Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  At 5:24 A.M. TWA Flight 3, carrying the Lombard party of three, lifted off from Indianapolis into the black Midwestern night. Next stop: St. Louis, Missouri. For Petey, the ensuing 140 minutes amounted to white-knuckled torture. How could she look out the window at the utter blackness of night, not knowing how high up they were? How could she do anything but stare straight ahead at the back of the seat in front of her as Carole held her hand across the aisle and dozed in exhaustion? The rigors of the previous day dictated sleep, but how could Petey sleep? There wasn’t one good reason in the world why this damn contraption should stay in the air. She had to expect trouble with every bump and noise in flight as she shivered in the cold of a cabin scarcely warmed by a heater while everyone huddled under blankets.

  The DC-3 was an audacious, aluminum beast of an airplane: solid-state, hard-charging, and reliable in any job. Its cabin was not pressurized, which meant conveying passengers in temperatures near that of the air outside, sandwiched between growling, twin 1,200-horsepower engines working on each side of the cabin to keep the sleek ship aloft. Those engines vibrated into the pores of every passenger, every moment. For a woman who didn’t want to cruise at 8,000 feet, Petey felt all the cold, vibration, and noise, and every dip of a wing and rumble of a turbulent cloud.

  Flight 3 reached Lambert Field, St. Louis, at 6:47 A.M. Dawn was still half an hour away. Lombard and party stepped out of the plane and saw only blackness beyond. There was talk of fog rolling in, so they moved inside the terminal and waited. Carole paced, Tots fretted, Wink sought the latest information and sent a telegram to Gable about the delay.

  Oh, how that fog did roll in, and Lombard stared out at...nothing. Gray, drizzly, nothing. Finally, at just short of 9 A.M. Carole, Petey, Otto, and the other passengers of Flight 3 stepped out onto the tarmac again and now in fog-enshrouded daylight could see they stood in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it represented the geographic center of the nation or the Bread Basket of the United States or the Garden Spot of America, but just this moment they were absolutely nowhere. Farm fields barely showed through the gauze of the morning, past a couple of older planes parked about and beyond the row of hangers. The weary passengers climbed aboard the DC-3 and waited. When visibility reached an acceptable minimum, finally, mercifully, the Sky Club sliced its way up through the cottony morning sky, now heading for Kansas City.

  An hour-and-45-minute flight got them into Kansas City at 10 minutes to 11 A.M. By now all three were beyond dead tired. Dozing on a DC-3 wasn’t the easiest of chores, and each felt the shouts, the cold, the bands, the applause, the conversations, the emotion, and the wintry shadows of the previous day in the marrow of their bones.

  The flight crew that had steered the plane from Columbus, Ohio, led by Captain John “Speed” Hagins, a snappy-dressing and lazy-drawled Texan, now stood down and young, German-born Ernest Pretsch, newly minted TWA captain, took to the Sky Club with his co-pilot and air hostess.

  Carole, Petey, and Otto grabbed a bite inside the Municipal Air Terminal during a long hour amidst what the Kansas City Star described as a “large crowd which awaited the arrival and departure of several flights, all held here or held out of here,” and Lombard paced the waiting area as she always paced. At each of these stops, she drank a bottle of Coca-Cola or three if she could find it, and smoked one Camel cigarette after another. A passenger aboard Flight 3 said of Carole Lombard, “I watched her as she walked up and down.... She was very animated, but I had a feeling she was not very gay, not very happy. I looked at her and had a feeling that she was melancholy.”

  That passenger, Joseph Szigeti, knew melancholy when he saw it. An accomplished concert violinist who had performed across continents, Szigeti had been born in Budapest of a Jewish family, and as the Nazi threat increased, he and his wife emigrated to the United States just two years earlier and settled in California. He was heading in that direction now on a break from his latest tour, having performed the previous night in Winfield, Kansas. Joseph Szigeti was a classically trained musician. Lombard couldn’t look up her nose high enough to see him; he couldn’t look down his nose low enough to see her. His impression from her manner and aura—but only in retrospect and after tragedy had struck—was, “I pictured her to be an artist-colleague of mine.”

  Passengers of Flight 3 boarded again at 11:30 A.M. and by now 15 of 19 seats were occupied, and luggage—thanks in part to the bags and trunks of the Lombard party—spilled over from the luggage compartments and the overheads. “When I boarded the plane,” said Szigeti, “I noticed that on both sides of the aisle up in the front just back of the cockpit, luggage was stacked.” It was standard airline procedure to block off the front row of seats on commercial flights for cargo when loads grew too large.

  The plane flew the next leg to the Wichita Municipal Airport, another hour-plus in the air, landing at 1 P.M. Another agonizing two hours was spent on the ground in Wichita, and by now the Hollywood trio was numb from the experience of trying to get home. On the plane, Mary Johnson got a new seatmate, Genevieve Brandner, a young army wife from Holton, Kansas. Genevieve settled into her seat and onto the plane walked Carole Lombard.

  “Is that—” she began.

  Mary assured her that it was. Brandner put two and two together about as fast as the human computer sitting in the next seat, and now Mary had somebody who could share the glee of what lay ahead in Burbank.

  The Sky Club took off for Amarillo, Texas, and the trio of war-bond travelers in seats 8, 9, and 11 endured another two hours in the air, touching down at 3:11 P.M. local time for fuel. One hour on the ground followed, giving Wink ample time to send a Western Union telegram to the MGM publicity department stating that the plane was experiencing what seemed like endless delays and not to expect arrival in Burbank before 8 P.M. California time.

  At Amarillo two military men boarded, their gear adding to the pile at the front of the cabin near the cockpit. A civilian boarded here as well, a young woman of 24 with coal-black hair and striking movie-star looks. Lois Mary Miller Hamilton, from just outside Detroit, had been a stenographer before marrying First Lieutenant Linton D. Hamilton of the U.S. Army Air Corps seven months earlier. Now the Army wife flew west from San Antonio to meet up with her husband. Anyone looking at Lois, and everyone noticed a looker like Lois, knew at a glance that this was a woman with class. There was something about her that said good upbringing, and smart girl, and big future. Mrs. Lois Hamilton settled into seat 17 for the long trip west.

  At 4:10 P.M. Flight 3 roared into the sky heading west out of Amarillo for Albuquerque. Two more air hours passed and the plane again changed time zones; Lombard and Winkler dozed while Petey listened to the drone of those big engines and felt the penetrating cold of the air at 8,000 feet.

  For the excited young pair sitting two rows behind Carole Lombard, Mary Johnson and Genevieve Brandner, one thought occupied their minds and one thought only: Every single minute that goes by, we are getting closer to seeing Clark Gable.

  26. Stranded

  Warren E. Carey, the Senior Air Safety Investigator of Civil Aeronautics Administration Region Six, had completed his frantic taxi ride from the Hotel Amarillo out to English Field, the remote Amarillo airport, and now awaited an American Air Lines DC-3 that would pick him up for the hop to Boulder City, Nevada. There the plane would arrive after dawn, which was critical since Boulder City didn’t have a lighted runway.

  Carey knew as much as there was to know about the crash west of Las Vegas. The TWA man in the station had related that Trip 3 from LaGuardia to Burbank had refueled at the Western air field in Las Vegas and taken off in the dark and had gone down 15 minutes later near a mountaintop and had caught fire. A Western Air pilot had flown over and confirmed it. Carey wanted to believe there could be survivors since nobody had yet reached the crash site and determined for sure that all were lost. The crash had occurred above the snow line and snow helped lessen any impact, and yet—

  He heard a plane overhead. It was the 4:00
A.M. flight and it was more or less on time. Wait a minute—he heard some commotion at the American Air Lines desk and that damn plane flew over and kept going. The American man told him that because of winds on the runways, the American plane had been forced to continue on and not stop for passengers.

  So much for his flight to Boulder City.

  Warren sat there in the quiet with his suitcase, hat in hand. Fine thing: A man has a job to do and no way to get there to do it. Well, he had three choices: talk to the TWA man, the American man, or the Braniff man, and that’s what he did, in order, and finally learned that Braniff had the next flight in, heading for Fort Worth, which was in the wrong direction, but at least he wouldn’t be in Amarillo any longer, so Fort Worth sounded fine to Carey. He knew there would be American flights from Fort Worth to Los Angeles and home, and he could figure out a flight from Los Angeles or Burbank to Las Vegas or Boulder City. Or if need be he could drive to Las Vegas. He handed over his bag for the Braniff ticket agent to tag, and he hoped.

  The sun came up. Warren ate some breakfast and then called Wilma and woke her up. He kept close tabs on the TWA desk for updates. From the radio he learned that Carole Lombard’s mother had been aboard the downed plane, and that the 15 Army personnel on board were Air Corps. Army fliers, just as he had been an Army flier in the last war. It got to him a little, thinking about brothers in arms going down that way. And Carey was reminded that Carole Lombard was married to Clark Gable, the most famous movie star of all.

  Carey considered the ramifications of this fact, that Hollywood people were involved, and this would draw the press, and additional scrutiny from the President on down, and plenty of questions and demands for answers.

  It was Warren Carey’s job to determine why crashes occurred. It had been such a tremendous problem in the late 1930s, with airlines springing up and taking to the skies with no rules or regulations, and their planes plummeting to earth and killing people. Congress took action by establishing committees to investigate these crashes, and by creating the Civil Aeronautics Administration, which FDR then split into the Civil Aeronautics Authority and the Civil Aeronautics Board. The first crash involving this new investigative branch, the CAB, had occurred on August 31, 1940, when a Pennsylvania Central Airlines DC-3, designated Trip 19, had plummeted to earth during a thunderstorm after takeoff from the Washington, D.C., airport, killing 25, including a U.S. senator from Minnesota. When investigating air crashes, Carey always started with the most obvious cause and worked from there. In the case of Trip 19, lightning had been observed in the area; it was the obvious cause and in the end that’s what the CAB had determined, that lightning had struck and disabled a brand new Douglas DC-3, which then fell out of the sky.

  But from what Warren Carey knew so far about the TWA crash, admittedly not a lot while sitting in the middle of a prairie, the causes weren’t so obvious. Weather out of Vegas had been clear, with light winds, which should have meant a fine night for flying, all of it by visual reference. Carey had flown out of McCarran Field often enough to know there were lots of visual references for night flying, despite the fact that Vegas sat in desert.

  Or were there enough references? As he sat and waited for the Braniff plane to come in, Carey turned over in his mind those new regulations about signal beacons. If those critical navigational aids couldn’t be extinguished on 15 minutes’ notice—which represented the warning time that civil defense personnel would have that the Japanese had launched a carrier-based attack on the U.S. mainland—then the beacons were ordered to be extinguished permanently. And with mountains as rugged as those in the High Desert above Los Angeles, well, that could be an obvious cause of a crash.

  But the commercial pilots were slick and knew their business. Hell, they had been the ones who taught new Army fliers of 1941 how it was done this past year, so, beacons or no, that TWA pilot should have been fine. Should have. There was another obvious concern, even in clear weather and VFR conditions, and that was sabotage. Carey was certain that airplanes would be sabotaged in this war—it was the dirtiest possible game but leave it to the Axis powers to resort to something like that. He had been preparing himself to see evidence of sabotage in commercial air disasters, and he wondered if a day, two days down the road this would be it.

  The Braniff DC-2 approached the terminal and eased to a stop. Warren Carey began to pace. He would fly southeast down through Texas to Fort Worth, and then head west to Los Angeles, and by the grace of God, this evening he would have a meal in him at his own house, and get a hug from his own wife, and if necessary take his own car north through the desert to Las Vegas, where he would begin to look at all possible causes for the loss of Trip 3, from the obvious to the obscure.

  And in the meantime he said a prayer that they would find the crew and passengers alive.

  27. The Glamorous Life

  Alice Frances Getz was always special, the last of four born to Fred and Katie Getz of Kewanee, Illinois. The Getzes had thought Alice would be a Christmas baby, but she didn’t steal the show from Santa and arrived a respectful two days later, on December 27, 1916. Smart and wise beyond her years, Alice always had her eye on the horizon, because that’s where the planes were. After a family move from Kewanee to nearby Mineral, little Alice would stand and stare with all the concentration of young Charles Castle and, mouth agape, watch the airships pass over. At age 11, in 1928, she made her first flight in a plane and decided then and there that she must have a career in aviation.

  Mineral, Illinois, at this time was an American small town lost in the vast open spaces of farm country, a town that had consistently numbered 275 people for a century. Fred Getz had run a farm until he retired in 1930; Katie taught school. Both insisted that their kids must get an education, and Alice happily obliged because of her goal. Always a popular girl, she became president of her class all four years of high school, then valedictorian; never mind her graduating class totaled nine students.

  By now, air transportation had gone commercial and a new career field had opened up. In a man’s world where few women this side of Amelia Earhart flew planes, Alice set her sights on becoming an air hostess. In those days only trained nurses could become flight attendants—one didn’t know what might happen 10,000 feet in the air—so Alice trained to become a nurse at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, graduating in February 1938. She became an obstetrical nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital in Racine, Wisconsin, then at Cook County Hospital in Chicago.

  At the beginning of 1939, 22-year-old Nurse Getz saw an advertisement for stewardesses from American Airlines. Are you a registered nurse? Between 5 feet 2 and 5 feet 5? Between 100 and 125 pounds? Between the ages of 21 and 26? If so, join us in the air!

  Four hundred girls responded to the ad; six were chosen. Alice Frances Getz was one of the six, and all embarked on a crash course, not in serving coffee, tea, or milk, but in aeronautics, air traffic control, radio transmissions, meteorology, airplane loads and determining center of gravity, timetables, food service, and company organization. Upon Alice’s graduation, American Airlines had a wait list for hostesses, but TWA snapped up the dark-haired, browned-eyed, five-foot-two-inch, 119-pound Alice Getz, and suddenly she was living the glamorous life at 10,000 feet on the Chicago to New York line of TWA commercial flights in the sleek new DC-3s.

  TWA air hostess Alice Getz had it all, looks, a warm personality, an education, and now money and fame. She bought herself a yellow convertible, and in her tailored uniform with a smart jacket, pencil skirt, heels, and cap set rakishly on her head, she became the celebrity of Mineral and turned heads wherever she went, from O’Hare in Chicago to LaGuardia in New York. In just two-and-a-half years she had racked up more than 300,000 air miles, and her photo regularly made the local newspaper, the Kewanee Star Courier.

  Alice was an athlete who enjoyed horseback riding and golf. Pretty but not beautiful, Alice drew the attention of the opposite sex with her personal warmth and a devastating charm in all circumstances. One male pas
senger recalled that, “on a flight to Tucson, she was putting a dinner tray on my lap. My hat fell on the floor and as I reached to pick it up the cigarette in my hand burned a hole in her silk stocking. She let out a yell and everything spilled.” He went on, “I bought a couple of pairs and gave them to her on the return trip. She didn’t want to take them saying, ‘It’s all in the game. It was my fault not yours.’”

  Now, at 25, her personnel file thick with similar platitudes from passengers with all manner of troubles she had remedied, Alice found herself holding hands with Army Air Corps First Lieutenant Robert Burnett in a cab heading for Albuquerque Municipal Airport, suitcase at her feet. She had agreed to take the flight of another hostess, which caused no small unhappiness for Robert because he had flown an AT-6 down from Phoenix so they could spend time together, and now that time had been whittled away to nothing. Then again, part of the reason he loved Alice was that Middle America reliability of hers, stepping in when needed. He would be counting on that same spirit from her for the rest of their lives, so how could he complain now?

  The cab pulled up to the curb. Alice stepped out and Robert slid across the seat, and stepped out with her. Neither cared for good-byes, and what was the worst that could happen—a few days’ delay before they would meet up again back here in Albuquerque or maybe in Salt Lake?

  They shared a young lovers’ kiss, and Alice knew she had to dash because TWA Flight 3 was due in at any minute from Amarillo, and she needed to meet up with the flight crew. She reached up and kissed her flier good-bye one last time, and he stepped back into the cab for the ride to the Army base next door to the airport.