by Marty Appel
With further irony, Jerry’s son Jeff played baseball and went to Ohio State on a scholarship. He went on to play ten seasons of Independent League baseball, including a year playing for Ron Guidry on an Independent League team in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 1998, and then at Yogi Berra Stadium with the New Jersey Jackals in 1999. Then Jeff played in Somerset, New Jersey, under Sparky Lyle, where a teammate turned out to be future Yankee Cory Lidle’s twin brother.
Dave Hall became an air traffic controller, and eventually moved to Boston, where he worked at the Boston Flight Standards District Office. He politely declined an invitation to speak with ESPN for their 2004 feature, and has chosen to maintain a low profile with respect to his footnote to history. He and Anderson long ago lost touch.
In preparing this book, I asked if he wanted to see the chapter about the accident and to add any comments or correct any facts, but he said he preferred not to. He did confirm some additional facts used in this book and was pleasant and friendly on the phone. He had to check with his wife to recall that Diana had visited him during his hospital stay, saying he remembered nothing from those days. It was clear he had moved on from that tragic event.
How much money did Thurman’s death cost the family in baseball earnings? His potential earnings are intriguing to contemplate. His contract took him through 1981. If he had enjoyed continued success in business, continued to enjoy being home, and found his career hobbled by injuries that made his performance suffer, he might have retired.
On the other hand, if he’d enjoyed a new burst of excellence by moving to designated hitter or to outfield or first base, perhaps the lure of big dollars and the enjoyment he got from playing ball might have won out.
There was a long players’ strike in 1981, and then he could have declared free agency, and perhaps signed another three-year deal with another American League team (where he could occasionally DH). But here is where it would have gotten interesting.
The Yankees signed Dave Winfield to a ten-year, $23 million deal beginning in 1981, which even included annual cost-of-living increases. Munson, had he decided to stay, would have insisted that he had an agreement which would keep him the highest-paid player on the team. The Yankees might have argued that that agreement was part of his expiring contract and no longer in force. Or, had they felt it was in force, they might have had to think twice about signing Winfield. The contracts would have overlapped at least in Winfield’s first season, 1981, a year the Yankees went to the World Series.
It all makes for intrigue as to what might have been. It could have changed Yankee history.
Thurman’s death did change things in the future—sometimes in positive ways. A year after his death, representatives from the Association for the Help of Retarded Children in New York visited me at my office at WPIX. I was by then the PR director for the Yankees’ home TV station, and would later become producer of their telecasts.
As I’d coauthored Thurman’s autobiography, they thought I could help with a special project: holding a dinner in his name as a fund-raiser. Gene Michael would be another of the early organizers.
Thurman had no connection to disabled children, but that didn’t matter to those who were visiting me that day. They thought that if they could sell thirty tables and present some awards, they would have honored his name and helped their charity.
Diana liked the idea, and the dinner worked. Thurman’s name attracted far more people than they expected, and they decided to make an annual event of it. Not all the honorees were from sports. In the second or third year, James Cagney made one of his final public appearances to receive a “Thurman Award.”
The routine always seemed to start in my office, tossing around names of prospective honorees, and working with the local team PR people to secure them. The selection criteria were generally a combination of “Are they good citizens?” and “Are they available the night of the dinner?” Diana, and then sometimes her children, would attend almost every year. I think a snowstorm may have prevented them from coming one year.
She always read a short speech from the dais, and the audience loved her sweetness, her sincerity, and her ability to make everyone remember Thurman with fondness. When I was more actively involved, I had a video produced showing his career highlights, which the audience loved. On into the 2000s, the dinner continued, uninterrupted, with no loss of table sales despite the distant memory that Thurman was becoming for some. Millions of dollars had been raised. Management of the dinner changed, and Gene Michael and I became lost in the shuffle, but it would always be nice to attend the event and catch up with Diana, who was always the focus of everyone’s attention.
Tracy and husband Chris Evans had a daughter and two sons. Tracy became a teacher at a Montessori school. Kelly and her husband, Tony Parson, had two daughters and one son. The son, Anthony Thurman Parson, is the one who carries Thurman’s name, along with the birth name of his beloved father-in-law and best friend, Anthony “Tote” Dominick. Kelly designs houses, and retains Munson as her last name.
Michael proposed on one knee to his girlfriend, Michelle, in front of his dad’s plaque in Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park in 2004 when the family returned for Old-Timers’ Day. She said yes. Their first child, a daughter, and the first grandchild to bear the name Munson in the family, was born in May 2008.
Michael, because he was only four when Munson died, grew up watching his father’s highlights on television having fewer personal memories than his sisters. He grew to be a large man, five feet ten and 240 pounds, much of it from weightlifting. He went to Glen Oak High School and then to Kent State, and in 1995 was signed to a Yankee contract through the good graces of Gene Michael, by then the team’s general manager. A catcher, he batted .300 in nineteen games for Tampa in 1996, but he wasn’t cut out to be a big leaguer like his dad, and his minor league career would be fleeting. He wound up briefly playing Independent League ball in the park named for his dad in Canton.
Every bit the Canton guy like his dad, he opened Munson’s Home Plate Sports Pub on Dressler Road NW in January 2008. At the finale of old Yankee Stadium in 2008, he represented his dad on the field in pregame ceremonies, receiving a tremendous ovation.
September 16, 1979, was Catfish Hunter Day, as the great Yankee pitcher was preparing for retirement. The team was in free fall after Thurman’s death and there were few joyous moments for the fans as the season wound down. Hunter himself was going 2-9 in his final campaign. He told the crowd on his day, “There’s three men shoulda been here today. One’s my pa”—the crowd burst into cheers—“one’s the scout who signed me”—bigger cheers—“and the third one … is Thurman Munson.” A great ovation rose from the stands. It wouldn’t stop. The fans so longed to cheer for Thurman, and this was the first time they could since the days after he died.
After that season, the Yankees would run video on their scoreboard before the games showing great Yankee moments, and one recurring scene would show Thurman, his knees beaten, struggling to rise and continue to play. It was very heroic. And it never failed to increase the crowd’s cheering, as though their man had just popped out of the dugout as he had done in the rookie summer of 1970, ready to pinch-hit.
Corky Simpson tracked down Darrell Munson for the interview that ran in the Tucson Citizen on October 4, 1979 (and was quoted earlier in this book). In retirement, twenty-nine years later, Simpson remembered it well.
“In nearly fifty years of sportswriting I must have done thousands of interviews and let me tell you, this was not only the strangest, but the most uncomfortable,” says Simpson. “Darrell Munson was working in a tiny, corrugated metal shed at the entrance to a parking lot near the University of Arizona. That’s one of my most vivid memories—that the father of a magnificent athlete would be working in such a small, telephone-booth-sized structure, collecting change from people parking their cars.
“Mr. Munson was a most unpleasant man who seemed to be angry at the world. That anger and some deep hurt from some unknown
cause could be seen in his eyes. He sure as hell was one angry man. It was pretty obvious that Darrell resented Thurman’s enormous success. I have heard men say that the toughest relationship of their lives was with their sons—but this was borderline hostility. Over the years, I have asked myself many times if I shouldn’t have simply folded up my notebook and walked away from this one. But if I had, maybe an important shred of evidence in a wonderful baseball player’s life and times, including his struggle to be great, would have been lost.”
Graig Nettles, who would be named the next Yankee captain in 1982, told biographer Peter Golenbock, “For a long time we didn’t even bring up his name. Now, when we see a fat guy on the street, someone will say, ‘Hey look at Thurman.’ Jokes are a way to ease the pain. For a while it was tough to concentrate on playing. When his plane crashed, so did our season. We didn’t feel much like playing the rest of the year.”
Darla Munson would write a poem, an interest she shared with her brother Thurman, who had written poems many years before to a young Diane Dominick:
Greenburg Road in August
The road I do not travel
The execution site of a ballplayer
Who spent his life in challenge
Until one came along he couldn’t master.
Touch and go landings
Up and down, back and forth,
Round and round
Crash to the ground.
Why did he always fly away?
What did he try to prove that day?
What a horrible price to pay
For the possession of a plane;
The thought of it’s insane.
Touch and go landings
Up and down, back and forth,
Round and round
An excruciating sound
The crashing to the ground
And all of it went up in smoke,
A pathetic sickening joke.
Thurman’s death would cause the 1980 roster to change, with Chris Chambliss traded away to get a replacement catcher in Rick Cerone from Toronto. “With Thurman playing more first base in the end, we thought it might be the end for Chris in New York anyway,” said Audra Chambliss. “We hated to leave, but that’s baseball.”
Billy Martin would get himself fired again after punching out a marshmallow salesman in a bar. Dick Howser would be named manager. Gene Michael became the team’s general manager.
In September 1979, the NTSB issued its accident report, based on the investigation of Edward McAvoy. He cited “startling mistakes” by Thurman and concluded:
the probable cause of the crash was improper use of throttles and flight controls, and four gross errors that caused him to undershoot the airport:
He made a low approach to the 6,400 foot runway and failed to correct for it, even though there were runway slope indicator lights.
He neglected to keep close watch on the jet’s airspeed, letting it drop 10 knots below safe speed.
He forgot to lower the jet’s landing gear, and when he did lower it, he failed to compensate with enough power to overcome the added drag.
He was either unfamiliar with or forgot the proper engine procedure for recovery from a low approach.
In addition, he was not using the plane’s flaps, which would have added lift to the plane.
“In summary,” said the report, “the Safety Board concludes that the pilot’s conduct of the flight set the stage for oversight and confusion. His disregard for standard practices, procedures and regulations created an atmosphere in which he could not recognize a worsening situation. Perhaps a more experienced pilot would have recognized the dangerous situation more readily and may have taken proper and timely action … Therefore, the Safety Board concludes that the manner in which the pilot conducted his flight was the primary factor which precipitated the accident sequence, not his training and experience.”
McAvoy explained, “One employee of A-Flite, an Akron company, taught Munson instrument flying, and another, the operator of the flight center, was the designated FAA examiner. Similarly, one employee of FlightSafety International, Inc., in Wichita, taught Munson to fly his new Citation jet, and another tested him and gave him an FAA jet rating.”
“Cessna had a contract with FlightSafety to provide flight training to purchasers of Citation jets and Munson received the flight lessons as part of a purchase package,” observes Ettie Ward in the book Courting the Yankees. “Although most purchasers were required to get their instruction at FlightSafety’s Wichita site and divide their time, on a prescribed basis, between simulator training time and actual flying, much of Munson’s instruction in flying his new jet took place while traveling to and from baseball games on the West Coast and the All Star Game in Seattle. At the time of the crash, Munson had just 41 hours of flying time in the Cessna Citation and only six hours as pilot-in-command.”
Said McAvoy, “This opens the door to Munson’s being a novice pilot.”
Despite the findings of the NTSB, Diana was advised to sue Cessna and FlightSafety, the company that trained and certified Thurman to fly the Citation. (Cessna reported that it was the first Citation in the United States to be involved in an accident.) She retained a Canton attorney, Eugene Okey, a former minor league player and amateur pilot himself. Assisting him at trial was Daniel C. Cathcart, who had a long history of litigation in airline accidents, including the 1977 Canary Islands collision between KLM and Pan Am jets, and the 1979 American Airlines DC-10 crash, at the time the worst air disaster in history.
The suit, filed in federal district court in Akron, Thurman’s birthplace, in 1980, sought $42 million in damages. Basically, the suit claimed that Cessna and FlightSafety should be liable because of the very findings of the NTSB report—that the sale of the jet and training were a package deal, and that it was in Cessna’s interest to grant a license so they could sell the plane.
A claim was also made about design defect in the cabin entry door, which contributed to preventing Thurman’s rescue.
The value of the plane, $1,218,900, was part of the claim in the suit. An additional $3 million was sought for Munson’s “conscious pain and suffering” while he was still alive. Punitive damages of $9 million were sought, in part “because of alleged negligence in the use of high-pressure sales tactics to induce Munson to buy a sophisticated aircraft, when the company knew he was a pilot of limited experience.”
Cessna’s lawyers claimed that Munson “crashed not because he should not have been flying a Citation, but because he should not have been flying at all on August 2, 1979. He was fatigued from a late flight in bad weather the night before, and in pain from persistent knee problems, which were aggravated by an injury the night before that necessitated his removal from the game. He was overly complacent in the relatively undemanding circumstances on August 2, 1979, and was under stress from various concerns. All these things together were a prescription for the disaster that occurred.”
Leading to the trial, depositions were taken from Billy Martin, Graig Nettles, and Reggie Jackson about Thurman’s piloting abilities, and from Yogi Berra and Gabe Paul about his future earning potential in baseball that was lost.
It took four years and approximately $127,000 in expenses for the case to go to trial—five years from the time of the accident. But on May 25, 1984, after only four days of testimony, the parties agreed to settle the case. (Only Cessna was a defendant at this point; Flight-Safety had reached a separate settlement.) The settlement amount was never announced, but it was said that the $1.69 million figure reported in the press was “an understatement.”
The Yankees, in an unrelated move, also sued FlightSafety and Cessna, making similar claims through their lawyer, John McCarthy of Cleveland, but suing over their loss of services of their player, whom they likened to property or “unique chattel” in terms of market value. But the district court ruled against the Yankees, noting that their loss was “merely a remote and indirect consequence” of the defendants’ actions.
; “The accident changed the way aircraft manufacturers, insurance companies, and the FAA look at ‘hurriedly training pilots in new aircraft,’” says Jerry Anderson. “Today, it takes twenty-five to fifty hours of flying with a safety pilot before you can move up to a more complicated aircraft and fly on your own. It’s ironic that Thurman’s death helped change the aviation industry and probably saved many other pilots and passengers from a similar fate.”
Despite the findings of the NTSB regarding Thurman’s pilot skills that day, three people did survive the crash thanks to the actions he took under emergency circumstances. Yes, Thurman survived the crash, only to die in the fire. He would likely not have lost his life had the plane not hit the tree stump. And when the plane came to a halt on Greenburg Road, Thurman’s last words were of concern for his passengers—“Are you guys okay?” He had saved their lives with his actions in landing the doomed aircraft.
“Thurman flew that airplane to the last nanosecond,” says Anderson. “He kept it under control and brought us down. He never panicked. He saved our lives.”
Ruth Munson died in 1987 in Canton and is buried a few steps from her son. Darrell Munson died in April 1991 in Alexandria, Louisiana, probably on his way to or from Florida, where he alternated stays with his Tucson residence.
Even Thurman’s classmates, so loving in their recollections, all seemed aware of the “difficult” circumstances of his upbringing. All things considered, Thurman ended the cycle that began at least with his grandparents, if not earlier. The Munson children are well-adjusted, good citizens of the community, living happy and productive lives.
What ended this cycle and made Thurman the man he was, rather than someone who might have been doomed to a lifetime of psychiatric care, discussing his parents?
Basically, two things saved him. First was his discovery at age twelve of Diana Dominick and his acceptance into her family, giving him a sense of how things should be. He used that to raise his children and to create a family for himself that he never had. Tony “Tote” Dominick, who died in 1985, was both a father-in-law and a best buddy.