Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero

by David Maraniss

  Que triste fue el Viernes Santo

  Que horas de anguista y dolor

  Sufrieron nuestros hermanos

  Que volaban a New York

  How sad was Good Friday/What hours of anguish and pain/ Our brothers suffer/ Who were flying to New York. In the silence, the haunting lyrics and melody ran through Vera’s mind, but it was just a song, it could have been any song, it could have been “Feliz Navidad,” just something that slipped into the subconscious without her thinking about what it meant.

  When lunch was ready, she went to fetch Roberto, who had barely slept. As they ate, they reviewed their plans for the next few days. The Rauches, who were coming to visit from Pennsylvania, had spent the night at Carlos and Carmen Llanos’s place in the Bronx and would be catching a flight down to San Juan later in the day. New Year’s Eve was a major holiday in Puerto Rico, a time to be with friends and family. There had been so many special days that Roberto had missed lately. He had missed their eighth wedding anniversary on November 14 and then missed Thanksgiving while he was managing the amateur baseball team in Nicaragua. He kept saying that he hated to be separated from his family and yet he kept leaving. Vera didn’t directly ask him not to leave again, but the message was there as she cited his absences.

  “Don’t worry,” Roberto said. “When you are healthy and you are happy, every day of life is the same.”

  “That’s true,” Vera said. She understood because they thought the same way. He meant that every day of life was special, every day they were together was special, none better than the others. When they were traveling in Europe, without worries, those days were wonderful, but no different. And so many times she had heard him repeat his mantra: If you have a chance to make life better for others, and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth. In going to Managua, she thought, he was doing something good for humanity. She didn’t feel great about him leaving on New Year’s Eve, but she was not going to make a big deal of it. He’d be back in a day, soon enough.

  • • •

  Jerry Hill, the pilot Arthur Rivera recruited for the trip, had returned to San Juan International Airport at six that morning after a hop to Miami and back. He had not slept overnight, and would need some rest before leaving for Managua. Rather than find a motel, Hill dozed off in the cabin of the DC-7. In his last-minute hunt for a pilot, Rivera had not bothered to check Hill’s background. He was not much for going by the book in any case. Hill told him that he loved DC-7s and knew how to fly them, and that was sufficient. The records of the Federal Aviation Administration filled out some of Jerry Carroll Hill’s history. He was forty-seven, a veteran pilot who was born in Texas, began flying in California, now lived in Miami, and “seemed to have seen better days,” as one report said. He was qualified to captain a DC-7, with about three thousand hours of flying time in the aircraft, two-thirds of that as the pilot in command. But at the time Rivera hired him, he had been furloughed by Airlift International and was in jeopardy of losing his commercial license, facing a hearing on thirteen violations that occurred between October 1971 and January 1972. He was divorced, and his ex-wife wanted nothing to do with him.

  This was the pilot, catnapping in the cabin, now entrusted to fly Roberto Clemente and a planeload of humanitarian aid across the Caribbean. Rivera would be the copilot, even though his sum experience amounted to the flight that brought the plane out of Miami’s Cockroach Corner and then the incompetent taxiing episode earlier that month. In need of a flight engineer, Rivera first tried to recruit Rafael Delgado-Cintron, the Caribair mechanic, but Delgado-Cintron’s boss would not let him off work that day. In desperation, Rivera asked Delgado-Cintron for the number of Francisco Matias, another Caribair mechanic. Matias knew how to fly a single-engine plane but did not have a flight engineer’s certificate. As a forty-two-year-old father of four with another baby on the way, he said he could use the extra money moonlighting for Rivera and quickly agreed to join the crew.

  The DC-7 was still being loaded while Hill snoozed. At mid-morning, José Fonet, who worked at the airport, climbed inside and woke the captain to tell him that another pickup truck with humanitarian cargo had arrived. Hill was so tired that he expressed no interest in overseeing the last-minute effort. The aircraft was already full, holding one hundred ninety-eight packages of rice, three hundred twelve cartons of evaporated milk, 320 cartons of beans, 70 cartons of vegetable oil, 90 cartons of luncheon meat, and 60 cartons of cornmeal. Now here came another small pickup truck with a final load—16 bags of sugar weighing 60 pounds apiece, plus more rice, beans, milk, sugar, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and medical supplies. Raymond Cintron, a ramp inspector for the airport police, helped load the last-minute cargo with his supervisor. With no space remaining in storage, they stacked it haphazardly in front of a steel mesh net near the bulkhead. Then a large spare tire was placed on top of the load. No attention was paid to the plane’s center of gravity. Rafael Vasquez, an airport attendant for Texaco, came by at twelve forty-five to supply five gallons of aircraft oil No. 120. Vasquez said that when he entered the plane he was stunned to see all the “cargo which was not tied down.” The plane was not supposed to haul more than 40,000 pounds. The air cargo manifest that Rivera would file with the Bureau of Customs estimated the total weight at 39,288 pounds, but that manifest was a lie. FAA officials later determined that the improperly loaded plane was at least 4,193 pounds over the maximum allowable gross weight.

  • • •

  Sometime after three that afternoon, Rivera called Clemente from the airport and said they were nearly ready. They had prepared a flight plan, the plane was loaded, and they had a full crew. Clemente was at home shining his boots and talking to Vera and his friend Cristobal Colón, the regional sales manager for Goya Food Products who had been helping with the relief effort. Colón, known by his nickname Caguitas, had stopped by the house with his young son, Angel Luis. Time to go, Clemente said, and Caguitas insisted on driving them to the airport. Clemente did not bring a suitcase. He carried what he needed in the alligator-skin briefcase he bought in Nicaragua during the baseball tournament a month earlier. On the ride down the hill toward Isla Verde, Caguitas kept turning to his young son and asking, “Angel Luis, who is sitting beside you?” The toddler would say proudly, “Roberto Clemente.”

  They arrived at the airport around four and were taken to the cargo ramp. The plane was fueling and there was more paperwork to be done, so Clemente, Vera, and Angel Lozano drove to a nearby restaurant to order food. When they returned, Caguitas Colón seemed alarmed. This was the first time he had taken a good look at the DC-7, and he did not like what he saw. The lightning-bolt paint job of orange with black trim did not impress him. He was concerned with the tires. The landing wheels were so squashed they appeared almost flat, and the nose tire was virtually off the ground. “When I saw all this I complained to Clemente and advised him that the aircraft was unsafe and improperly loaded,” Colón said later. He hoped that Clemente would forget about the DC-7 and take a Pan American flight to Miami and go to Nicaragua from there. Vera was standing nearby. As she later recalled, “Roberto said, ‘Don’t worry. They know what they’re doing.’”

  There was so much Clemente did not know: Cockroach Corner. Tramp airlines. The FAA’s Southern Order. Arthur Rivera’s sixty-six transport violations. The ditch incident. Pilot Hill’s troubles and lack of sleep. The wholly unqualified copilot and flight engineer. The imbalanced and overweight load. Everything was wrong, but the only physical signs of that were the tires, the tips of the iceberg, and though his friend Caguitas raised the issue, Clemente chose not to worry about the tires. When he said the crew knew what it was doing, Vera believed him. Shortly before five, she said good-bye to Roberto and left with Colón for the other side of the airport, where she had to pick up the Rauches, who would be arriving on a flight from JFK in New York. An earlier plane from New York had arrived already, but the Rauches missed that one, so they would be two hours late.

  At 5:3
0 P.M., according to FAA records, Rivera’s DC-7, identified as N500AE, called the air traffic control tower and requested taxi instructions from the Pan American cargo area. The tower cleared the plane to Runway 7.

  In the Federal Aviation Administration structure, the air traffic controllers and safety inspectors were under separate fiefdoms. The inspectors of the Flight Standards Office were located in a separate building at the San Juan airport. The air traffic controllers were not enforcers—their duties were demanding enough, handling the flow of planes taking off and landing. When Hill radioed the tower and asked for taxi instructions, it was not up to the traffic controllers to check first whether the plane was airworthy. That was the job of the Flight Standards Office, at least in theory.

  It is hard to imagine an aircraft that called out for surveillance more than Arthur Rivera’s DC-7 that final day of 1972. As a tramp aircraft purchased at Cockroach Corner in Miami, it seemed to fit the description of planes that were to be watched under the guidelines of the Southern Order. But Leonard Davis, who ran the Flight Standards Office in San Juan, said that they did not have the manpower to check every departing flight. Office inspectors certainly knew about Rivera and had been watching his plane since the taxiing incident, and had even suggested that he replace one engine and conduct a test flight. But now that Rivera was ready to go, without a new engine, no test flight, a tired pilot, himself as a novice copilot, a mechanic as the flight engineer, a plane so overloaded the tires were slumping, and the famous Roberto Clemente aboard—now there were no Flight Standards inspectors around. It was New Year’s Eve. No one was assigned to surveillance that weekend. George E. Mattern, who had arrived in San Juan in October as the general aviation maintenance inspector, was on inspection standby. He had come into work on Saturday to check out another tramp operator and then had been called to the wreckage of a small plane that had crashed on the beach near the Caribe Hilton in Condado, a resort section of San Juan. By Sunday evening, he was back home in Río Piedras. Most of his colleagues were at a New Year’s Eve party.

  After taxiing to Runway 7, Hill went through final checks in the cockpit. His checks showed a problem with the spark plugs in cylinder No. 5. The plane sat on the runway for twenty-one minutes, then they radioed the control tower and asked for instructions to taxi back from the runway to the Pan Am cargo area. When Hill got out to inspect the spark plugs in the other cylinders, he found that most of them were bad. Hill and the mechanic-cum-flight engineer, Matias, opened the cowling on No. 3 and No. 4 engines and worked on them for more than three hours. Delgado-Cintron, the other Caribair mechanic who could not make the trip, got off work and went over to help. When all the repairwork was done, Delgado-Cintron climbed halfway up the ladder. Clemente handed him a slip of paper on which he had written his home phone number. He asked the mechanic to call his house and tell Vera when and if the plane left for Nicaragua.

  As he stood on the ladder, Delgado-Cintron caught a final glimpse of the scene inside: Arthur Rivera sat in the right cockpit seat and Jerry Hill was in the captain’s seat. Clemente was sitting on the lower bunk in the cabin, forward of the cargo. Angel Lozano and Francisco Matias stood nearby, not yet in position. In the past few days, Clemente had asked so many friends to come along: Orlando Cepeda, Manny Sanguillen, Osvaldo Gil, but they had all declined. Angel Lozano was the one who had agreed to go. He was thirty-three years old, married with two children, and ran his own trucking company, which hauled provisions for Pueblo Foods. Like Clemente, he had been working long hours every day on the relief effort.

  Three and a half hours after the first attempted takeoff, the DC-7 was cleared again to Runway 7. Antonio Ríos, working for Eastern Airlines at Gate 12, saw Rivera’s plane as it rolled past his ramp. It must have a lot of cargo, Ríos thought, because “the nose gear was hardly touching the ground.”

  Seventy-six degrees. Scattered clouds. Visibility twelve miles. Long after sundown, but objects could still be seen in the distance.

  “San Juan tower, Douglas five hundred alpha echo ready for departure Runway Seven,” Hill reported at nine-eighteen.

  “Douglas five nine alpha echo Runway Seven cleared for takeoff,” responded the air traffic controller, Dennis A. McHale.

  “Roger, that’s Douglas five hundred alpha echo,” Hill said, correcting the number.

  “Five hundred alpha echo, okay, you VFR [using visual flight regulations]?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Okay.”

  An Eastern Airlines flight radioed from the runway: “Tower, Eastern nine sixty-four ready . . .”

  “Okay, Eastern nine sixty . . . uh . . . hold your position just a minute . . . I got a DC-seven taxiing off your right there I think . . .”

  “Okay,” said the Eastern pilot.

  The controller radioed Hill: “Alpha echo, are you behind the jet—can you make your first taxiway there . . . ?

  “. . . the seven twenty-seven go first,” responded Hill.

  “Okay. Eastern nine sixty-four, he’s advised you’re in front of him, you can taxi on the runway and cleared for takeoff Runway Seven . . .”

  “Okay, cleared for takeoff, nine sixty-four . . . here we go,” reported the Eastern pilot.

  “And, uh, five hundred alpha echo, taxi into position and hold.”

  It was nine-nineteen. Gary Cleaveland replaced McHale as ground controller in the air traffic tower.

  Thirty seconds later, Cleaveland said: “Douglas five hundred alpha echo, Runway Seven cleared for takeoff.”

  “Alpha echo, roger.”

  The Eastern jet was airborne above the ocean by then.

  “Eastern nine sixty-four, contact departure, good day,” said the controller.

  “Nine sixty-four, Happy New Year, sir,” responded the Eastern pilot.

  At nine-twenty the DC-7 started rolling down Runway 7.

  Juan Reyes, an airport security officer, happened to be watching. The plane didn’t seem to have the necessary speed to take off, he thought, and “by the sound of the motors it looked like it was making much effort.”

  Gilberto Quiles, a cleaner for Pan Am, sensed that the plane was in trouble as it rumbled slowly down the runway.

  Antonio Ríos, the Eastern employee, noticed how the plane kept rolling down the strip, six thousand, seven thousand, eight thousand feet. As it reached the end of the runway, Ríos heard several loud backfires about five seconds apart on the left wing.

  Rafael Delgado-Cintron was near Ríos in the Eastern cargo area. “They were about at the end of the runway . . . I hear like a . . . three backfires . . . changing engine noise and a very big explosion. Then silence.”

  At the far end of the runway, nearly nine thousand feet from where the takeoff roll began, the plane struggled into the air. Witnesses on the ground could no longer see it after it barely cleared the palm trees at the eastern edge of the airport. From his control tower perch, Cleaveland noticed that the DC-7 was not gaining altitude as it flew about a mile past Punta Maldonado and then banked to the north and out over the ocean. At that point, by his estimate, the plane was no more than two hundred feet above water. It appeared to be descending.

  The radio scratched. “Tower, this is five hundred alpha echo coming back around.”

  Cleaveland could not hear the transmission. “Five hundred . . . uh . . . alpha echo, say again.”

  Nothing but silence. McHale, tracking on radar, watched as N500AE curved north and then suddenly disappeared from the Brite One display screen.

  • • •

  When the incoming Eastern flight arrived from New York on the passenger side of the airport earlier that evening, Vera was at the gate waiting for her friends Carolyn and Nevin Rauch and their daughters Carol and Sharon. The Rauches were delighted and surprised to see her, considering how late their plane had been and how busy the Clementes were with the earthquake relief effort. When they asked about Roberto, Vera said he was probably halfway to Nicaragua. But he would be back the next day if there was no t
rouble with Somoza, and they would have a great celebration when he returned.

  Vera was a warm woman with a contagious laugh and a self-deprecating nature that put people at ease. One of the little jokes she shared with friends was trying to find the right key on her key chain. There were so many keys, for various doors and security systems and gates and she always had to try a few before she found the right one. When they reached the house in Río Piedras, they could hear the telephone ringing as Vera fiddled with the keys. By the time they got inside, the ringing had stopped. “I wonder if that was Roberto,” Vera said.

  Carolyn and Nevin were hungry and wanted to take Vera out to eat. She was tired, and feeling out of sorts, but they thought it would be good for her. Carolyn called around and found a seafood restaurant that was serving late. Vera agreed to go, but asked that they stop first at the earthquake relief headquarters at Plaza Las Americas. Something told her that she should be there in Roberto’s absence. “I felt the responsibility on my shoulders,” she said later. It was raining. After visiting the headquarters in Hato Rey and eating dinner at El Pescador in Santurce, they drove to the Zabala house in Carolina.