It was the night of Jan. 17, 1960. The Minneapolis Lakers NBA basketball team had lost to the St. Louis Hawks on Sunday evening in St. Louis. The team boarded their DC3 at 8:30 that night for their flight back to Minneapolis.
As John Steffes explains, the plane lost electrical power soon after takeoff. They had no instruments, no radar and virtually no vision as they flew into a snowstorm somewhere over Iowa. The pilots decided to try and descend low enough to see the ground and perhaps find a landing spot. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were over the town of Carroll, Iowa.
“One guy who lived by the water tower, he took his kids to the basement,” says John Steffes, who lives in Carroll, Iowa. “It just shook the house. It’s a loud plane. So when you buzz the town at least nine times, you’re waking people up.”
A Loud Roar
Carroll resident, Jack Donovan was in bed, now in the early hours of Jan. 18,1960.
“The plane woke me,” Donovan recalls. “You could hear it go this way and then came that way, and finally, it really got loud. And I got up and my neighbor across the street was waving his arms at me. He said, ‘duck!’”
The pilots knew the roar of the engines were waking people. They could see porch lights coming on, but didn’t know where they were, and flying blind, the pilots couldn’t see if there was some place to land.
“The plane came around the water tower and as it turned left, he saw something out in front of the water tower,” says Donovan. “And he could look out and see this dark spot out here.”
A Corn Field Landing Pad
It was a corn field.
A wet fall had prevented the area from being harvested, and the pilots decided it would become their runway.
The DC3 was the right type of plane to make such a landing.
Norman Hutcheson, also a Carroll resident, remembers coming to this spot to see what had taken place.
“It was just a cornfield,” Hutcheson says. “And here here’s this airplane, and it made a track down through the corn and was setting up against the fence down there, and it just looked like he landed in an airport, except it wasn’t an airport.”
A Sight to See
Townspeople rushed to the scene to see the fate of the plane and passengers.
“At that time, I don’t think Carroll had any ambulances, so to speak,” Hutcheson says. “So there were two or three funeral hearses they used as ambulances. And when the fellows got out of the airplane, I guess they wondered what they were sitting there for.”
But the hearses would no have business that night, save to take an NBA basketball team into a town that was now wide awake after a DC3 had buzzed the water tower several times. Townspeople opened the hotel and the switchboard, providing a way to call home and a bed for the night.
1 of Only 8 NBA Teams
The team took a bus back to Minneapolis the next day. The plane was repaired, and a bulldozer cleared a path in the cornfield for it to take off three days later. The team continued to use the plane, but if the pilots had not pulled off the landing — all would have perished, and NBA basketball would be very different today.
“There were only eight teams in the NBA back then,” Steffes says. “And so the Lakers were this close to being wiped out that night.”
And the Minneapolis Lakers, who were to move to Los Angels the next year, would have ceased to exist, eliminating an iconic team in today’s NBA.
An Iconic Outdoor Court
On the 50th anniversary of the lifesaving landing here, the town and the LA Lakers joined together to build a outdoor basketball court at the site were it all happened.
“This is almost the precise spot where it landed,” Steffes says, “so I think it was destiny to build a little court here in honor of that event. And it’s a good reminder of, like Doc said earlier, we have the good neighbor spirit, the Good Samaritan spirit. We’d like to think that continues today.”
The court is marked with the LA Lakers colors of purple and gold and has a light blue border, a nod to the colors of the old Minneapolis Lakers. You can come here today, to play basketball yourself at the site where a town welcomed a NBA team when they made their emergency landing in a snowy cornfield.
