In 1989, the Sioux City Journal was an old-fashioned daily newspaper steeped in a tradition that began in the 1860s. By necessity, all thirty-one staffers wore many hats. Marcia Poole was food editor and responsible for the Sunday Living section as well. “We were vacation thin, of course, in July,” she recalled. Four reporters were on duty, along with three photographers and two interns.
Cal Olson, the editor, was a character right out of central casting in Hollywood. With a generous head of wavy hair, and not much pepper left amid the salt, he had a vigorously frank and friendly face. He wore sharp conservative suits and big glasses that accented his black bushy eyebrows. His smirk could either wither you or fill you with warm confidence, depending on what you had done to deserve it. He made a habit of asking his reporters, “How does it smell out there?”
Poole had returned from interviewing a poor family that was trying to make the most of its budget for food. She had stopped in at Dean’s Drug Cafe to order a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke to go and hurried back to the paper to write her story. She could barely hear the murmuring police scanner, which sat on the desk of one of the newsmen. The city editor, Glenn Olson (no relation to Cal), had been listening when the distinctive musical tones signaling an Alert Two came over the air. It was becoming apparent that a jumbo jet was in genuine distress, as the scanner picked up increasingly alarming chatter from police and fire departments. The musical tones now announced Alert Three status. Poole left her frustrating story and her sandwich and crossed the room to the scanner. She knew that jumbo jets didn’t land at Sioux City. As the skeleton staff gathered around, word came over the air that the plane might have to land on U.S. Highway 20.
Glenn Olson picked up the phone and called the new library, where John Quinlan, a reporter, and a photographer named Gary Anderson were covering a news conference about the opening of the nearly completed building. Someone at the library called Quinlan to the phone, and the city editor barked, “Get back to the newsroom.” Even as Quinlan and Anderson drove the short distance from the library to the Journal offices, Ed Porter, a photographer at the paper, was sitting in his car in front of the old Carnegie library, listening to his police scanner. Mark Fageol, the chief photographer, also heard the announcement that the plane might land on a road. Porter put his car in gear and headed straight for the airport, while Fageol headed out of town on Highway 20.
As Poole and the staff listened to radio chatter, Cal Olson stepped out of his office and said to the newsroom in general, “Get your stuff and get out to the airport. I don’t care what you’re doing, just drop it.”
Even though Mark Reinders was a copy editor, he left for the airport. “I had no idea what I was going to be doing.” But he knew that Marcia had sent an intern, Shari Zenor, a girl of barely college age, to the fire department to write a feature story for the Living section on a typical day in the life of a fire fighter—what Cal Olson called a popcorn piece, pure filler. Chances were that nothing at all would happen, and she would struggle to fill the space describing yawning firemen watching daytime television. The high point of the story would be a firehouse lunch. Now Reinders couldn’t imagine where the poor kid would wind up.
Poole, in a kind of daze, ran out of the newsroom and into the street, still not convinced that a DC-10 could be coming their way. Standing before the Journal building, she found herself looking at the sight that caught Greg Clapper’s attention as he led his family to the movie theater to see Peter Pan. “I could see the plane riding low to the southeast,” she said. She watched 1819 Uniform vanish behind the intervening buildings. The town seemed completely silent, as it does after a deep winter snow. She heaved a sigh of relief. They had made it in safely. Thank God, she thought.
Minutes before, Gary Anderson had rushed into the Journal building to get his telephoto lens. He was now going seventy miles an hour on Interstate 29 north of the airport, and at the same moment when Clapper and Poole saw the plane, Anderson too saw it out his window. Without taking his foot off the accelerator, he picked up the Nikon F2 and began firing off frames with the motor drive. The silhouetted shape, shark-like and huge, rose over the bluffs, ballooned above the Southern Hills Mall, and dragged in over the intervening trees. As he fired away, he kept thinking that everything would turn out all right, making a good tight local story with a happy ending.
He cranked the steering wheel over and stopped on the shoulder. He leapt out. He could see the DC-10 vanish behind a hill. As he brought the camera to his eye, “I got the fireball,” he later recounted, “then I felt sick thinking there were a lot of people dead, right at that moment, right there. How could anybody be alive?”
Bill Zahren, a young reporter, stood with fire fighters at the south end of the airport and watched 1819 Uniform come in low and fast. He lost sight of it behind a building, “and I heard this rumble like a tympani drum, and I saw the wing shoot up in the air and saw fire running off the wing like water runs off a butter knife,” he said. Zahren began running toward the terminal. When he reached the fence beside the building, he saw Dave Boxum, a cameraman from KTIV TV, Channel 4. Standing beside his tripod and camera, his hair and eyebrows were so blond that they seemed incandescent in the sun. He looked pale and shaken.
“Hey!” Zahren called, “did you get that shit?”
“Yeah, I think so,” said Boxum, and Zahren ran on. He realized that he had to get on the field. As he ran, he recalled a story he’d recently researched about someone who had built his own airplane. He had met him at Graham Aviation, where all the private planes parked. He remembered how easy it was to get on the ramp. “You just had to go through a shop door, turn left, and there you were.”
Fageol had been on his way out of town on Highway 20 when a police car, lights and siren going, passed him and pulled over to the shoulder. Fageol slammed on the brakes and pulled in behind him. He stepped out with a 200-millimeter lens on his camera and aimed up at the mammoth shape passing overhead. Clearly the plane wasn’t going to land on Highway 20. The police car turned around and headed back west toward town, and Fageol followed. He was going well over the speed limit, he recalled, when a sheriff’s police car passed him as if he’d been parked.
Poole stood before the Journal building, watching the dome of black smoke billow into the sapphire sky and begin leaning away to the south. She went inside to tell the city editor that she’d go anywhere he needed her, as every phone in the newsroom continued ringing. She picked one up and said, “Journal newsroom, Marcia Poole.” She heard a scratchy, long-distance voice say, “You’re on the air!” The call was from a radio station in Toronto. Only two reporters remained unassigned, Poole and the court reporter, Kathy Hoeschen Massey, but when word came over the scanner that some people had survived the plane crash, it became immediately obvious where they should go. From previous stories she’d done, Poole already knew people at St. Luke’s Hospital, so she went there, while Massey went to Marian Health Center.
Out on the freeway, Anderson returned to his car and barely made it past the first roadblock. When he saw a second roadblock, he drove through somebody’s front yard to reach the road to the airport. Going through the main terminal would be hopeless, so he headed to the opposite side of the field where the private planes parked at Graham Aviation.
As Bill Zahren ran toward Graham, he saw Anderson. They walked through as if they knew what they were doing. As at most small airfields in the 1980s, no one stopped them.
At the same time, Ed Porter, an ex-Marine with more than thirty years of experience, was pulling up to the Air National Guard entrance on the north side of the airfield. By chance Swanstrom had issued the All Call moments before. Porter, a month shy of his fifty-fifth birthday, was swept through the gate with everyone else who was responding. The sentries weren’t even checking IDs. A bus was waiting, and Porter boarded with the rest of the Air National Guard men and women, many of whom were not in uniform. He was the only reporter on the scene with experience photographing air crashes. He had been a Marine Corps photographer from 1954 through 1957. As he put it, “I knew what the outcome was when you stick a jet into the ground.”
When the bus stopped on the debris-strewn runway, Porter emerged with the other men and women and paused for a moment on the elevated step to look out over the scene. He saw ribbons glittering and rippling across a snowscape bedecked with human bodies “and then two or three people just kind of walking. That’s the first image I remember.”
He stepped down and took a few photographs before heading across the runway toward the tail of the aircraft, which lay on Taxiway Lima. Before he reached it, a United Airlines employee accosted him, “and he and I got into a fight, because he was trying to stop me from taking pictures. The last frame I got is his hand over the lens of my camera. He was trying to take the camera away from me.” As the two struggled amid the revolving paper and ash and smoke and money, the Sioux City chief of police, Gerald Donovan, approached with several officers.
“Get them out of here,” Donovan told his officers.
No sooner had Gary Anderson run out onto the airfield than he saw the most incongruous sight: a middle-aged man in a suit, looking as if he’d stepped out of his office. The man walked right up to Anderson and said, “Have you ever seen anything like this? I was on that plane. Is there a bar around here?” Anderson could barely speak. He pointed at the terminal building. The man walked on as if nothing had happened. He was later found drinking at the bar.
Anderson continued to take photos. More and more people came wandering out of the smoke. He turned and shot and turned and shot. “There was so much out there,” he later said, “but I couldn’t just shoot randomly. I couldn’t panic. I had to have some sense of what I was getting and how it would all go together to tell the story.” Then he caught sight of a guardsman carrying a small blond boy unconscious in his arms. Anderson let off a burst of exposures with his motor drive. The boy’s name was Spencer Bailey, son of Frances, brother of Brandon.
Moments before, a woman named Lynn Hartter, forty-four, had run onto the field in the company of several other members of the Air National Guard. “We ran out there,” she said, “a whole bunch of us. There was a civilian man kneeling by this group of seats.” The bank of seats was tipped over so that the people who were strapped in were face-down on the concrete. “We went over there, and you could hear a noise. And then we realized that it was a child.” Two of the guardsmen reacted instinctively and “pulled the seats back. I mean it was just sheer adrenaline, they couldn’t have done that the next day.” Hartter squirmed up under the seats as the two men held them back. The civilian man pulled out a knife, reached up under the seats, and cut the seat belt, and three-year-old Spencer Bailey fell face-down into her arms. “And then I wiggled out and stood up and got the kid turned over.” Then she was running for an ambulance, dodging debris and bodies.
As the supervisor of flying for the Air National Guard that day, Colonel Dennis Nielsen had witnessed the crash from a distance of less than 200 yards. Now he was astonished to see any survivors at all, let alone this little boy who had been ejected from the plane, with his mother and brother, in a detached bank of seats. “Lynn Hartter was carrying him,” said Nielsen, “and there was a lot of debris on the ground. It was difficult to walk. Spencer was not a small child, and Lynn Hartter was in her mid to late forties, tiny gal. I knew Lynn, and she was stumbling through the wreckage, and she wasn’t going to make it with this child to wherever she was going, and she just yelled, ‘Colonel Nielsen, Colonel Nielsen, help me!’ And the child fell into my arms. I walked about a hundred feet or so and put Spencer into an ambulance.” During those few moments, while Nielsen relayed Spencer from Lynn’s arms to the ambulance, Gary Anderson spun and snapped off several frames with his telephoto lens.
Lieutenant Jim Walker was searching for bodies with a group of Guard men and women at the edge of the corn and happened to turn and see Nielsen carrying Spencer. “I was within twenty yards of him when he walked out of the cornfield, and I remember thinking, Man that would make a great picture. And then I was just stunned when I saw that on the front page of the newspaper.” That photograph was published around the world and became the model for a life-size bronze statue that commemorates the crash on the river walk in downtown Sioux City.*
Anderson was barely getting started constructing his story. He had shot perhaps two dozen frames when the police came down the runway with Ed Porter. The two photographers saw each other at last.
“I think I’ve got something!” Anderson called.
“That was good enough for me,” Porter said later. His main concern was getting off the field with their film and cameras intact, “because Gary [Anderson] was hot. He was mad. I was trying to keep everything calm and collected until we could get out of there.”
Anderson said, “I was just hoping I had something in focus.” He drove back to the newsroom, marveling at the fact that he had started his day with a stultifying news conference at the library and then had been launched into “the biggest story I’ve ever covered in a matter of minutes.” And it was over almost before it began.
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, Mark Reinders, carrying no more equipment than a notebook, found himself stymied by the dozens of vehicles blocking the main gate to the airfield. He took back roads, which he knew well, and parked near the north end of the airport. “I assume the statute of limitations has run out,” Reinders admitted to me a bit sheepishly. “But I literally climbed the fence.” Coming from the north, Reinders first reached an area that a number of the passengers later called the Grassy Knoll. The rise in the land where no corn grew made a home for a few gnarled and aging scrub trees, some weeds and grasses, a boulder, and the running killdeer and creaking red-winged blackbirds. A gravel road curved into the distance. A vast cornfield separated the knoll from the wreckage, but many of the passengers, running through the corn, were led there by the arrangement of the rows. As Reinders approached, he saw a few people sitting on and near the boulder and called out, “Hey, what are you guys up to? Are you with the airport?”
“No,” one of them said. “We were in that plane that crashed.”
Reinders was “speechless and dumbfounded.” An FAA technician had already discovered the passengers and radioed for help. Soon Air National Guard men and women escorted the survivors to triage. The rescue workers wanted to take Reinders to triage too, but he told them that he was not a survivor, he was a reporter. They told him to go away, “and there was no way I was going away.”
Fortunately, the Guard members had their hands full, and Reinders slipped into the cornfield. He bashed his way through the stalks as survivors hurried past in the other direction. The heat was steaming him inside his clothing as he slogged through the rows, while a helicopter thundered overhead. He ducked down to avoid being seen. After the helicopter passed, he pushed on toward the wreckage. “And your adrenaline is just pounding the whole time,” he recalled.
Emerging from the rows of corn, he concealed himself in the spaces among the emergency vehicles, which were parked haphazardly in every direction. From that vantage, he said, “I just took it all in.” By then the police had rounded up all the other reporters and photographers and ejected them from the scene. Reinders was the only official witness left. All except for Shari Zenor, the young intern, who was concealed within Orville Thiele’s fire department SUV. Although she had a box seat for the biggest show ever to hit Siouxland, the fire fighters had told her to stay in the vehicle, and she obeyed them. Marcia Poole later wrote, “It’s doubtful, however, that any of the experienced reporters or photographers would have obeyed orders to stay in the fire department vehicle. The extreme circumstances would have compelled them to get out of the truck and go to work.”
Zenor, however, was in shock, and she remained in shock throughout the afternoon, trapped in the vehicle, taking desultory notes as the scanner emitted bursts of static and frenzied voices. People were trapped in the fuselage as Larry Niehus, Jerry Logemann, and the other fire fighters tried to put out the fire with foam. Zenor could taste the oily smoke and hear the sirens and helicopters and the roar of the angry fire. She took in the dead bodies in their seats, even as survivors streamed out of the murk toward her. One of those survivors, a man wearing a blue Oxford shirt and a tie, came to her window and asked for water. Zenor opened the door and stepped out of the car to point the man in the direction of the triage area. For many years, Zenor would see that man’s face in her dreams.
Thiele had his driver move the vehicle several times in the first hour after the crash. By that time, the injured were gone. Thiele asked Zenor if she wanted to get out and look around. She stepped down into the wintry scene and tried on the unfamiliar cloak of the reporter. “I saw bodies and body parts,” she later wrote. “We had to drive around and through them. Most hadn’t been covered. Some of them were still in their seats. I can shut my eyes and see those people.”
Mark Reinders was in shock as well. When I asked him to tell me what he saw out there, all the air went out of him in a loud rushing hiss. He was rendered speechless for a moment, as the memories rushed back in. He described it as “similar to a tornado, where you just see so many personal items, purses and books and clothing and blankets and everything else just strewn out over the runway—wallets, napkins, necklaces, credit cards, and things like that, just—forever. And the wind was blowing and a lot of that stuff was blowing across the runway in the grassy areas.” He surveyed the scene, scrawling in his notebook, “Two sets of golf clubs, a wallet photo insert depicting a pretty brunette in her prom dress, a Reebok tennis shoe, a purple hairdryer, pages and pages ripped from magazines, a dozen pieces of luggage, a signed graduation card, one woman’s black high heeled shoe and a collection of Marilyn Monroe photos.”
While he crept among the emergency vehicles, catching glimpses of the scene from his concealment, Reinders was struck by the endless computer tape that draped the site, as if it were a festive bunting for this unclean event. In the dim and smoky atmosphere, “it was like tinsel at Christmas with people dead in their seats,” he later said. Pat McCann, a young police officer who was on the field, said it made him think of some sort of diabolical parade.
Reinders wrote in his notebook that the heat of the fire had withered the cornstalks and seared off their tops in a vast swath to the south of the main wreckage. He mentioned the strong smell of kerosene. He noted that even when the bodies were covered, it was obvious that some had been torn apart. The advantage the reporter has over the photographer is that his equipment is in his head. He need only open his eyes and see. And by now Reinders had seen it all. Moreover, all the survivors had been taken away by then. So he took in the blackness where a wall of flame had passed over the runway and the grass. He let the overwhelming heat and toxic smells of burning jet fuel and plastic and of the people who had not made it out of the fuselage seep into him and find a permanent place there, and he filed those things away where he could retrieve them later on.
When the time came at last, as Reinders knew it would, the police escorted him off the field. He returned to the newsroom and found “a chaotic mess” because everyone was trying to make the deadline for the next day’s paper. Reinders wasn’t even sure that he had anything to contribute because he hadn’t really interviewed anyone in an official capacity. But Reinders had something more valuable than mere facts or quotes. He had a human view of the scene, and Cal Olson recognized that and told him to write it. “And that is what I did.” Reinders served the role of official witness to a great historic event.
Everyone at the Journal scrambled to develop film and print photos. They pounded out copy and even managed to answer the ringing phones and make room in their darkroom for photographers from other news organizations. The bulldog edition of the paper went to bed at ten that night. Then Mark Fageol transmitted photos electronically to various news organizations for a few hours. He packed up a couple of hundred prints and set out for the airport in Omaha at about two in the morning. Some news organizations, such as Time and Newsweek, required prints for the higher-quality images they offered. It fell to Fageol to get them to the Associated Press in New York as fast as possible so that organization could distribute them to the magazines and other outlets. He reached the airport in Omaha at about three o’clock. At first the only plane he could find bound for New York was a United flight. He hesitated. Fageol understood that if he shipped a box of photos from the Sioux City Journal to the Associated Press, it might never arrive. “It would be one of those lost luggage things,” he said with a laugh. He found another flight later that morning, made sure the package was on board, and began the return trip home. “By the time I got halfway to Sioux City, it’s sunrise.”
Even before Fageol began his drive to Omaha, many of the reporters had gone to Miles Inn, the local hangout for journalists, and ordered drinks. The team from KTIV, the local television station that had been co-founded by the Journal, was in attendance as well. The pub was small and crowded. As the Journal staffers drank and watched the coverage on television, the footage of the crash came flaming across the screen above the bar in horrifying color. Dave Boxum from KTIV had stood right behind Gary Brown, with the airport fence between them, and had caught the fiery breakup.*
“And it was kind of unfortunate,” Reinders said of that night, “because . . . [the KTIV team] kind of cheered. They were proud of what they had caught on camera. But there were some other people in the tavern who found that offensive. There wasn’t a big row, but it was kind of like, You heartless bastards, people died in that plane crash.” Yet it was understandable that they wanted to acknowledge their achievement. They had caught on video what was never caught on video at that time: the crash of an airliner full of people.
In fact, all of the reporters at Miles Inn that night had helped to document a unique event in history. As Reinders said of the ensuing days and weeks of round-the-clock work, “It was fun. It was invigorating. Long, long hours, because it was taking so much space and time, and nobody cared. Because that’s what we do in the newspaper world. I remember being very proud of the next day’s coverage. We were heartbroken for all the people that lost their lives and proud of the people that were on the scene and helped out, but we did our role as well, and to me there’s nothing wrong with that.” In the aftermath, Reinders worried that he might really be a heartless bastard. But when Cal Olson sent him to cover the one-year anniversary of the crash, he said, “I cried like a baby.”
Just before the crash, a volunteer with WCDES, a local businessman named Dave Kaplan, was flying one of his company’s airplanes inbound to Sioux City. “I was actually airborne at the time and witnessed the smoke plume from far away,” Kaplan recalled. Since the airport was closed right after the crash, he landed at another field and caught a ride back to Sioux City. “I reported to Gary [Brown] when I got there and he sent me to a pile of wreckage to check it out.” As he approached the pile, he saw fire fighters standing around examining passengers and asked, concerning the unrecognizable pile of debris, “What’s this?”
A voice came out of the pile: “It’s the cockpit. There’s four of us in here.”
Years later, Kaplan recalled, “It scared the be-Jesus out of me when I heard voices calling for help out of that pile.”
Jim Allen, a lieutenant with Engine 5 of the Sioux City Fire Department, and two of his fire fighters gathered around with Kaplan and started talking with the eerie voices emanating from within the tangled mess. Allen, wearing a neat mustache and cleanly trimmed brown hair flecked with gray, gave a sad smile as he ruminated on the difficulties his crew faced that day. The flight crew, he said, was “trapped in this wreckage that to the naked eye did not resemble a cockpit area whatsoever.” They were used to people being trapped in cars or trucks, which presented known “points of access,” as he put it. “There was nothing to go by. We winged it.” It seemed to be nothing but a giant ball of wire. Indeed, the amount of wire in a DC-10 could stretch from Sioux City to Omaha and beyond, and it all came together in the cockpit, the location from which the plane was supposed to be controlled. As the plane rotated up onto its nose and as the cockpit was sheared away from the first class cabin, those wires were pulled from the walls and floor of the aircraft and were left trailing. Then as the cockpit tumbled down the runway at better than a hundred miles an hour, it wrapped itself in those wires.
Allen and his crew used hacksaws to cut the wire. Once the fire fighters had unwrapped the cockpit from its shroud, they were able to reach in through the broken windows and cut the pilots’ seat belts. Chaplain Clapper knelt beside the wreckage, his hand thrust inside to touch Bill Records’s head. A paramedic reached through a broken window to give Records oxygen. “I was on the bottom of the pile, and it kind of revived me,” Records said. The rescue workers tried to lift the wreckage but it wouldn’t budge. Allen radioed to one of the WCDES vehicles that carried AMKUS tools, powerful hydraulic clippers used for cutting the tops off of wrecked cars. But when they tried to use those cutters on Records’s side of the pile, it began squeezing Haynes, and he screamed in pain. When they tried it on Haynes’s side, Records called out.
“We stopped that immediately,” said Allen, “and I called for a forklift.” He thought that if they could lift the structure straight up with no side loads on it, they might succeed.
At about that time, one of the Air National Guard pilots saw Bendixen across the 150-foot-wide runway and asked for his help. Bendixen marched across the runway and began to look for ways to give assistance. He peered inside and saw living, breathing men.
“I was face-to-face with this flight surgeon,” Dvorak recalled. “He was peeking into the crack and talking to me.”
The Air National Guard sent Allen both a crane and a large forklift. As Bendixen inspected the wreckage to see where each person was located and to assess his condition, Allen chose the forklift. He had the operator put the forks above the cockpit. “We strung a chain around the forks and down throughout various trusses of the wreckage,” said Allen. One man was assigned to each pilot to watch him and to alert the operator to stop lifting if the movement was crushing anyone. Then Allen ordered the forklift operator to lift the wreckage six inches. A guardsman stood on the forks looking down to ensure that the pile of debris came straight up. The pile rose a few inches off the ground. Bendixen and Allen checked with each monitor. It appeared that no one inside was being injured, so Allen gave the order to resume lifting, and Fitch came out, as Allen put it, “almost immediately, almost under his own power.”
“We didn’t hear any noise from him anymore,” Dvorak said.
“I felt a hand just tap me on the chest,” Fitch recalled.
The hand belonged to a guardsman named Brian Bauerly, who said, “Don’t worry, buddy, I’ve got ya. You’re gonna be fine, we got ya.”
While the forklift was adjusting and readjusting, the wreckage separated somewhat, and “I decided that I could crawl out of there,” Dvorak said. He was the second person to be freed. As he squirmed out, Susan White was making her way across the field in a glow of adrenaline. He said, “I crawled out, they put me on a stretcher and hauled me over to triage.” He blew a mass of blood and snot out of his nose as White appeared. Dvorak believed that she was “grossed out by that,” as he later said, but after being told that the cockpit had disintegrated and that no one had survived, she was overjoyed to see him alive. She wiped his face and gave him water.
Al Haynes was the most difficult to rescue. Somehow in the tumbling of the cockpit, his head had been trapped by the yoke. His leg had been thrown up and over the control column as well. “We had to cut the yoke,” Allen said. After Bendixen crawled inside and pushed Haynes through the small opening onto a backboard, he turned to Records, who was trapped in his collapsed seat.
An ambulance from the Cushing, Iowa, fire department was moving along Interstate 29 by then, not making much progress. The paramedics had encountered a wall of parked cars with people standing on their hoods and roofs, trying to see the wrecked plane. The crew had to drive on the grass to get around the roadblock. Nevertheless, the ambulance arrived in time to transport Records. As the paramedics prepared to leave, one of the rescue workers leaned inside the open door and asked how many people had been in the cockpit. Records held up four fingers, and then Allen, Kaplan, and Bendixen knew that everyone was out. Records suffered some of the worst injuries of any member of the flight crew. As he later said, “I was pretty much out of commission for almost a month there. I was in critical condition for about the first week. Then they moved me down a floor to Intensive Care for another week. It was several weeks before I was even able to talk to the investigating team. I was unable to talk because my ribs were broken and I was full of fluid, and [I was] trying to keep from coughing.”
Haynes and Dvorak shared an ambulance. As it pulled away, John Transue stood by in his undershirt with an ice pack on his head and his crushed briefcase under his arm. Inside the ambulance, as it jolted across the debris and the uneven ground, Al Haynes winced in pain at every bump. He groaned and said to Dvorak, “Tell the driver to go back. I think he missed a pothole.”
At the same time, Jim Walker and his fellow A-7 pilots, who had been moving wounded people to triage, formed lines and began walking through the corn to make sure they hadn’t missed anyone in the confusing scene. Walker had begun to notice, “a large amount of cash blowing around, piles of it. Even days later you could find small drifts of various denominations against a fence or wherever the wind left it.” As soon as the plane crashed, people all over the field had begun to notice that thousands of hundred-dollar bills were swirling around within the snowstorm of paper and were drifting in piles, as the wind picked up through the long afternoon. The plane had been carrying an exceptionally large amount of U.S. currency. No one knew why. (The large number of pineapples was easier to understand, as many passengers coming from Hawaii were carrying them as gifts.)
Gary Brown said, “There was enough cash turned over to me that I could have paid off my house. I had one of our big Ford rescue trucks out there, and people were bringing me handfuls of hundred-dollar bills.” He was seated in the truck, using it as a temporary command post. He reached over and rolled up the window on the passenger side and locked the door. As people brought him the money, he threw it on the floor. He filled the passenger side of the truck with the bills.
Dave Kaplan, one of Gary Brown’s volunteers, said, “I filled a body bag with crisp hundred-dollar bills. People were just walking up to me and handing them to me. I can’t begin to image how much money I handled in those two to three days on the field. Later someone from NTSB mentioned to us they were amazed that we turned that money in. The thought of keeping it didn’t cross our minds.” When I asked Gary if he knew where the money came from, he laughed. “We think we do. Nobody will admit to it. There was a lot of money on that aircraft. There’s a reason that nobody wants to talk about it from an official agency, because they don’t want people to know that large amounts of cash are being transferred on commercial airlines.” I asked him where it went. “The FBI took it,” he said. United Airlines issued a denial that the money had ever existed.
After Haynes and his crew were taken away, Bendixen crossed the runway once more. He returned to check the victims who had been left where they were because he or a medic had determined that they were too seriously injured to save. He found three or four people who had been thrown clear of the wreckage and now lay in the corn, still breathing. “We put ’em on a backboard, carried ’em out of the corn to the nearest ambulance, and let the ambulance go from there.”
Bendixen’s best friend Bill Shattuck lived in town, and he went to stay with him and his wife Marie that night. Bendixen was at the Sioux City airport for six days straight “with just my underwear and my flight suit. And every night, Marie would take my flight suit and my underwear and put it in the laundry and give it back to me the next morning, and away I’d go.” He said that to this day, he marvels at the fact that he was on the scene. “There was just no logical reason why I should have been there that day. I had been flying for two years before that, and they never scheduled me in the afternoon.”
* Colonel Nielsen visited Spencer Bailey in the hospital and was met by reporters as he left. One reporter shouted, “How did you save the child?” Nielsen responded, “God saved the child—I just carried him!” Those words are inscribed on a plaque near the statue.
* Go to laurencegonzales.com to watch the video.