CHAPTER 40
FREDDY LOVED HIS NEW PLANE, WHICH HAD A BRIGHT RED FUSELAGE with Cadillac blue wings. To test it out and show it off, he flew to California to see Kitty, who had spent the winter with Mary Perkins at her family’s horse farm and was now back at Arequipa, where her friend Harriet McLaughlin was visiting.
Once his sister got a look at his shiny new toy, Freddy turned around and flew the plane back to Kansas City, and then on to New York, bringing along a college chum and fellow flyer, William Read Jr.—yet another rich kid torn between his family business and his love of aviation. His father owned the prominent New York investment banking firm that became the legendary Dillon, Read & Company, which William had fled after the stock market crash. He was now running the trust department at Central Hanover Bank, and trying to find a way to make flying his career.
Freddy met Betty’s boat when it arrived early on Thursday morning, April 16, 1936; she came off the S.S. Manhattan smiling broadly for the cameras that often greeted prominent overseas passengers, wearing her new mink stole and one of her smart new hats, clutching her fuzzy little puppy to her chest. She and Freddy stayed over in New York—long enough to do some shopping and register the puppy at the Tail Waggers Club—and on Saturday, he spent the afternoon at the Racquet Club with William Read and a bunch of their old college friends. They drank and recounted stories of Freddy’s youthful exploits.
The next morning, the Harveys took off in the Staggerwing from New York. The sky was clear, with temperatures in the forties, but as Freddy piloted the plane across northern Pennsylvania and approached the Allegheny Mountains, he ran into icing conditions and decided to land for lunch. He put down at the Duncansville Airport, which served the old railroad town of Altoona—home of the Logan House, the nation’s first great trackside restaurant in the years before Fred Harvey. The chic couple with the snazzy plane and the adorable dog enchanted the staff at the small airport.
Freddy called the TWA control tower at Pittsburgh airport, on the other side of the Alleghenies, to ask about the weather ahead. It was one of the perks of being a board member. He was told that the skies were treacherous: dense fog and icing conditions up to seven thousand feet. The TWA staff at Pittsburgh airport strongly recommended that he wait before trying to fly over the mountains.
This wasn’t just because the weather was terrible and he was their boss. The tower staff was being hypervigilant in the aftermath of one of the worst commercial plane crashes in the nation’s history, which had taken place—on their watch—just twelve days earlier. In fact, federal air safety officials were still in nearby Uniontown, Pennsylvania, sifting through the wreckage of the Douglas DC-2 in which twelve passengers on a flight from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh had lost their lives. The U.S. Senate had been screaming for an investigation of air safety for some time, ever since one of their colleagues, New Mexico Senator Bronson Cutting, had been killed in a private plane in May 1935—followed just three months later by the death of Will Rogers, who crashed in Barrow, Alaska. Then seventeen people died in a commercial airliner accident in Goodwin, Arkansas, that some investigators believed was caused by a suicidal passenger who shot the pilots. And now there was the Uniontown crash, which was front-page news every day in Pennsylvania.
But Freddy was impatient to get home, so he asked for other options. He was told that if he absolutely insisted on flying, then he could try backtracking northeast and take the long way through the Newark-to-Cleveland airway. Or he could try taking off and rocketing pretty much straight up in the air until he got above the clouds. That’s what the larger commercial planes in the area were doing, but they had deicers and vacuum-driven instruments, equipment that was not available even on the poshest of private planes.
Hearing the same advice from the Pittsburgh tower, another pilot who was waiting along with the Harveys elected to stay on the ground until conditions cleared. But Freddy believed his new Staggerwing was up to the challenge.
“It looks bad,” he told one of the grounds crew, “but I’ll try it.”
Freddy had stopped wearing parachutes when he flew, but when Betty heard about the weather warnings, she put one on. They took off at 2:00 p.m. into what appeared to be an open spot in the clouds above the Duncansville Airport. The red and blue single-engine plane, with “NC281Y” painted in white beneath the wings, climbed three thousand feet and disappeared into the gray cloud bank.
According to expert analysis and reconstruction done at the time—and recent interviews with contemporary pilots with Staggerwing experience—the four wings of Freddy’s plane began to ice very quickly. He kept pushing the plane to ascend but was unable to find the top of the clouds, where the visibility would be better and the icing would stop—since moisture doesn’t freeze onto the plane in colder air at higher altitudes.
In the meantime, Freddy’s instruments were becoming sluggish and unresponsive. And because of the low visibility in the cloud bank, he had to rely on gyroscopic gauges to know which direction he was going—even to determine if the plane was still right side up. But the gyroscopes were powered by air pressure from a “venturi”—an hourglass-shaped metal tube mounted on the outside of the plane—and it was clogging with ice. So the gauges couldn’t be trusted.
After ten minutes airborne, Freddy was only twenty miles from the airport but already ten miles off course, lost in the middle of a mountain range. He tried to circle back down—or what seemed like down—to find an opening for an emergency landing. But as he circled, the ice on the wings kept getting heavier, increasing the drag on the plane’s 420-horsepower engine.
There is a moment in a troubled flight when the plane is no longer really flying on the air but falling down through it. There’s nothing the pilot can do to maintain altitude, and almost anything he tries will cause the plane to drop faster and faster, until it starts breaking up.
The Harveys hadn’t been in the air more than fifteen minutes when the plane’s instruments started failing and its shiny blue wings began cracking and shattering. Freddy knew exactly what was happening, but was powerless to do anything to stop it. He was still pulling on the controls, and Betty clutching her puppy, when the plane hit a span of electrical wires, sparking chaotically. Seconds later, they smashed into the side of a mountain. The fuel tank, which had just been refilled, exploded on impact, sending rivulets of burning gasoline streaming down the mountainside.
The crash site was just outside the coal town of Dunlo, Pennsylvania, and as miners from the nearby Henrietta Shaft came running to the scene, they passed pieces of clothing strewn on the ground—a woman’s black evening dress, a tuxedo jacket—before reaching what was left of the plane’s cabin. It was burning so intensely that they couldn’t get close. One miner dashed to a nearby stream, filled his hard hat with water, and ran back to try to douse the flames. He and his co-workers kept this up until local farmers arrived with buckets and formed a brigade, concentrating their efforts on the area where two bodies appeared to be lying facedown on the ground, still strapped into what was left of their leather seats.
After an hour of fighting the fire, and still no sign of a rescue squad, the miners and farmers were able to approach the bodies and turn them over. The seats had provided some protection for their torsos, as had Betty’s unopened parachute. So, her arms were intact and still cradling her lifeless dog; her wristwatch still clearly read 2:18, and the pink nail polish on her right hand wasn’t even chipped. But her skull had been smashed and burned to ash, as had her feet. Freddy’s legs were incinerated at the knees. All that was left of his head was a charred skull.
The front-page stories in all the nation’s major newspapers the next morning did their best to be somewhat tasteful about the disturbing condition of the bodies. But the local Johnstown Democrat showed no such tact.
“Plane Crash Nightmare,” the banner headline read. “Kansas City Rail Leader and Wife Burned to Crisp.”
AT THE FAMILY’S REQUEST, there were no eulogies at the funeral in the jam-packed St. James Catholic Church in Kansas City. There was no sermon, no hymns. Just two identical caskets, blanketed with white lilies. There was Mass and absolution for the deceased, and a single reading from the book of John, chapter eleven, concerning the death of Lazarus and the mourning of his sisters.
“Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,’” Monsignor Keyes read to the standing-room crowd. “‘But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.’
“Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’”
In keeping with the Harvey family tradition, Freddy’s casket was carried by his closest colleagues within the company. Betty’s was carried by their closest friends, including William Read, who was the last to see them alive. “One Sweetly Solemn Thought” played on the church organ as the sixteen pallbearers brought the caskets to twin hearses. Church bells rang “Abide with Me” as hundreds of car doors closed to begin the long procession to Mount Washington Cemetery.
Like his father before him, Freddy Harvey was eulogized only in the newspapers. Perhaps the most touching piece came from Howard Vincent O’Brien, who wrote the popular “All Things Considered” column in the Chicago Daily News. O’Brien received a postcard from a friend visiting the Grand Canyon only days after the plane crash, which immediately caused him to flash back to
my epochal ride on muleback down Bright Angel Trail, with Fred Harvey leading. Alas that such a fine gentleman, such a blade of Damascus as he was, should be no more; though his end was as he would have willed it—one swift flight out of the skies, and oblivion.
Among the memories I shall always treasure is that of an hour of twilight I spent with him on the tower of a Hopi khiva, overlooking the sun-reddened walls of the canyon. We talked of many things, but mostly of religion, and I had a glimpse into a truly clean heart.
I shall never forget it.
It was Kitty, of course, who took Freddy’s death the hardest. They had become closer than ever after their father died, handling his estate and sharing big dreams for the company’s future. Freddy was finally turning into the businessman she had always hoped he would be, but without losing the carefree spirit and courage of that young man in the photo she kept on her nightstand, her little brother dangling from the edge of the Divine Abyss.
Kitty’s closest friends, Mary Perkins and Harriet McLaughlin, had accompanied her on the train from California and stayed with her in Kansas City for several weeks after the funeral. But they couldn’t assuage the existential shock of being the last one left alive in her immediate family. Even worse, the moment that her brother died, Kitty was thrust into the middle of a legal nightmare.