April 4 | Lady Be Good

Lady Be Good was an American bomber in the US Air Force during World War II. The plane disappeared on April 4, 1943 after a bombing raid on Naples. Nothing was known of what happened until 15 years later, when a British oil surveyor found the wreckage of the plane deep in the desert — the crew had overshot the base by 400 miles.

The plane was broken into two pieces, but otherwise in good shape. There was a working radio, food, and water on board. There was even a thermos of tea. What there wasn't, was any sign of a human being. Nor were there any parachutes. It seemed that the men had bailed out, but it was not clear why: the final log entry was written while the plane was still in Naples.

It wasn't until some of the bodies were recovered two years later, at the end of a trail of footwear, parachute scraps, and other discarded articles that the probable story became clear (although much is still mysterious).

The day of the raid presented severe winds all over the Mediterranean. As a result, the bomber was separated from the squadron and the crew uncertain as to their course. They probably flew very close to the base at around midnight: near this time, another base nearby received a voice call from the pilot of Lady Be Good requesting a position report and indicating that their direction finder had malfunctioned.

At about the same time, the staff at Soluch heard the engines, and sent up flares, but the crew missed them. They continued to fly — for two more hours. At that point, running out of fuel, they put on their parachutes and bailed. They were not aware how far inland they had flown: the winds had been heavy all day, there was no moon (April 4, 1943 was a new moon), and with a protocol of radio silence (for fear of drawing the attention of enemy planes). What happened next was recorded in the diaries of two crew members and pieced together from the wreckage and the bodies found.

The first to die was the bombardier: his parachute didn't open properly and he died on hitting the ground (his body was found miles from where they landed). The others, however, didn't know that, and spent some time calling out for him in the darkness. When they couldn't find him, they discarded what they didn't need and set out to the northwest, hoping to come across him on the way. It was 2 a.m. but they had little water and no food; they needed to travel as far as they could before the desert sun rose.

They didn't realize that they were fully 400 miles from the base. Had they known, they could have reached food, water, and a working radio in the wreckage, just a few miles southeast.

They moved northward for 5 days, sharing one canteen of water. At that point five of them gave up: they had walked 78 miles and could see tall dunes ahead. Three had enough strength to continue and, hoping that the base would be just beyond the dunes, promised to send help. It was futile: the base was still hundreds of miles away, and within three days all the crew members were dead.

Sources: ladybegood.com, Wikipedia

March 21 | Homer and Langley Collyer

November 6, 1881 and October 3, 1885 - March 21, 1947: Ages 65 and 61

Homer and Langley Collyer were well-to-do New Yorkers who grew up in a fashionable brownstone in Harlem with their mother and father. They both had degrees, one in engineering and one in law, but preferred music and inventing, respectively. The family's relatively comfortable finances meant they didn't have to make any serious effort to make a living, and when their parents died in the 1920s they simply stayed on at the family home.

By this time, the neighbourhood had changed. With the explosive growth of the suburbs, Harlem had many vacant homes, which were rapidly filling up with Manhatten's African Americans displaced from other areas of the city. Although the neighbourhood had already been racially mixed, the sudden increase of blacks and decrease of whites left it almost entirely black by the 1920s. The Collyer brothers, now in their 40s, stayed where they were, simply cutting themselves off from the world.

Rumours of their wealth encouraged people to try to burgle the house, and the young people in the neighbourhood spread stories about the inhabitants and enjoyed throwing rocks at the windows. The brothers became more fearful and paranoid, boarding up their windows and creating complex booby traps to discourage intruders. They stopped paying their bills, and when their gas, water, and electricity were turned off they started warming the house with a small kerosene heater. One of the brothers, Langley, would walk about at night, fetching water from a fountain in the park nearby, and in the process dragging home any junk he found along the way.

By 1933 Homer had severe rheumatism, and went blind. Langley prescribed a diet of 100 oranges a week, plus black bread and peanut butter. He began saving newspapers, and when the brothers drew public attention in a kerfuffle over their mortgage, he told newspapers that he was saving the papers so that his brother could catch up on the news when he regained his sight.

The kerfuffle was this: they stopped paying the mortgage, but when the bank began eviction procedures they insulted and threatened the cleanup crew who was sent over. Police were called, but unable to enter the house. They tried to smash down the front door by were foiled by the mountain of junk piled on the other side. Suddenly Langley appeared and made out a check for $6,700, the balance of the mortgage, and ordered everyone off the premises.

On March 21, 1947, police received a tip that there was a dead body in the house. Eventually a team of seven men were able to gain access by slowly taking out the junk in the front hall, piece by piece, to make their way into the interior of the house: a wall of old newspapers, folding beds and chairs, half a sewing machine, boxes, parts of a wine press, and more. The presence of a dead body was made clear by the smell, but where was it? One patrolman broke in through a second-floor window where he found more boxes and newspaper bundles, the frame of a baby carriage, a rake, and old umbrellas tied together. After a two-hour crawl through the junk he found Homer Collyer dead, his head resting on his knees.

The medical examiner confirmed that it was Homer, but indications were he had not been dead more than ten hours. There was no sign of Langley, or rather there were too many signs to be able to figure out where Langley was.

They began searching the house, systematically removing the junk: books, guns and ammunition, an x-ray machine, a horse's jawbone, a piano, and always more newspapers. More than 19 tons of junk was removed from the ground floor alone; there were two other floors above. In the end, the total was more than 100 tons of rubbish.

Finally, on April 8, a workman came across Langley's dead body, just ten feet from where Homer had died. His body was partially decomposed and was being consumed by rats. He had been crawling through a tunnel of newspapers to bring food to Homer when one of his own booby traps had fallen down and crushed him. Homer, blind and paralyzed, died several days later of malnutrition, dehydration, and cardiac arrest.

More items from the house, as posted on Wikipedia:

Items removed from the house included rope, baby carriages, a doll carriage, rakes, umbrellas, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, pinup girl photos, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer's hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a checkerboard, a child's chair (the brothers were lifelong bachelors and childless), more than 25,000 books (including thousands of books about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, a beaded lampshade, the chassis of the old Model T Langley had been tinkering with, one British and six American flags, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and, of course, countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some of them decades old. Near the spot where Homer died, police also found 34 bank account passbooks with a total of $3,007.18.

I trust you are appropriate inspired to commence spring cleaning.

Source: Wikipedia