Lakers crash land in cornfield

It was January 18, 1960. The Minneapolis Lakers played a game in St. Louis that afternoon and boarded the team plane later that night for the flight home. For whatever reason, they didn't take off until around 11:00 PM.

It was a military surplus DC-3, bought by Lakers owner Bob Short, who wasn't aboard that night. As the plane took off and headed for the Land of a Thousand Lakes, the players got a card game going. The flight was expected to take approximately three hours.

The players concentrated on their cards, hardly noticing when the plane flew into a snowstorm.

The plane bounced and bucked in the blizzard but the players didn't pay much notice. Then the lights went out.

Elgin Baylor later said, "When the lights went out, we didn't think much of it because strange things had happened before in that plane."

Players started complaining because they couldn't see their cards. Someone called toward the closed cabin door, "Hey, turn the lights back on!" The pilot could clearly be heard calling back, "We've lost our power."

With that, most of the players wrapped themselves in GI blankets and tried to sleep. Fairly soon, Elgin Baylor found himself shivering: "I got worried when the heat stopped. It got very cold on that plane."

The pilot called back that they had lost their radar and couldn't see a damn thing because of the blinding snow. There was an influx of cold air as the copilot opened a side window to scrape off the windshield. He kept the window open, sticking his neck out trying to see.

It was so loud in the cockpit, the pilot and copilot had to yell to each other and the players could hear every word, including, "If we don't put this thing down soon, we're gonna run out of gas."

The copilot stepped through the cabin door and faced the passengers, holding a flashlight. Behind him, cold air and flying snow from the open window rushed into the belly of the plane. The copilot said, "We're in a snowstorm, we have no power, no radio, and we're running out of gas. We're over Iowa; there's a cornfield down there. We have two choices: we can try to find an airport, which we don't know where there is one, or, we can land in the field."

The players were unanimous: "Let's get this plane down now!"

The copilot returned to the cabin. A minute later, the pilot could be heard, saying, "If we're going to land in this field, we gotta make sure we clear those high tension wires."

The plane flew over the field, then banked around and approached it again.

Slick Leonard had a window seat: "At this point, we were so low that the noise from the plane was causing people to wake up and turn on the lights in their houses. We saw red lights from a fire truck and an ambulance. We actually were following a car down a road, about three hundred feet above him. Then the car started going uphill and the pilot yanked the plane straight up, which scared the hell out of everybody."

Those who couldn't look out the window heard the copilot calling out the altitude: "Eighty . . . seventy . . . sixty . . . Take it back up! Take it back up!"

The pilot made several more passes, banking, taking the plane down, then up again. The tension inside was excruciating. Outside the noise of the engines and the howling of the storm, inside the plane there was dead silence.

The copilot called out again: "Eighty . . . seventy . . . sixty . . ." Then the engines went dead. The DC-3 floated in a field of white, bounced once or twice and drifted to a halt.

Elgin Baylor said, "To me it was the smoothest landing I had ever had. There was three or four feet of snow over the corn and it was like landing on a blanket."

Hot Rod Hundley recalled, "It was a perfect landing. The guy didn't put the wheels down. He flew through a blinding snowstorm, between a water tower and power lines and got us down without a scratch. When we were on the ground, it was absolute silence for a moment. All you could hear were a few knees knocking because we were so cold, yet our foreheads and palms were soaked with sweat from fear."

At some point, Elgin Baylor left his seat and took a position on the floor at the back of the plane. He remembered, "After the initial silence, there was a knock on the door of the plane. It was then that we realized we'd made it and everyone just started cheering and screaming."

Baylor opened the plane's rear door and the team piled out into the field - and four feet of snow. According to Slick Leonard, "The snow was up to our ass, but we were jumping in it, throwing snowballs at each other. We were like little kids, just glad to be alive."

The players walked about a mile through the snow to an old hotel, where they stayed up all night, taking refreshments and rehashing their near escape. The following day, they returned to Minneapolis - by bus.

But that wasn't the last they were to hear of it. An opponent, Johnny Kerr recalled, "The Lakers getting out of that crash became fodder for jokes around the league. The best one was that as they were going down, Hot Rod wanted to do something religious, so he stood up and started a bingo game."

A few weeks later, the players pitched in and bought the pilot a trophy, presenting it to him at halftime of a home game. It read, "May you have eternal safe landings."

As a footnote, the farmer who owned the field in which the Lakers' plane had landed, sued the team for $10,000 for ruining his crop - a crop that he claimed was growing under four feet of snow.

Spike

great story

But on a side note many farmers who grow corn for the ears (cattle feed) and can't get to it all in the fall dur to wet grounds or whatever do harvest the following spring in some cases. So there may be a bit of truth that they did "damage" a bit of his crop. (but doubtfull it was 10 grand) I wonder how they got the plane out of his field?

No wonder John Madden always took his cruser!

beat

beat

We certainly don't want to cast aspersions against farmers. Where would we be without them? So here's a footnote to the footnote:

Bob Short brought out some mechanics to Iowa and they fixed the plane right there in the field. Then, he hired a bulldozer and bulldozed a runway, the plane took off, and the farmer was left with the consequences. But my source says he sued the Lakers for "ruining his crop", which, in my ignorance, is why I chose to poke fun at him.

The plane was in service a few weeks later, just in time for a flight from MN to LA, where the Lakers would move after that season. It was a flight over the majestic Rocky Mountains and the entire team looked at the plane and refused to get on board. So Bob Short told them, "Anyone who doesn't board that plane is out of a job." They all got on, but every one of them, when it came time for the exodus to Shakytown, went by car.

Spike

wasn't there a John Wayne movie with the line about "flying the dam plane outta here" or am I way off base.

Perhaps Wayne was a distant relative of John!

beat