... It's Gonna Crash

An incident that occurred in the early 1970s when I was ten years old. Never forgotten.

I’m going to tell the story here about something that happened to me when I was 10 years old. This story is true and no embellishments are necessary. Let me set the scene:

I lived in a small neighborhood in a rural area near Jackson Michigan. We lived across the street from a friend’s house. Behind the house was a hill that goes to a channel that goes out to a lake called Center Lake (we used to call it Michigan Center Lake, but on maps it’s called Center Lake).

It was August and my friends and I were playing basketball across the street from where I live just goofing off playing the game horse . It was kind of a high overcast day and it was just barely sprinkling a little bit.

We heard a loud pop and what sounded like a small thunder clap. We looked up and saw a small white, low wing Cessna plane. I saw something fly from the back of the plane. Then the plane started fishtailing back and forth and then it started dive straight down. It was pretty high up, but it looked like it was going to land right on top of us. Someone said “Oh my God! It’s gonna crash. Run!!”

I heard the basketball bounce once on the pavement as I took off running across the street to my house. When I got to my sidewalk I turned around just in time to see the upside-down tail of the plane go behind some trees. Then I just waited and BaBoom!!! A very loud explosion. I ran inside and I told my mom a plane just crashed. My grandma Pauline, who was always pretty nervous about things anyway, was visiting and she said “oh golly”. This accident didn’t help her nerves no doubt.

My cousin Shelly and I ran back across the street to look at the crash site. The plane crashed into the bank of the channel that goes out to the lake. The channel is probably a 200 ft wide and the other side of the channel is a marsh with clayey, mucky soil and so the momentum of the plane caused the front portion of the plane and it’s occupants to be injected abut 10 feet underground. We saw some reeds and grass on fire, but couldn’t see the wreckage of the plane. After that my friends and I went back down the hill to look across the water at the crash site.

The fire department couldn't get to the place easily because t was back in a marshy area with the only road acces to the crash site being a hunting road which could only be accessed by going through the property of another friend of ours. So it took him about an hour to get their equipment to the site.

Meanwhile my friends and I were standing down there looking and a guy came down the hill (I assume he was a firefighter or some kind of first responder). My friend’s dad had a little dock right there with a small john boat directly across from the crash site. The guy asked whose boat was at the dock. My friend told him that it was his dad’s boat. He asked if he could use it. My friend said yes of course. The man paddled across the channel, got out and looked around a little bit and returned to our side. I don’t remember him saying anything to us, but his face was grim. After that we all just waited for the fire department to arrive.

The fire department showed up and hundreds of people came to sit on the hill (which became a sort of natural amphitheater) to watch them recover the plane and the bodies of the occupants. There were hundreds of people on this hill just watching the process. It was dead quiet of course with no wind and being right at the end of this channel any sound echoed.

They finally got in there with the fire trucks and they knew that the occupants were dead. There’s no way they could have survived that crash. So my friends and I sat on my friend’s boat dock approximately 200 feet across the channel and watched the whole thing with. I recall that a friend of mine named Kevin (11 years old) and his brother Mark (nine years old) were there with me (ten years old). There were some other friends there as well.

The first responders had to dig with shovels because the wreckage was buried in the mud. Eventually they put a winch on the tail of the plane and they pulled it up. It was upside down just like I had seen when it went past the tree. Then they dug a little bit more and then this guy came in and he went into where they were digging and he disappeared. You couldn’t see him and then after a few minutes he came out with the first victim on an Army type stretcher that had army green canvas and wooden poles. Another guy helped him carry the victim away. We could see the guy’s face. It looked dirty, but he didn’t look bad. I mean there was no blood, but he was definitely dead. The bank of the channel was steep and the guy in the back slipped on the muddy soil and they dropped the body. The crowd groaned and somebody yelled out “Oh come on!!”

So we continued sitting there watching and that guy went back into that hole again disappeared again and came out with another body and the other guys helped carry him out. I remember what the guy looked like except for his face which they had covered with a blanket. His arms were stretched straight up over his head. He had on one of those orangish colored crushed leather jackets with the tassels on the arms and on his right hand he had a big ring, like a class ring, and his hair was long and curly kind of reddish color. So they start carrying the guy away. It was dead silence when my friend Mark (9 years old) yelled out “LET US SEE IT”!!! The crowd groaned loudly in disgust and his brother Kevin just said “Shut up Mark!!!” and reached over and smacked him upside the head and he said “I wanted to see it.”

So after the bodies were removed, people started filing out of the theatre and I ended up getting my 15 seconds of fame. I went up the hill and there was this old older guy standing there and he was saying oh everybody says they saw it and all this stuff and I said “I saw it. I was right over there”. It just so happened that a lady from the news station with a tape recorder was standing there and she came up to me and she said you saw it and I said yeah me and my friends saw it. She asked me to tell her what I saw when the plane crashed. I then described what I saw.

Well to my embarrassment, on the local news that night they showed a video of the crash site and dubbed my voice telling what I had witnessed. My family and I watched it and I remember feeling sort of embarrassed for some reason maybe because my voice sounded so weird to me and I thought my friends were going to make fun of me the next day or something.

We never really discussed it, but what did happen, and this is kind of dark, was a rumor among the kids in our neighborhood tha they had left one of the guy’s fingers at the crash site. A total lie, but a bunch of kids took their little boats over there the next day with shovels and started digging around to see if they could find pieces of the plane. They found some stuff including what I now know was the altimeter. It looked like the mileage gauge on a car. It read “2000 feet” and that’s about how high up that plane was when we saw it and I swear it looked like it was going to land right on top of us. The distance between where we were playing basketball and where the plane crashed was less than 50 yards, but it crashed down the hill and it just sunk into that mud so there wasn’t any debris or anything like because of where it landed.

So I saw a small plane crash and got my fifteen seconds of Fame. I doubt if the tape still exists because it was in Jackson Michigan in about 1972.

To this day when I hear a small plane overhead I look, remember that moment, and hope it never happens again.