I remember there was the guy who flew a small plane into the Clinton White House lawn. He had been drinking and missed the building. I hope this wasn't what inspired Osama, but might very well have been. Osama probably ordered, "no drinking!"
I remember there was the guy who flew a small plane into the Clinton White House lawn. He had been drinking and missed the building. I hope this wasn't what inspired Osama, but might very well have been. Osama probably ordered, "no drinking!"
I suspect that what *inspired* Osama- or more likely, the tactician charged with planning the best combination of likely successful activities capable of causing the highest headline-grabbing casualty numbers- happened ling before Charles Bishop or Bill Clinton were born:
B-25 Bomber Crashes Into the Empire State Building
July 28,1945
Colonel Smith lowered the landing gear of the B-25 thinking he was about to land in Newark when through the fog he saw that he was heading directly for Radio City Music Hall. Quickly he began to raise his landing-gear tilting his nose up almost to a stall veering just past the buff-colored Salmon Building.
They say one of the secretaries in the Catholic War Relief Office on the 79th floor of the Empire State Building could see Colonel Smith's Clark Gable mustache as the cockpit filled up with limestone and chrome mullions from around the building's windows. Streams of molten high-octane fuel cascaded down the side of the building. The GIs on the deck of the troopship on the Hudson shouted, The Japs are bombing New York with V-2s!
When the bomber hit, the left engine separated from the fuselage shot diagonally through the thick walls to the shaft of the G bank of elevators to slice through six braided steel lifting cables the size of wrists the engine rebounding off the steel fire wall to fall in flames down the shaft.
The Number Six elevator of the G shaft with Betty Lou Oliver alone at the controls begins to fall with the exploding engine plummeting down towards the car's roof.
Betty Lou Oliver, her last day. Said bye-bye to Mr. Needleman with the belt business on the 79th floor. Her husband Oscar soon back from the Navy. She'll wave at the pier. He'll be sate from Kamikaze. Got a new blue dress with blue-and-white spectator pumps. Meet her sister at the Russian Tea Room for farewell lunch. Slides the big brass handle all the way back to close the elevator door. She lands on her behind grasping the brass handle, belting out, St. Louis Blues at the top of her lungs. When you get your own empty elevator to sing in without people making funny faces, and this the last day, you simply must sing grasping that brass handle shutting the door and moving the elevator down for coffee break.
So there's a thud. The car shudders. It begins to drop. The red lights whiz past 73 72 71. The floors blur. She punches the Stop button. The car descends faster, vibrating. She grabs the phone dangling in front of her. She taps the hook several times. What can she say to the starter anyway? What can he do? Suddenly she feels her feet rising above the floor. Cables and flaming metal crash through the roof. Her body is separate from herself. A shriek fills the shaft. She is rising, floating, weightless.
When seventeen year-old Coast Guard apprentice medic Donald Molony climbs in the sub-basement of the G-shaft he does not expect anyone to be found alive but when he crawls through the small hole in the wreckage of car bumpers pushed through the car's roof she is there moaning. Thank God, the Navy's here. I'll be OK now, she says according to the New York Times but Molony only hears, Drowning... drowning... as the water from the firehose fills up the shaft.
They say it's a miracle she's alive. When they lift her face down into the ambulance with a rabbi and a priest on each side babbling in Hebrew and Latin she can feel it. She floats above herself, looking down, weightless and falling. A miracle, they say. But she keeps the sensation to herself. Oscar comes in a few days. By her bedside, tears in his eyes. He's the one back from the war, from danger. And the war almost over. Again she feels herself lifting from the bed. The sensation of falling yet rising. Like being caught in an endless moment of indecision. Between living and dying. She cannot remember the point of impact. Only that she is outside herself falling. She knows eventually she must hit the ground. What feels like permanent suspension is only the moment before everything changes. Oscar holds her hand. She knows she will have many children and will live to be a grandma. But that does not matter. She hears Walter Winchell announce on the radio that we dropped the Atom bomb on some city in Japan. She is floating towards the ceiling of the ward, failing, as the hospital drops towards the sun.