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SHORT STORY BY RICHARD E. SCHIFF The Tower ©2006, 2009 |
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The Tower A story by Richard E. SchiffCopyright 2006, 2009 All rights reserved. What was the world like in the middle of the 20th century? Was it slower paced or perhaps just more hands-on than today’s technologically detached lifestyles? November 9, 1956 The rain lashed the windshield of the Cessna 195 as it flew closer to its target of LaGuardia Airport in New York on its way from Indianapolis. The cockpit walls were covered with the streaked rain from the windshield projected from the fog lights. Bill Tombley was an experienced pilot. Eleven years before he was training all his talents on a bombing run over Dresden, Germany. Now all he could do was to get this baby across the Hudson River and northward to a strip of safe, if wet, terra firma in New York. The Cessna was built to carry a pilot, co-pilot when required and five passengers in austere comfort. Like all small passenger craft the Cessna was well appointed for a special clientele; rich people. Only one passenger, a very rich Russell S. Longless Sr., 60, of Indianapolis, a millionaire oil company executive, slept with his right hand under his chin, undisturbed by the mild rocking of the plane in the strong headwinds the plane challenged. Perhaps Russ was thinking about meeting his son who was just flying in from Europe to meet him after years apart. Up in the cockpit pilot William Tombley was white knuckled on the stick, pressing his eyes as close to the windshield as possible. "Visibility is terrible," he said to himself. The weather outside made every thing dangerous. It was still daylight but the fog was like what they used to call "pea soup" back in the war. "I should be able to make out the Empire State building soon," Tombley said out loud enough to wake Williams in the seat behind him, from his deep sleep. "Almost there Billy?" Russell was stretching to wake from his nap. "I think I see the Empire State Building in the distance over there…"
The last thing pilot William Tombley of Indiana tried to do, jerking himself back into the pilot’s chair, was make a crash landing a few blocks away in the Hudson County Park but he never made it and instead he and his passenger were killed as they crashed into the top two floors of a 5 story apartment building just ahead. One of the two engines tore loose from the mangled fuselage and dropped like a cannon ball straight down through the roof of a house below. The $1,000,000 tower, which has not been in use for three years, stood as high as an 80 story building. Soaring from a high bluff, it reached a height greater than the Empire State Building. At precisely 12:50 pm on Thursday November 9, 1956 Mrs. Harriet Stein, 65 was preparing dinner for her husband who would be home by 4:30, in her fifth floor apartment she’d occupied since she and Terrance were married 40 years before. Mrs. Estelle Porter, her next door neighbor, had lost her husband a year ago and she often joined Harriet and Terry. Harriet thought she should invite Estelle for dinner tonight and was walking to the phone when… Without warning, a fireball and explosion filled Harriet’s eyes and ears as the wall separating her apartment from Estelle’s seemed to vaporize and what emerged was a force of hot air. The fiery muzzle of a burning airplane scourged forward after vaporizing Estelle and her world. Harriet raced toward the wall, jerked open the window and threw herself out, where she dangled by her fingernails till the burning sill singed her fingers, which lost their desperate grip, plunging her to her death 5 stories below in the concrete backyard of her brick apartment house. Part 2 My brother Walter was an active member of a local Civil Defense chapter due to his fascination with and mastery of mobile two way communications technology coupled with his amazing radio building skills. This rainy and cold November afternoon, a month following my 9th birthday, and the day before Walter’s 18th we were in his 49 Ford Fairlane on a granite mountain the locals called Snake Hill. It had that awful name for the hospital prison for the criminally insane that stood on its crest. This crest was a massive outcrop of ice age formed granite that spiked the back end of the Great Palisades walls of the Hudson River as it runs around Manhattan to the Ocean. Snake Hill was Walt’s and my outpost that night. We had just installed a Gonset in the car, known affectionately as a Goony Box! A Gonset had a large green electrical eye in the middle and the green eye showed the sound of your mike voice by pulsating. We could push to talk, release and listen. Before the World Trade Center Towers were thought of, New York had an old neighborhood where they eventually stood. The Twin Towers rose on what had been old Van Cortland Street that housed stores operated by shrewd dealers who sold used and surplus electrical parts and electronic instruments. Anyone born after the Trade Center was erected did not experience New York like we did. Van Cortland Street, even its name, was a holdover from a cultural reality that gripped lower Manhattan for most of its history, the legacy of its Dutch ancestry. Young people in New York and New Jersey schools were imbued with Dutch history from the old days, when Hendrik Hudson first sailed down the Hudson and discovered Manhattan on September 11, 1609, having set sail from The Netherlands. He named the River after himself and took possession of the Native American’s land for Holland. The Dutch kept it a long time. We all learned of that famous Dutch colonial Governor of New Amsterdam, as it was called, Pieter Stuyvesant, the one legged veteran. He had served in the West Indies and served as governor of the colony at Curacao, lost one of his legs during an unsuccessful attack against the Portuguese island, St. Martin. Returning to Holland in 1644, Stuyvesant was appointed Director - General of New Netherlands; taking his oath of office at 42 years of age on 28 July, 1646, arriving New Amsterdam on May 11, 1647. Van Cortland Street ran perpendicular to Broadway and both sides of the two-way Street featured large brick buildings with storefronts at the street level, though not actually at street level; the whole street had stairs at street level that rose to the front doors of the storefronts. It was like few other streets, none other duplicated it. There the merchants showed their wares in cardboard boxes stacked on the steps. Everything electronic was sold there. My brother Walter was an electronic genius. He was among the first to miniaturize electronics that made space exploration possible when he worked for Bendix Aviation in Eatontown after marrying. His Van Cortland Street Gonset was installed and we were on the road. We were taken off guard by a voice over the "goony box"- the green eye flickered with each syllable, and "Plane hit the North Bergen TV Tower, plane down all points alert. 4 Fatalities. All emergency responders. Tower unstable. Calling all responders." "Holy cow," I said. "Let’s go," Walter said as he stamped his left foot down on the clutch and slammed the stick on the wheel into reverse. That Ford had belonged to my Grandmother who always prided herself on being one of the first women licensed to drive a car in New Jersey. It was all souped up now by my brother and his friends. It was a pleasure to be in. We got onto Route 3 and rolled onto Hudson Boulevard at 30th street in no time flat. In those days there were half as many people as now and roads were never crowded especially on a cold rainy November night. The rain was strong and the wind pushing it at gusts of up to 30 miles per hour. The headlights of our Ford made the puddles sparkle as our tires splashed through them. The streets of North Bergen and Union City were
rainswept and empty. Walter and I both craned up necks and bent to look up to see the tower as well. He found a parking place; we got out waved to a few cops, "We have a mobile Gonset, officers." Walter said respectfully. One of the taller cops responded, "We heard you CD guys were coming to help. Welcome and thank you. Go inside the firehouse here and get some coffee for you and the little guy," he said, pointing at my short statured person. "Better lay off the coffee," the other cop said, "It seems to have stunted your growth!" And they all had a good chuckle at my expense. With that we went into the firehouse. The scene inside was different. It was dry, for one thing. There were at least 100 men and women milling around and many were police and fire fighters, like outside, but mixed in was a different kind of uniform. "Who are those people, Walt?" I asked, tugging on his sleeve. "Salvation Army, Rich, they are always the first charitable organization on the scene. See? They are bringing the men coffee and food, and they never charge for it!" We had both heard our relatives who were veterans of WWII say the Salvation Army never charge and the Red Cross always charged. This was my first real experience with that. To really appreciate this scene, you must realize that the men, the reporters. , delivery guys and detectives on the scene all wore fedora hats and ties, jackets and overcoats. The women all had Lucille Ball type hairdos, or they wore it like Lana Turner or like Thelma Ritter, depending. This was 1956 in full throttle; Elvis released his version of Big Mama Thornton’s "Hound Dog". Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino also headed the song charts. The radio was on. "Look, there’s Louise Fiezer, who owns the luncheonette on the boulevard," I pointed to the slightly hard boiled looking bleach blond over on the sidelines talking to the Fire Chief. "She’s a friend of Mom’s isn’t she?" Walter asked me. "Yeah, Mrs. Fiezer has been over having coffee with Mom in the afternoon sometimes." I answered. We had surveyed the inside of the fire house and decided we might be of more use outside, so we made our way back to the side door we had come in, to where the Ford was parked. We passed a woman carrying a tray of freshly made ham & cheese sandwiches that we must have spied hungrily. "Do you boys want a sandwich?" she asked us brightly. She was a really pretty redhead with short bouncy hair and bangs. I thought she was a dead ringer for my movie heartthrob, June Allison. "I’m starving!" I said, and took the hefty sandwich she was offering. "Thanks," my brother said and took the one she handed him. Turning to me he said, "What do you say we eat these in the car?" "Good idea." I piped back and with our sandwiches in hand we left the command center behind and found ourselves in a suddenly chilling and rainy wind. The scene had changed considerably in the short time we had been inside. The wind had picked up. When I looked up at the tower I saw an amazing sight; there was a fireman, a volunteer, climbing the ladder on the side of this enormous and unforgiving steel structure. This monster tower was no longer secure on its massive legs and if it fell it would lay waste to an long line of single family homes, and 2500 residents were at that very moment being evacuated from their homes, since many expected the tower to fall and few tried to go back even the next day for belongings. The plane struck the tower and went into a death spin leaving its large aluminum wing in the tower’s superstructure approximately 50 feet from the top. The climber was towing a large cable that had been wrapped around him and secured to a brace on his waist. It looked like a very heavy steel cable and the man struggled in the wind and rain to gain a step at a time in his mission to get to the broken section that took the initial impact of the plane’s crash. The area surrounding the tower, from Bergenline Avenue to Broadway and from 71st to 75th Streets, was a virtual ghost town.
The first guy up, meanwhile, was climbing
hand-over-hand up the outside part of the tower while a 70-mile an
hour wind buffeted the shaky steel structure. Steel cables had been attached about midway up that ran down to the ground at each of the four corners of the massive foundation that were taken up by lines of male volunteers who wore gloves and grabbed onto the cable and lifted it and walked backwards till the cable was taut. This was synchronized at all four corners and this scene, reminiscent of that summer’s epic movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s "The Ten Commandments" with its scenes of Hebrew slaves pulling great obelisks upright using teams of rope pullers. In time we would all see if this massive turnout of brute force on the ground could defy the wind and elements, and as the time crept on, the temperature dropped considerably. This scene was so compelling; it was hard to tear myself away. "Your sandwich is getting all wet," Walter said close to my ear so as to be heard in the awful noise of the wind and the rain. "Let’s go,’ I said. In those days you could leave a car unlocked and we had. It was good to be inside the warm old car that still smelled of Grandpa’s cigars. Rain beat steadily on the roof of the Ford. We sat there watching the scene before us. It would appear that fire companies from the neighboring communities of Union City, Guttenberg and Ridgefield Park were all on the cables that night. Trucks bearing the names of those towns in bright gold leaf on their doors were parked on all the neighboring streets. North Bergen police patrolled the evacuated streets, but there was no such thing as looting in those days when the population raising children were the veterans of World War II. No better generation raised kids in that century. To our surprise, there on the sidewalk in a conversation with a police detective in a fedora, is our mother, Queenie. Her real name was Louise Mary, but they ha called her Queenie since before birth. We are of Scottish people. Mom’s maternal grandmother was also Louise Mary, born in Edinburgh and when my grandmother, Mary Helen was pregnant with mom, it was decided she would name her baby after her mother. Those were the days when no one had a clue what the sex would be aforehand, yet these very Scottish and clannish matriarchs were calling the unborn child still in her mother’s womb Queenie. How did they know she would be born a girl? Our clan was not one to mess with, especially not its women. At that moment the other Louise, a name Mom would never allow anyone to call her, emerged from the door of the firehouse to take a cigarette break. As she lit her Lucky Strike she spotted mom. "Queenie!" Louise called to my mother. Mom looked up and saw her friend Louise Fiezer which endowed mom with a look of being at home. She made a hasty adieu to the cop and headed right over to Louise’s side. What information mom had not got from the detective she got from Louise. "It was awful Queenie. They found the Stein woman dead in the alley behind her apartment building. Her hands wee burned , she fell to her death." Louise was shaken. Mom tried to comfort her. Louise went on, "The plane hit that building she lived in - it was six blocks from the tower, they think the poor pilot was trying to make for the park." Hudson County Park was on 79th street. "It killed the Pilot and his passenger and another woman who lived in the apartment house was killed upon impact with the building." With this news mom started shaking. "How do you know all of this Louise?" "All the firemen who fought the fire the crash caused were talking about it. It was all they were talking about. Nothing like this has ever happened to this town, Queenie." Louise dropped her cigarette on the street and crushed it with the tip of her high heeled shoe. Most young women wore spike heels in those days. "The best news was the wrong news," Louise said, taking another cigarette from her plastic pack and lighting it, "they thought there was an infant missing at first," at which my mother instinctively twitched, "but that was a mistaken report, thank God." "Thank God almighty, which reminds me, have you seen my sons here Louise, that is really why I came, I heard this on the news and knew Walter and Richie were out on Civil Defense work tonight. I was worried about them." "There they are sitting in your son’s car," Louise pointed to us and for some reason we were surprised. We were so busy listening to the radio and eating our sandwiches we really had lost touch. The air was full of orders barked on bullhorns. The rain kept up , followed closely by mounting gusts and strong long enduring blasts of freezing wind and rain. Through the windshield awash with rain we saw our mother navigating toward the car in her high heels. She came right over to the rear passenger door opened it and slid in on the seat behind me. "How are my two heroes doing tonight," she asked, condescendingly. Walter said, "We are fine ma, we just ate. They might need my goony box for something so we are waiting. Look what these guys are doing to protect these people." Surveying the scene outside my mother said, "I heard from Detective Malloy that one of the engines fell down through the roof of a man’s house and set fire to his living room. Fortunately no one was hurt." My brother and I reacted to that news as terrifying and glad the man was ok. She told us the firemen saved his house before much damage was done. The man was so shaken he was taken to the hospital for observation. "When do you boys plan to come home? You both have school tomorrow." "Mom, it’s almost Thanksgiving, we can miss a day of school," Walter said. ‘He is right mom," I said pointing to the scene of quiet chaos outside, the men huddled against the wind and rain, over two hundred of them, on the cables holding the tower up. "We can’t leave now." Mom looked intently at the scene. "Why is Louise Fiezer here boys?" "She told us she had her people here from the luncheonette making food for the volunteers," Walter said, leaning over the seat to look at mom. Mom nit her brow a moment and then said, "Well boys, maybe we all stay here and pitch in. You guys wait here, and see where you’re needed. I’ll head in and hook up with Louise. I am sure that I can hand out a sandwich, or for that matter, make one, as good as the next, don’t you think?" "Sure Mom," we both said in near unison. Mom lifted herself a little and we leaned in a little. She kissed us both on the tops of our heads and then opened the door and gingerly got out. We could hear her heels click on the pavement all the way to the firehouse. It turned out that we had to vacate our seats and let the fire chief use our radio to communicate with some of his people on the next block. We agreed to go quietly and wound up running the coffee from inside the firehouse to the men on the line outside. They just could not make enough coffee that night. The time went slowly. There was no let up in the weather either, for as the night turned into the wee hours of Friday morning the temperature dropped to 30 degrees. With the wind chill factor it was more like 13 degrees, I swear. How they held onto that cable and kept it taut I just do not know, but it was with the same perseverance they exhibited at Monte Casino, The Bulge or Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima. Somehow I must have gotten back in the Ford because I remember waking up there and noticing that it was dawn and the rain had stopped. The sky was still gray and overcast and I saw that the men were still on duty holding up the tower. I looked around and did not spot my brother. I rubbed the sleep from my bleary eyes, and climbed out of the car. Getting my bearings I realized I was well rested and must have slept for a while. Now that it was light I could see the enormous amount of metallic debris scattered all over the ground from the plane and tower. Walking over to the area where the men held the cables, I could see the smoldering roof of the house the engine crashed through. In the distance I saw that the top floor of the apartment house had been destroyed, and the tail assembly of the ruined plane had stuck out of the hole the plane made when it hit. The local Newspaper, The Hudson Dispatch reported as follows: The tower was the subject of a court fight a year
or so ago when North Bergen residents sought to have it removed as a
hazard, particularly in icy wintry weather. WOR-TV replied that its
construction had been approved by all the proper authorities,
including the North Bergen zoning officials, and the court upheld
the station. The top floors of the apartment house at 7805 Broadway were lost yesterday when the twin-engine plane, after clipping the tower and shearing off a wing, dove into the roof of the structure. In Guttenberg, where several hundred persons were evacuated from their homes last night, Mayor Herman G. Klein called a special town commission meeting this afternoon. Town Attorney John Tomasin was to be empowered to take action against WOR-TV if satisfactory action on removing the tower were not taken voluntarily by its owner. Treated for injuries at North Hudson Hospital,
Weehawkin, were: The Red Cross declared the section a disaster area. Last night schools were opened to feed and house those evacuated. Early this morning the First Army sent in emergency supplies. I found my Mother and brother in the fire house. Mom was talking to a man who appeared to be the Fire Chief of North Bergen by the markings on his helmet. She was holding a pad and he had a pen and wrote something and handed her back the pen, tipped his hat brim and went back to his men. Mom appeared to thank the chief and turned and clicked her heels all the way over to us. "Well you really earned the day off from school boys." She brandished the note she held in her hand. "This is your excuse note, written and signed by the Fire Chief himself." Is it any wonder I never forgot that night? Now that you heard it I bet you will never forget it either. And so it will not go forgotten. For me, that is why a story needs telling at all. |
He was cut off mid sentence and thrown to the
floor by the most horrifying jerk upwards to the right caused by the
right wing of the Cessna catching in the framework of an unseen 760
foot WOR-TV transmission tower when built in 1949 was the 10th
tallest structure in the world. The whole wing tore off and sent the
damaged plane spinning out of control.