Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  Between my Lord and me;

  I cannot choose the colors;

  He worketh steadily.

  At times he weaveth sorrow,

  And I, in foolish pride,

  Forget he sees the upper,

  And I the under side.

  Fieldsie had written a short sentiment that was read by Reverend Chapman. It stated: “Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy and duty of life. Those whom we have come to honor and, in God’s name to bless, never shrank from life, but welcomed it—welcomed life and its every aspect—loved life and were responsible to both its duties and its joys…. Each believed steadfastly in the glorious life to come.”

  Silence fell. Then Reverend Chapman said the benediction. The pallbearers were called: Fred MacMurray, Buster Collier, Nat Wolff, Al Menasco, Harry Fleischmann, Walter Lang, and Zeppo Marx stood and moved to the dark gray steel coffin of Carole Lombard. The mourners stood; Carole’s casket was lifted and carried from the chapel. A collection of Petey’s friends bore hers out. Sobs and sadness filled the Church of the Recessional, and then slowly, the mourners wandered out into the graying dusk.

  Fred and Stuart Peters stood outside and watched the caskets of their mother and sister as they were borne to twin hearses for the drive to the Great Mausoleum. The caskets were taken to waist-level, side-by-side crypts in a private section called the Sanctuary of Trust with Gable, Fred and Elizabeth Peters, and Stuart Peters watching as each casket was carefully lifted to its crypt and pushed inside. Word was out that Carole and Clark had fought—and why. The Peters had nothing to say to Gable this day; they seethed quietly and held him responsible for the destruction of their family.

  According to UP’s Othman, Gable “left the cemetery at sunset, alone in the back seat of a rented limousine. His fans and Miss Lombard’s, numbering by now perhaps 100 at the gates, glimpsed him hatless, with chin in hand, as the car purred away.”

  42. Even the Unfortunates

  Jill Winkler’s life with her “Winkie” had been charmed, and there was no question that the Winklers were part of the Hollywood fabric. Wink took care of the stars and the stars relied on him, trusted him, loved him. Not only Gable but others like Walter Pidgeon and Lana Turner. Of course, Gable counting on someone wasn’t an easy thing because Gable was a demanding man and he wanted Wink within arm’s reach, within the distance of a shout, every moment the king was on the lot, and within the reach of a telephone the rest of the time. As difficult as this was, the pressure relentless, the trade-off for Jill was—Clark Gable, for God’s sake! Gable was bar none the most famous movie star in the world, and probably the most recognizable face in the world, more familiar than FDR or Einstein or Hitler. And Jill’s husband worked directly for the king.

  Then there was the other royal to serve, and that was Carole Lombard. Carole had a down-home breezy loud boisterous charm about her that was just…love. She loved the people she was close to and if you were Carole’s friend, she had your back and would fly into a rage on your behalf at any insult. Gable’s charm was different. It was really all about Gable in some way. He’d make that sparkling eye contact and any girl would want to just giggle, he had that way about him, and he didn’t like to talk about himself and would rather talk about whomever he was with. He called Jill “honey” like he called all good-looking women honey. Lombard was a brass band; Gable was a crooner who didn’t even need music.

  And this famous duo had called Otto and Jill Winkler friends. The elopement caper had forever bonded the four, which had been a glorious thing and led to picnics and dinners at the ranch, where the Winklers were among the chosen few. Carole famously said she didn’t much like to entertain and certainly never, ever wanted a guest to need to spend the night, and yet the Winklers were welcome and Jill and Carole were girlfriends. They shared secrets.

  Yes, the world had been a happy place for Jill Winkler for three glorious years. Then it had turned dark in an instant, what was it, five days earlier? Six? The air, the faces, the sky and the clouds: dark. The days dragging into nights. Dark. She would recall that last dinner on North Wilton when Otto had revealed his premonition about his death by air. She would flash back to the frantic Gable-chartered DC-3 taking off from Burbank. “…It seemed to shoot straight up into the sky,” she remembered. “It was such a beautiful night. I looked out of the window at the twinkling stars above. I thought my mind must be playing tricks on me, that this was just a bad dream. It couldn’t be happening this way.… As the plane reached its proper altitude, I began to realize this was not a bad dream—that we were indeed on a sad mission to Las Vegas and to the scene of the fatal crash.”

  At 3 P.M. on Thursday, January 22, 1942, Jill Winkler took her place in the Family Room at the Church of the Recessional. Jill’s sister Hazel sat in the pew behind her with husband, Joe Roznos, and their daughter, Nazoma, age 22. Otto had a sister, Clara, and she was there. They looked out at the steel casket ahead. None of them knew who was out in the main part of the chapel, but they could feel the force of a large crowd—MGM people from the brass on down, Louis B. Mayer, Sam Katz, Benny Thau, Eddie Mannix and Toni Lanier, Lana Turner, Ann Rutherford, Virginia Grey, Nelson Eddy and wife Ann, Rosalind Russell, and the entire publicity department. “Many of Winkler’s former cronies and friends from the metro dailies were there,” said the Hollywood Reporter, “as were 50 members of the Los Angeles police and civic officials who knew Winkler during his 12 years on the Examiner.” Even some of the unfortunates showed up, guys to whom Wink had given a break when he was a reporter on the beat.

  Yesterday, the church had been less than half full, so disinterested had Lombard been in funerals and so strong had been the impression made by 250 Harlow mourners sucking the air out of a small chapel in the heat of June. It had taken a police cordon to keep people away yesterday; today the church was packed past its capacity of 155.

  Just as the service was about to start, the Roznos contingent heard the outside door open and in tiptoed Gable, moving as a dark-suited blur up to the front beside Jill. Her family members exchanged glances and no one said a word, but there was king of the movies Clark Gable, thin, pale, his skin hanging from his bones, a shocking sight, the pall of death unmistakable about him. Heavy, sad, lingering death. For a moment Lombard was there in everyone’s thoughts as they shared the load he was lugging around, but this was about Otto now and thoughts settled back only to him.

  Gable put his giant bony paw over Jill’s cold ivory hands clasped in her lap, and the service officiated by Rev. James Lash, pastor of the Hollywood Congregational Church, began. Comforting words were spoken. Prayers recited. Hymns sung. After a pause, the rich baritone of Walter Pidgeon bounced off the ancient rafters as he spoke simply and from the heart about the guy he knew named Otto Winkler. The living, breathing humans who heard Pidgeon’s eulogy melted into the floor of the Church of the Recessional. No one could have heard this testimonial and not succumbed to tears in a trickle or a torrent, because Wink had been a good guy, a loyal guy, who, as was pointed out by his newspaper pals, “never hurt anyone to get a story and yet he always got the story.”

  “Clark Gable was very grieved,” said Nazoma. “He sat in front of me and tore a handkerchief to shreds while the service was going on. This was one of his best friends.”

  MGM contract player Allan Jones took the podium and sang a melancholy tenor rendition of “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” which took the MGM people straight back to the Harlow service down the hill in Wee Kirk o’ the Heather when Nelson Eddy had sung the same song.

  Finally it was over. Mr. Mayer stood. Howard and Gail Strickling stood. And Eddie Mannix and Toni Lanier. The Wheelwrights. The Spencer Tracys. And so many other MGM people filed out into the January afternoon. Otto Winkler’s body was borne by pallbearers that included, cops, reporters, and publicity men to a waiting hearse and then driven to the Great Mausoleum, as Carole’s and Petey’s had been the day before. The casket wa
s slid into crypt 8727 in the Sanctuary of Comfort, one floor below Lombard and Peters. Finally, after four years serving Clark Gable at all hours, and experiencing dark premonitions, and trying to wrangle Carole Lombard on a hectic bond tour, and being forced to flip a coin and losing that toss, and finding himself dragged cross country at breakneck speeds that finally broke his neck and the necks of 21 others, Otto Winkler began his rest.

  A few days later Damon Runyon’s syndicated column, “Brighter Side,” ran a guest commentary written by an anonymous L.A. reporter, probably Wink’s pal Tom Devlin of the Examiner, which Runyon used in a piece that was run coast to coast: “…the story of a former police reporter. Just a little guy with a heart so big that it finally cost him his life. The guy I refer to is Otto Winkler, who lost his life in the plane crash with Carole Lombard and carried to eternity with him the love and friendship of everyone who knew him, including the jail bums he helped in his reporter days as well as the big stars and film magnates he worked for.”

  The column summed up, “Otto had a beautiful wife whose love for him as his for her was as glamorous a love tale as any of Hollywood’s publicized romances. Jill Winkler might have been a movie star, too, because she was rising in the ranks when she met Otto and married him. But she gave up her career for the biggest thing in her life. And just when things were the happiest, tragedy came winging its way to crash against the Nevada mountains. And the little guy with the big heart, the man who had written the record of a thousand heartbreaks for the papers, got his own name in print at last.”

  43. The Cream of the Crop

  The evening of the fireball, Lt. Voorhees had given Lt. Dittman his ticket and felt good about doing a comrade a favor. Now, Voorhees had moved on to his next assignment, and Dittman lay in cinders, leaving behind a young widow who would never remarry.

  A single coroner's inquest was held for the military men after the processing of the high-priority civilians and the flight crew. Then one by one, the bodies of 19 crash victims made their way back to grieving families.

  As dramas had played out for Clark Gable and Fred and Stuart Peters, and for Jill Winkler and her family, so did they play out for the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives, children, and sweethearts of 18 other families around the nation. The mother of Mary Johnson, the computer for NACA, heard about the crash on the radio and believed her daughter dead. Mary arrived safely in Burbank and, knowing that the family in tiny Benicia, California, didn’t have a phone, telegrammed her mother that she was safe. But the Johnsons also didn’t have a mailbox and instead, telegrams were inserted in their mail slot at the post office.

  On Saturday morning, a heartbroken Anna Johnson walked to the post office and picked up the mail. She saw the telegram, assumed the worst, that it was a death notice for her beloved Mary, and lugged the envelope home with a heavy heart. She asked a neighbor to open and read the telegram—and learned that her daughter Mary was alive and housed in Hollywood luxury at the expense of TWA.

  Other families did not fare so well. Especially hard hit was southwestern Pennsylvania, home of Al Belejchak and the Nygren brothers. Fred Nygren, father of Ed and Bob, had served as superintendent of buildings at Leisenring High School for a generation and was one of the most respected men in Dunbar Township, Pennsylvania. Dunbar hid in the morning shadows of the Appalachian Mountains on a spot that once had been frequented by a young George Washington during the French and Indian War. One quiet Saturday morning, Fred answered a knock at the front door of his white frame house. Unfortunately for Fred, who had lost Ed and Bob’s mother Lela about a decade earlier, that knock came Saturday morning, January 17, 1942.

  When he grabbed the door handle and pulled, he saw a neighbor boy and felt a blast of January cold. The boy handed Fred a telegram from the War Department. He opened it with no warning as to what he was about to read: “The Secretary of War regrets to inform you that your sons Staff Sergeant Edgar Allen Nygren and Sergeant Robert Frederick Nygren have been involved in the crash of a civilian transport near Las Vegas Nevada along with 13 other Army personnel. If further details or other information are received you will be promptly notified.”

  Thus began for Fred and second wife Amelia a weeks-long nightmare trying to get information about how and why Fred’s sons had died. Not only had he lost Lela, but their little girl had died in infancy, and now the boys were gone as well.

  Fred was damn proud of his boys, especially that they had stayed together from the first, even through three transfers, and both were noncoms at such an early age! They were officers and doing important things for the country. Imagine, local boys from Dunbar taking the big bombers from Los Angeles all the way cross country to the east coast and some even to England and Canada. Fred would hear the drone of an airplane overhead and wonder if Ed and Bob were aboard.

  Pearl Harbor had hit Fred hard. His boys flew combat aircraft, and now there was a shooting war to fly in. He hadn’t heard from them since Christmas but didn’t think anything of it. He relied on the fact they served stateside and therefore out of harm’s way.

  Then came the second telegram, a few hours later—after Jack Moore, Lyle Van Gordon, George Bondley, and the others had made their discovery—confirmation shot across from Las Vegas 2,500 miles to Fred Nygren in Dunbar, Pennsylvania, that no one survived the crash.

  Very soon, a reporter from the Connellsville Daily Courier appeared with hat in hand. Fred told him, “Had it happened in a war zone, probably one might have prepared himself for it.” It hadn’t happened in a war zone, and Fred clearly wasn’t prepared. “But we can’t decide these things,” said the now-childless father. “The choice is someone else’s.”

  The community rallied around Fred Nygren and offered condolences, food, and company. Fred became a celebrity because Ed and Bob had been killed on the same plane as Carole Lombard.

  During the long week of body recovery and identification, Fred received a telegram of condolence from Clark Gable and another from Fred and Stuart Peters, and Nygren was struck dumb that these important California people would take a moment from their own grief to send word to others. But then, the crash united all the families of Flight 3; all had lost loved ones in that lonely place on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. And maybe it was something special that Gable had lost two family members, and could understand Fred’s loss in particular and the fact that two sons had been taken away.

  Fred began to wonder when his boys would make their last journey home and heard sporadically from the Army that identification of the remains was difficult. Finally, Bob was identified when the last of the victims arrived at Garrison’s, but not all of Ed was found. Ed was one of three that Lt. Hunt could never find enough of to satisfy Deputy Coroner Lawrence. As a result, the United States Army resorted to the wisdom of Solomon. After the Lombard party, the flight crew, and 12 of the Army personnel had been positively identified, random pieces of three bodies remained. Those unidentified were Ed Nygren, Hal Browne, Jr., of San Antonio, and Ken Donahue of Stoughton, Massachusetts. With the permission of the families, including that of Fred Nygren, the remaining body parts were cremated together and divided in three, so only a small pile of ashes that possibly once had been S. Sgt. Edgar Nygren was sent east along with brother Bob when finally twin coffins arrived in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, on the frozen Saturday morning of January 31, via Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

  The caskets were taken to McCormick’s Funeral Home in Connellsville, where they lay in state, flag draped, until Sunday noon, when they were moved to a packed-to-the-rafters First Methodist Church for the funeral service. TWA was represented, as were the Ferrying Command and the VFW. The president of the United States sent a message via his secretary, Mr. M.H. McIntyre, and Lutheran Rev. Dr. William Hetrick said over the boys, “It so happened in the inscrutable Providence of God that these two brothers, Edgar and Robert, inseparable in life as children, reared together in this community, of the same church and of the same school in Dunbar township, hand in h
and united serving their country, should both meet death in this tragic way.”

  The funeral procession drove several miles over twisting foothill roads, trees barren, ground frozen, sky full of clouds, from Connellsville to Flatwoods Cemetery, where Ed and Bob were laid to rest under a rattle of rifle fire in military salute, and another two casualties of Flight 3 settled in to eternal rest.

  Similar ceremonies took place around the nation. Milt Affrime was sent back to Philadelphia for burial in the Adath Jeshuran Cemetery. Milt would have been relieved to learn that his 56-year-old father was never called to active duty. James Barham returned to Waco, Texas, and Hal Browne, Jr., to San Antonio. Al Belejchak was sent east by rail to Braddock, Pennsylvania, for burial in the heights overlooking the steel mills. Fred Cook was shipped to Reidsville, North Carolina, and Robert Crouch to Bloomfield, Kentucky. Fred Dittman went west for burial at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California, where, standing over the grave, a shaken Burt Voorhees related to Fred’s devastated bride Violet and other mourners the story of exchanging plane tickets with Fred. Ken Donahue was forwarded to Massachusetts. Charles Nelson went to St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Stuart Swenson, who had enlisted as an aviation cadet the same day as Charles in the same place, Fort Snelling in Minnesota, was shipped to Los Angeles National Cemetery. Martin Tellkamp returned to La Moille, Illinois, and David Tilghman to Snow Hill, Maryland. Nicka Varsamine from picturesque Woonsocket, Rhode Island, ended up in grave number 23,757 at Arlington National Cemetery.

  Lois Hamilton, the Army wife with movie star looks who pleaded with Ed Knudsen to let her remain on Flight 3, returned to suburban Detroit, Michigan, in a child’s casket, there was so little left of her. Her cousin, Marie Levi, then a child of nine, remembered a packed gathering of family and friends in the home of Lois’s affluent parents, Russell and Viola Miller. They were tough people; there were no tears and instead Marie remembered a resolute acceptance.