SALON

Saturday, Jun 23, 2012 7:15 PM UTC

Missouri town remembers ’62 Continental jet crash

By

Topics: From the Wires,

Missouri town remembers '62 Continental jet crashThe wreckage of the Continental Airlines Boeing 707 jet lies in a rolling field of clover near Unionville, Mo., on May 23, 1962, where the plane crashed the night before. Forty-five people died in the crash. Iowa National Guardsmen searched through the wreck. KANSAS CITY STAR FILE PHOTO(Credit: AP)

UNIONVILLE, Mo. (AP) — Maureen Riordan’s family barely spoke about the plane crash that killed her father when she was just 11. Same for Ronnie Cook, a Missouri soybean farmer who as a high school junior was among the first on the scene when Continental Airlines Flight 11 went down 50 years ago just south of the Iowa border.

Aviation buffs know Flight 11 as the country’s first bombing of a commercial jet airliner, an act of sabotage by a passenger that killed all 45 people on board. Yet the crash of the plane, which departed Chicago en route to Los Angeles with a Kansas City stop, was largely forgotten as time passed, families moved on and more horrific airline incidents came to dominate history.

Now, as the result of efforts by a local historian and an aviation blogger, families who carried memories of the crash and residents who remembered that awful night are talking about it again. They include the children of auto executives and engineers who were on board and who are now in touch with others affected by the disaster. A few weeks ago, more than 100 people gathered for a 50th anniversary observance in Unionville, where an updated memorial that describes the crash was unveiled on the downtown courthouse square. The monument was first put up two years ago, although only with the names of Flight 11′s eight crew members and 37 passengers.

Until recently, “folks here put it aside, more or less,” Cook said. “It was something that happened. Life went on. We just didn’t talk about it.” But the new attention, he said, “was something that should have been done a long time ago.”

Initial reports blamed a severe thunderstorm for the crash on May 22, 1962. But investigators soon determined that passenger Thomas Doty, a suburban Kansas City salesman facing armed robbery charges, was responsible for the explosion. He detonated six sticks of dynamite in the plane’s rear bathroom as part of a botched plan for his wife, 5-year-old daughter and unborn son to collect on a life insurance policy he purchased moments before takeoff.

The FBI investigation was led by Kansas City special agent in charge W. Mark Felt, who would later earn acclaim as the Watergate whistleblower known as Deep Throat.

Some believed the bombing helped lead to tightened airport security measures a decade later and partly inspired author Arthur Hailey’s 1968 book “Airport,” which became a popular movie that spawned a run of 1970′s disaster films. But airline bombings by then were already entrenched, said aviation historian Bill Waldock, a professor of safety science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Previous incidents had targeted propeller planes. An October 1933 bombing of a Boeing 247 plane flying cross-country from Newark, N.J. to northern California killed all seven people on board. And in November 1955, Jack Gilbert Graham of Denver planted a bomb in his mother’s luggage on a United Airlines flight to the West Coast, killing all 39 passengers and five crew members. He too was motivated by a desire to cash in recently purchased life insurance policies.

Local historian Duane Crawford began resurrecting interest in Flight 11 about a decade ago. His efforts caught the attention of aviation blogger Andrew Russell, a 26-year-old New Zealander whose website began to attract the children of Flight 11′s passengers and crew.

Those who came to this observance included Riordan, who said her family never considered going to the scene of the accident earlier because “it wasn’t something you did in those days.” But Riordan, who lives near Hilton Head in South Carolina, said she always had an underlying urge to know more about the death of her father, a high school athletic star who became a chemist after World War II. He died on a business trip, as did many of the victims.

“They all had the same story, nobody talked about it,” Riordan said after talking to other surviving children. “Dads who were going off to do their jobs, that’s who traveled then.”

Bob Gray, a 66-year-old Denver area resident, came to honor his uncle Fred Gray, the plane’s pilot.

Capt. Fred Gray’s death hit his nephew especially hard. The 50-year-old pilot had taken Bob Gray on his first motorcycle ride, his first flight as a student pilot and for his first flattop haircut. Bob Gray, who later earned his pilot’s license and worked as an aviation engineer, named his own son after his uncle.

On the trip, father and son met strangers who also lost loved ones a half-century ago.

“A lot of people felt a kinship that they just didn’t even fathom could exist, 50 years later,” said Gray, who at the memorial service reconnected with a first cousin he hadn’t seen in decades.

The memorial service’s keynote speaker was Russell, who said he created a Flight 11 remembrance on his website to fill an information void about the incident.

“Here’s something that’s been forgotten,” he said. “You can’t Google it. There’s nothing.”

For Crawford, a Vietnam veteran and retired high school history teacher and football coach, the quest to tell the story of Flight 11 became a passion. His efforts helped the local historical society obtain several crash site artifacts, including fragments of pinion shifts, hydraulic junction blocks and other pieces of debris that were scattered over 40 miles in Iowa and Missouri.

He wanted to pay tribute to the victims, Crawford said. “Every family has got a story,” he said.

Fred Gray and his co-pilot were found strapped into their seats, their hands on the flight controls and emergency checklists nearby, with the plane’s landing gear down and locked.

“I know that my uncle had fought as hard as he could,” Bob Gray said.

The revived attention to the bombing has already had an impact. In 2009, at the request of family members, Continental agreed to retire the flight number.

___

Online: Continental Airlines Flight 11 blog, http://continenalairlinesflight11.blogspot.com

___

Alan Scher Zagier can be reached at http://twitter.com/azagier

More Alan Scher Zagier.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments are not enabled for this story.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations