off the death boat, but the river towns do not let such packets dock. Only two men are both hale and bold enough to aid the sick: Orson Pratt, who has encountered the disease on the overland trail, and Sam Wood, who has never seen cholera. He holds the head of a woman, wipes her forehead, gives her water, but she dies before him, and he moves to help another traveler. No one has the prescribed cholera medicines: pills-compounded of opium, camphor, cayenne pepper, and calomel, or a rectal injection solution of sugar of lead, laudanum, and gum arabic. By the time the Sam Cloon reaches Independence, some of the ill have begun to recover, and Sam and Margaret and sons are well and now baptized in the dangerous waters of the border country.