A half-century ago, the Minneapolis Lakers narrowly averted a disaster when their pilots battled a raging blizzard and frozen instruments to make a desperate impromptu landing in an Iowa cornfield. Today, the tiny town of Carroll, Iowa, is celebrating that effort.
Then Harold Gifford, 86, once again charted his course and set out for little Carroll, Iowa, 50 years since he last visited.
This time, it's his intended destination. This time, he expects to arrive Monday welcomed in splendid sunshine.
"This time, I'm going by car," he said.
Fifty years ago, Gifford copiloted an ancient chartered aircraft carrying home the Minneapolis Lakers basketball team in a storm from a game in St. Louis.
Until that night, that Lakers team considered itself anything but a winner.
Six seasons after legendary big man George Mikan led the franchise to the last of four NBA titles, these Lakers were on their way to a 25-50 regular season.
They also were on their way out of town, bound with young star Elgin Baylor for a franchise move to lovely Los Angeles that very next summer.
That day began like so many others -- with a loss, to the St. Louis Hawks -- and ended with a night unlike any other for 22 people aboard.
Blinded by an electrical failure and a raging blizzard, their chartered plane flew high, frozen and by the stars and the moon for nearly five hours before it made a forced, off-course, fabulous landing into an Iowa cornfield.
Cornfields were apparently very dangerous places back then. Eleven months earlier, musician Buddy Holly had died when his small plane crashed into a cornfield 100 miles to the northeast. The Lakers walked away from their plane unscratched on a night when their unexpected arrival was met by hatchet-carrying firemen and the town's mortician.
"Fifty years later," said Hot Rod Hundley, who lived on that night to broadcast NBA games for more than 40 years, "and I could tell you now where everybody was seated on that plane."
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