On Rockne's Anniversary

A man strolled up to two pilots tinkering an old trimotored ship at Tulsa Airport one day last week.

"You're carrying a very precious cargo," the man remarked.

"I wish this trip was over," said one of the pilots.

The cargo was the Winnipeg "Toilers" basketball team, amateur champions of Canada, who had just been beaten for the A. A. U. title by the Tulsa "Diamond Oilers."

On the trip down, one of the pilots told an acquaintance, two cylinders of the port motor had repeatedly cut out. At times none of the motors of the old plane, once grounded by the Department of Commerce, had turned up enough revolutions to maintain altitude.

The trip back was no happier. Suddenly, near Neodesha, Kan., the man at the stick called back to his passengers: "I'm having motor trouble and I'm going to have to land. Everybody watch out--Look out, we're gone!"

The plane, trying to nose down into a ploughed field, sideslipped, crashed.

"It was an indescribable picture," said a rescuer who helped prop one wing up with fenceposts to drag out victims. "Men were crying, 'Get me out!' and 'Oh, God, why doesn't somebody do something!' ''

Three of the 14 passengers died on their way to the Neodesha hospital. Three others died when they got there. Four more were dangerously injured.

The farmers of Neodesha remembered that two years before, almost to the hour, Football Coach Knute Rockne and seven others had been killed in an airplane crash at Bazaar, 75 mi. away.

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