A Time to Mourn
Just before 1:00 AM on February 3, 1959, under a starless sky, a small airplane headed down an Iowa runway. Once aloft, it banked sharply, slid obliquely downward, and violently cartwheeled into the ground. Flying blind in the falling snow, the sky black above and the farms black below, conditions had forced the young pilot to rely on a new dashboard instrument he had never even seen before. Everyone died on impact.
New York Daily News, February 4, 1959
As memorable as the loss remains, the incident had to compete for headline space. In East Germany, an American convoy headed for Berlin was being detained at a Soviet checkpoint. In New York, an airliner had crashed into the East River, killing 65 people.
Most of us had limited experience with mourning, and none with mourning the loss of celebrities about whom we cared. It did not feel good, but we would get more practice. By June 1964, singers Johnny Horton, Eddie Cochran, and Patsy Cline all would die in crashes.
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