Clemente: The Passion And Grace Of Baseball's Last Hero Part 10

Rivera then invited the Clementes to come see his plane. They drove over to the south ramp-and there stood the DC-7, freshly painted in silvery white with the orange lightning bolt and orange- and black-tipped propellers. A mechanic dressed in a white uniform stood near the steps. Vera stayed below while Roberto climbed inside. It looked okay to him, for the little that he knew about airplanes. Rivera said it was ready for leasing and that he was in no hurry. He would provide the crew, and they would wait in Nicaragua for as long as it took Clemente to do his business, a day or two or three-all for $4,000. Clemente shook hands on the deal, without signing an official lease. Rivera said he would gather a crew and call Clemente later that day when final flight details were arranged.

Roberto and Vera went back to the east ramp, saw off the Super Snoopy, then drove across town to the port at Old San Juan, where volunteer longsh.o.r.emen were loading more earthquake relief aboard the freighter San Expedito, a Panamanian flags.h.i.+p owned by a San Juan packing company. The Clementes were met at the dock by a flock of journalists, including Rosa Sabalones, who took pictures of the scene for the San Juan Star, and Efrain Parrilla, who wrote the story. "Clemente told newsmen before sailing that the s.h.i.+p was carrying 210 tons of clothing and 36 tons of food," Parrilla wrote, adding: The s.h.i.+p is expected to reach the Nicaraguan port of Blue Field by Wednesday, Clemente said, and the country's National Guard has been advised to provide transportation for the cargo from dockside to Masaya, a town close to Managua.

Masaya is the closest town to Managua that has a hospital and much of the foreign aid pouring into Nicaragua is being taken there, Clemente said.

The Nicaraguan government is pressing the survivors of last Sat.u.r.day's earthquake to abandon the city in order to avoid the health hazards there and make the work of crews flattening the ruined buildings easier.

Clemente said the s.h.i.+p carried the fourth load of aid sent from the island since the quake. Three other s.h.i.+pments have been made by chartered plane, he said, and another planeload is planned by the committee.

The phrase "another planeload" was a reference to the agreement with Arthur Rivera.

After the news conference at the port, the Clementes drove back to their house in Ro Piedras, where Roberto placed a call to the Rauch home in Kutztown. He wanted to make sure that Nevin and Carolyn and her daughters Carol and Sharon were all coming down from Pennsylvania to celebrate New Year's in Puerto Rico. Carol, who had just finished college at Kutztown State as a Spanish major, answered the phone in the kitchen. Roberto often called her and her mother by the same name, Carolina, the name of his hometown. The conversation drifted between English and Spanish, and though some of what Clemente said seemed confusing, at least concerning who would be where, when, his enthusiasm was typical. They would have a big celebration, he said, in honor of Carolina's graduation and his three-thousandth hit and the new year of 1973. He would buy a big juicy pig to be roasted. But that would have to wait until he got back from Nicaragua. He was leaving the next day and would return on New Year's Day. He had to make sure the humanitarian aid was getting to the people. Then, changing his story slightly, he said maybe Carolina should travel to Nicaragua with Vera. They could go shopping. The handicraft clothes in Managua were so beautiful. Wouldn't that be a great graduation gift? A quick trip, maybe an overnight, and then back the next day. Anyway, it was great they were coming and someone would be at the airport in San Juan to get them. Everything would work out.

Life always did with the Clementes, even if it seemed so fluid and spontaneous.

Back at the airport, Arthur Rivera was scrounging. He had a deal, but no crew. He knew that he couldn't fly the DC-7 himself, and there were no pilots in San Juan, at least none that he knew of, who could fly it. He had the name of a qualified pilot in Miami, and placed a call to him but couldn't reach him. A few hours later, a DC-3 happened to arrive from St. Thomas and taxied to a stop near Rivera's plane. The pilot, Jerry C. Hill, noticed the DC-7 as he was walking from the plane to the cargo lounge and said aloud, "I used to fly one of these."

Again, Rivera seized the opportunity. A pilot dropping out of the sky; what a pure stroke of luck. This could be the man to fly Roberto Clemente.

"Hey," Rivera said to Hill. "Want a job?"

15.

December 31

VERA CLEMENTE STOOD IN THE KITCHEN FIXING LUNCH. It was late Sunday morning, the last day of the year, and the house on the hill was silent. The boys were staying with her mother in Carolina. Roberto was in the bedroom, shades drawn tight, trying to rest before his trip to Nicaragua. Angel Lozano, a member of the relief effort who would accompany Clemente on the mission, had called several times that morning with the same news. He was near the DC-7 at the cargo area and nothing was ready; it would be hours before the plane left. Out the big windows of her kitchen, Vera could look north across the treetops toward the airport on Isla Verde and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The winter sky hung low and gray; the sea looked green. In the stillness, as she prepared the meal, a song looped around in her mind. It was the "Tragedia de Viernes Santo," a popular ballad about a DC-4 that crashed into the ocean on Good Friday 1952 after taking off from San Juan on the way to New York.

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 c.o.c.kroach 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, Jose 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+ning his boots and talking to Vera and his friend Cristobal Coln, the regional sales manager for Goya Food Products who had been helping with the relief effort. Coln, 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 Coln 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," Coln 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: c.o.c.kroach 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 Coln 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 5:30 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 c.o.c.kroach 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 a.s.signed 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Ro 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 c.o.c.kpit. 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-c.u.m-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 c.o.c.kpit 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 Ros, working for Eastern Airlines at Gate 12, saw Rivera's plane as it rolled past his ramp. It must have a lot of cargo, Ros 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 Ros, 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, Ros heard several loud backfires about five seconds apart on the left wing.

Rafael Delgado-Cintron was near Ros 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 alt.i.tude 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 pa.s.senger 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 trouble 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 Ro 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.

The boys were asleep. Robert.i.to fussed before going to bed. "Abuela, why is Daddy leaving?" he had said to his grandmother. "That plane will crash." Robert.i.to had been anxious for days. One of the last things he had done before they took him away from his parents' house the day before was to sneak into the dressing area behind their bedroom and look in the little dresser drawer divider where his dad usually kept plane tickets. Robert.i.to never liked it when his father flew away, and often tried to hide the tickets in a futile effort to keep him at home. This time there had been no tickets. He had warned his father not to leave, and now his premonition was stronger. Mrs. Zabala told him not to be foolish, everything would be fine. But later, before Vera and her friends arrived, she was overcome by an odd sensation. It felt like her heart was going around in a circle of sadness. She went into the kitchen and cried. Something bad is happening, she thought, but she didn't say anything. Nearby, at his house on Calle Nicolas Aguayo, Melchor Clemente was also haunted by dark feelings. He had had a dream about Momen.

The radio was on at the Zabala house, but it was only background noise, no one was listening. The room was full of people talking. Vera, her mother, her brother Orlando, and his wife. Neighbors. Nevin and Carolyn Rauch and the daughters. A few times Vera thought she heard an announcer say the name Roberto Clemente, but that was nothing out of the ordinary; he was in the news every day for his relief work. The telephone rang constantly. Carol, now fluent in Spanish, answered it once. There was music blaring in the background, and the connection was bad, but she thought she heard something about a plane crash. By the time she handed the phone to Orlando, the caller had hung up. One of Vera's close friends, the G.o.dmother to her youngest son, Ricky, called three times. She seemed tentative, evasive, asking how Vera was, then hanging up. The Navarros, Roberto's friends from Carolina, rang the doorbell and paid a visit. They took seats in the living room and didn't talk. It was as though everyone was expecting Vera to know something.

Then Roberto's niece Fafa called. She was coughing, crying. "Are you listening to the news?" she asked Vera. Something about a crash of the airplane going to Nicaragua. At first, Vera was disbelieving, but then Carol took the phone. When word spread through the room the reaction was the same. It couldn't be true. Roberto's plane would have been arriving in Managua by now. "We all said, 'This can't be true! This can't be true!'" Carolyn Rauch remembered. Vera's sister-in-law called the airport and got the first sketchy confirmation. It was a cargo plane with five people bound for Nicaragua. In the far bedroom, Robert.i.to heard his mother's cry and feared the worst.

Vera grabbed her car keys and rushed out the door, followed by Nevin, Carolyn, and Carol. They didn't want her to drive, but she insisted. She knew the way to Roberto's parents' house in El Comandante.

Matino Clemente, Roberto's brother, had been at his father-in-law's house when he heard the news on the radio. He looked outside toward Isla Verde and saw lights flaring in the night sky. He and his brother Osvaldo reached their parents' house before Vera got there. Melchor and Luisa were asleep. Matino woke his father and took him outside to break the news. The old man was devastated, but not surprised. He had dreamed this, he said. Luisa eventually came out of bed and noticed all the people in her house. What's going on? Matino told her it was a Parranda, a spontaneous house call during the holiday season. Then where is the music? Matino huddled with Osvaldo and they decided they had to tell her. She listened without saying a word, then collapsed in deep, sorrowful sobs. December 31. The final day of the year. On that same day eighteen years earlier, Luisa had lost her firstborn son, Luis Oquendo.

By the time Vera and the Rauches arrived, the street was buzzing with people. Soon a caravan of cars left for Isla Verde. They drove to the airport. Ma.s.s confusion. Sirens wailing, policemen everywhere. Had the plane crashed in Nicaragua? No, on takeoff, here in San Juan. They drove toward the ocean near where the plane might have gone down. In the rain, a crowd was already gathering on Piones Beach near Punta Maldonado. Police cars were s.h.i.+ning headlights into the ocean. Vera knew the area well; it was Roberto's favorite spot to collect driftwood.

Sitting in a car nearby was George Mattern, the FAA inspector. He had been at home in Ro Piedras, taking a shower, when his pager went off at about ten that night. He had no phone at his place, so he went out looking for help. Up and down his street, no one was home, they were all out celebrating. Finally, a block away, he found a neighbor who let him use the phone. He called the office and heard about a plane crash. A "newsworthy person" had been aboard. It went down in the Piones area. Get there as soon as you can. Driving through the back roads along the beach, he ran into his boss, Leonard Davis. Stories were already spreading at the beach. Jose Ayala of Punta Maldonado had been in bed when he heard a plane flying overhead and the motors sputter and go dead. Gregorio Rivera had seen wreckage floating on the water about a mile out to sea, but a few minutes later it had disappeared.

Vera felt faint; Melchor was getting weak. A nephew took Vera's car keys and drove them home long past two in the morning.

In Puerto Rico, New Year's Eve is one of the biggest nights of the year, celebrated with fireworks, traditional street dancing, and vibrant Latin music. But Orlando Cepeda felt something eerie in the air long before he heard about the crash. "It was quiet and sad. The night felt different. There weren't many people celebrating. No stars were out. Man, nothing happening." Cepeda, who had revered Roberto since he was a bowlegged batboy for the Santurce Cangrejeros in 1954, was with his wife at a brother's house when he got the news. Roberto Clemente cannot die, he thought. And he remembered how Clemente had wanted him to come along on the flight to Nicaragua.

Osvaldo Gil, who had persuaded Clemente to make that first trip to Nicaragua to manage, and who would have accompanied Roberto on the mercy flight had his wife not talked him out of it, was celebrating with his family when word of the crash reached him. In Spanish, Gil is p.r.o.nounced "heel," and it sounds quite similar to the Spanish p.r.o.nunciation of the English name Hill. With the first reports listing the names of the five people aboard the DC-7, friends and a.s.sociates heard the name Hill and feared that Osvaldo was among the dead. He remembered a saying that Clemente had uttered only a few days earlier as they discussed the flight: n.o.body dies the day before. You die the day you're supposed to.

Caguitas Coln was at a family reunion in his hometown of Caguas at two that morning when a relative told him the news. He had tried to warn Clemente that the plane looked unsafe, to no avail. Now he remembered how Clemente had scoffed at danger with one of his colloquial sayings: You even die riding a horse. Coln felt so blue he retreated to his bedroom and would not come out.

Juan Pizarro was on the roof of his house in Castellana Gardens in Carolina, fiddling with his malfunctioning television antenna, when the plane went down. He happened to be looking toward the ocean at the time, and thought he saw an explosion. A few hours later, when he heard that Clemente's plane had crashed, two thoughts rushed into his mind. He remembered when they were teammates on the Pirates and Clemente had told him that he was going to die in a plane crash. But he also thought Clemente absolutely could not die. He had to still be alive.

Jose Pagn was asleep at the family house in Barceloneta when his father came in and told him the news. The Pirate teammate remembered when Roberto had uncharacteristically fallen asleep on the team plane but jolted awake from a dream saying that a plane had crashed and he had been the only one killed, and how Pagn had tried to soothe him by saying that he often dreamed that he was rich but that didn't make it so. When Pagn's wife, Delia, heard the news, she insisted that they leave immediately for Ro Piedras to be with her dear friend, Vera Clemente.

Pedrin Zorrilla, who had signed Clemente to his first contract with Santurce, heard the bulletins on the radio that night at his house in Manat. The news left him gasping for air. Clemente, he thought, had become more than a baseball player; he was now a symbol, a representation of the Dream of Deeds, the burning pride for Puerto Rico expressed by Zorrilla's poet father: Land, blood, name, and race.

Eduardo Valero, a veteran Puerto Rican sports writer, was asleep that night when he received a call from a friend in Virginia. You know who died? Roberto Clemente. "It was like a cold water shower," Valero said. But he could never figure it out. "Who in the h.e.l.l in Latin American culture leaves a family on New Year's Eve? If you find two, let me know the other one. He left his family to go there on New Year's Eve."

Luis Olmo, one of the Three Kings of Puerto Rican baseball, paving the way for Clemente in the major leagues, was with his son's wife's family in Naguabo when he heard the news on the radio. Olmo thought of Clemente as a man of pa.s.sion for everything in life, and he had a different take on the question raised by Valero. "I don't see any reason for him to be on that plane that night to go to Nicaragua," Olmo said later. "That's the night to be with family. The reason he went, I don't know. That is the night to keep your heart at home."

Vic Power, another of the Three Kings, heard about the plane crash a few minutes before midnight after he had finished dinner with his wife and son at a restaurant in Condado. The last time he had seen Clemente was on the plane returning from Managua after the amateur baseball champions.h.i.+ps three weeks earlier. Clemente had been quiet during that uneventful flight home, sleeping. Power had been restless, still bothered by that fishbone in his throat. Then Clemente had gone off to run his youth baseball clinics, and Power had returned to manage Caguas. Power could not believe that his friend was gone.

The Pirates had a working relations.h.i.+p with the San Juan Senadores that year, and the team was stocked with young Pittsburgh players. Many of them had gathered on New Year's Eve at a waterfront condo. Chuck Goggin, who had slapped his first major league hit in the same game that Clemente got his three-thousandth, was sitting on the patio deck with Richie Zisk and Bob Johnson shortly after midnight and noticed "a bunch of commotion going on over the ocean, it looked like helicopters and planes" and lights. There were no radios, no phone calls, no one at the party had a clue. They speculated that there must have been a plane crash, or maybe a boat was missing.

Steve Bla.s.s and his wife were hosting a party at their house in Upper St. Clair Towns.h.i.+p, a Pittsburgh suburb. There were eight couples there from the neighborhood, including Dave Giusti and his wife. By two in the morning, everyone had left but the Giustis, who were going to stay and party all night. Then a call came from Bill Guilfoile, the Pirates public relations man. There is an unsubstantiated report that a plane has gone down near Puerto Rico and Clemente was on it, Guilfoile said. My G.o.d, Bla.s.s thought. Clemente! He's invincible. He doesn't die. He plays as long as he wants to and then becomes governor of Puerto Rico. With the stunning news, Bla.s.s and Giusti sobered up quickly. Not knowing what else to do, but wanting to do something, they drove to general manager Joe L. Brown's house in Mount Lebanon, the adjacent towns.h.i.+p in the South Hills area. Brown let them in and they sat around drinking coffee. As Brown later recalled the scene, the three men "talked about Roberto and cried" as they recalled "the depth of the man and the intelligence of the man and the humor of the man." Clemente never held anything back from the people, Brown thought. He gave them more than they had any right to expect from him. He reminded Brown of a panther, the grace and power of a panther. He would always think of footage from the 1971 World Series of Clemente rounding second and sliding into third, so graceful and strong, such spectacular pa.s.sion. What a good man.

From there, Bla.s.s and Giusti drove across town to Willie Stargell's house, and the three Pirates consoled one another until the sun came up, eventually making their way over to the annual New Year's Day party at the home of Bob Prince. The Gunner had thought about canceling his party after he heard the news, but decided that Roberto would want the party to go on. It did, as a wake.

The fans of Pittsburgh were in shock. On New Year's morning, Ann Ra.n.a.lli's mother was in the kitchen when she heard a radio report. She ran upstairs to tell her daughter, who three months earlier had taken the streetcar to Three Rivers Stadium and thrown confetti over the right-field railing after Roberto Clemente got his three-thousandth hit. Ann started sobbing. She spent the rest of the day praying that he would be found. "It was really hard," she said later. "He was the Pope to me."

"Adios, Amigo Roberto" read the lights atop Mount Was.h.i.+ngton. The mayor declared a week of mourning. Richard Santry was home for the holidays during his freshman year at Notre Dame. All through his childhood, Santry had watched Clemente from the Knothole Gang seats in the right-field bleachers. He and his father would stand at the screen and wave and sometimes Clemente would come over to talk to them or throw a ball their way. There are days you remember your whole life, Santry would say decades later. Where you were when JFK was shot. Where you were on 9/11. He would always remember New Year's morning, 1973. "The sound I remember is the bedroom door opening, the creaking of rusty hinges. My mother sat on an empty twin bed and started to poke me a bit. I glanced over at the clock. It was eleven-twenty or so; I had slept pretty good. My mom's first words to me were 'I have some very bad news.' I sat up, and Mom said that Clemente had died in a plane crash. I looked at her, groggy, not quite sure what I heard, waiting for a punch line. What are you talking about? He was on a plane delivering supplies to people in Nicaragua and the plane dropped into the ocean, she said. I was eighteen years old. I went into the bathroom . . . and just sat there and had a cry like a family member or my best friend just died."

Nancy Golding had gone to bed on New Year's Eve with her radio on. Things always seemed louder in the morning, and when she awoke the radio was blaring the news. She was just an average kid in Pittsburgh, and yet she happened to live near Roberto's accountant and the Clementes had been so kind in letting her into their lives. She had been to their house in Ro Piedras and had eaten in their kitchen and had played with their little boys. Roberto Clemente is missing and presumed dead in a plane crash, the radio announcer was saying, and she started screaming. "Clemente died! Clemente died!"

In Miami that morning, William Couric, the FAA official who had battled with Arthur Rivera almost daily during his tenure in San Juan, exploded in uncharacteristic fury when he heard the news. How could they let the tramp aircraft from c.o.c.kroach Corner ever roll down a runway? "They wouldn't listen to me! They wouldn't listen to me!" he cried. "I tried! I tried so hard to put those people out of business!"

The three Clemente boys, Robert.i.to, Luisito, and Ricky, were brought back to the house in Ro Piedras late the next morning. Everything was a blur, but there were a few images they would never forget. Parked cars line both sides of the street all the way up the hill. They are led across the little bridge from the sidewalk to the front gate. A big black bow is on the door. Military police stand at attention at the entry-way. The flags of Puerto Rico and the United States frame the doorway. The door opens into a sea of faces. Oh, there are the kids! And people rush up to hug and squeeze them. Finally they are taken into a bedroom with their mother and grandparents and their mom starts crying and holds them tight and searches for the words.