CalPoly

Tragic Flight: The 1960 Football Team Plane Crash

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The news arrived on the last Saturday of October, 1960, desolating families, stunning the campus, and shocking the country. The Arctic-Pacific chartered plane carrying the Cal Poly Mustang football team had crashed and burned on takeoff at the Toledo, Ohio, airport. Earlier that day they had played nearby Bowling Green State University.

Sixteen Mustang football players, the student manager, a member of the Mustang Booster Club, and four others perished that October 29th. Of the forty-eight persons aboard the Curtiss C-46 aircraft, another twenty-two were injured, some gravely. Dense fog, later determined to be a major factor in the accident, slowed ambulances trying to reach the airport twenty miles east of Toledo.

At 3:30 a.m., Vice President Robert Kennedy and Dean Clyde Fisher began telephoning the parents and wives of those lost. "It was one of the most nightmarish, heartrending tasks I’ve ever attempted," Kennedy later recalled. "The worst part of it was calling the parents, most of whom didn’t know there was a wreck."

At dawn that Sunday, flags on campus and across San Luis Obispo County were lowered to half-mast. Vice President Kennedy spent the early morning hours Sunday reading wire reports at the Telegram-Tribune, whose staff was busy getting out an extra edition headlined "POLY FOOTBALL TEAM IN AIR CRASH; 22 DEAD." Journalism students began the grim task of reporting on the loss of their classmates for the student newspaper. Two weeks later, Life magazine published an article, "Campus Overwhelmed by a Team’s Tragic Flight."

The grief-stricken campus reluctantly began another week of classes on Monday morning, October 31. Classes were dismissed at 10 a.m. for a memorial service in Crandall gymnasium, which was filled to capacity by students, faculty and townspeople. President Julian McPhee left for Ohio to be with the injured and their family members. "I cannot praise the people of Toledo and Ohio enough," McPhee said to a reporter. "And the alumni in that area at the time of the tragedy were truly helpful. We learned where the heart of America is — it is in the compassion of its people."

The Red Cross played a vital role in the aftermath of the devastating accident. On the scene almost immediately, Red Cross volunteers compiled reports from three area hospitals on the condition of survivors. They conveyed personal messages from the bedsides of the injured to parents and wives at home and worked with local Red Cross chapters in students’ hometowns to assist family members. Funds for travel to Ohio, for living expenses, and other necessities were advanced or provided by the the humanitarian organization.

Five women were widowed and eleven children lost a father in the accident, while several widowed mothers lost their sole support when their sons died. Many of those who survived faced daunting medical bills.

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