Clemente: The Passion And Grace Of Baseball's Last Hero Part 9

When the inning was over, Clemente walked slowly out to his position in right. Ramos followed him step by step with his zoom lens. In the right-field stands, Ann Ra.n.a.lli was ecstatic. She had wanted her hero's three-thousandth hit to be more than a dribbler, more than a single, and she got what she wanted-a line shot into the gap in left-center. Now, as Clemente moved in his easy, athletic gait toward them in right, Ra.n.a.lli and her friends rushed down to the rail and threw their confetti. Some of it landed on the field. Nearby, some fans from Puerto Rico were cheering loudly. Facing the bleachers, with his back to the plate, Clemente doffed his cap and raised it high. Luis Ramos caught the moment forever, in what became the most famous picture he ever shot. From the back, No. 21, tipping his cap. Ramos thought Clemente was raising his hat to G.o.d. The Puerto Rican fans thought he was acknowledging their cheers. And Ann Ra.n.a.lli felt certain that he was tipping his cap to his three fans from the eighth-grade cla.s.s at St. Bernard's. Over time it would seem that his gesture had a deeper meaning, that he was saying farewell.

Virdon sent in a replacement for Clemente the next inning and intended to rest him the final three games of the season, until the team's director of press relations, Bill Guilfoile, discovered that with one more appearance Clemente could break Honus Wagner's record for most games played by a Pirate. Clemente felt no urge to play; he wanted to rest for the divisional playoffs against the Cincinnati Reds, but in a late inning against the Cardinals on October 3, the second-to-last game of the season, Virdon sent Clemente out to right field for an inning, and the record was broken. He had played 2,433 games for the Pirates. Not bad for a hypochondriac, he would say.

All in all, it had been a rough year for Clemente. He had played only 102 games and hit .312, a figure that most players would envy but that was subpar for him. His fielding was superior, as usual, good enough for him to win his twelfth straight Gold Glove. But his final push for three-thousand hits left him with little energy for the playoffs, and it showed early on against the emergent Reds of Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Pete Rose, and Tony Perez. He went zero for seven in the first two games, which the teams split, then heated up in the next two, with a double and home run, but could do nothing to change the course of the five-game series. After Bench tied the decisive fifth game with a home run in the ninth, the Pirates ended up losing 43 on a wild pitch by Bob Moose. In the clubhouse later, everyone seemed down, except Clemente. He gave a spirited speech about next year, then found Moose alone in a corner, slumped in despair. "Don't worry about it anymore," Clemente told him. "It's gone. It's gone."

There had been talk when the playoffs ended that Clemente wanted to retire, but the surest evidence that he intended to keep playing came from Rex Bradley, the bat expert at Hillerich & Bradsby. Bradley made the trip from Louisville to Cincinnati during the playoffs just to talk to Clemente about his bats. "He wanted a new model made," Bradley recalled. It would be a refinement on the k.n.o.bless Frenchy Uhalt bats Clemente had been using for years. The new model would be a C276, and Clemente wanted it heavier than ever, thirty-eight ounces. Bradley promised to make two bats right away and send them to Puerto Rico for testing during the winter. If Clemente liked them, he would order a few dozen.

The question of retirement was broached by Sam Nover of WIICTV, who recorded an hour-long conversation with Clemente on October 8, a wide-ranging interview that was perhaps the most revealing of his career. "Bobby, at thirty-eight years old, and eighteen years in the major leagues, and having accomplished everything you wanted to accomplish in baseball, I guess the thought enters your mind that one of these days it's going to be all over," Nover began. "Do you have any idea now when it will be over, and when it comes, what are you going to do with your life? What would you like to do?"

Offering no hints that he planned to retire, Clemente instead took the opportunity to delve into his philosophy of life and happiness. "People are always asking me, 'How much money do you have? Are you secure?' I don't worry about that. The only thing I worry about is being happy. If I can live. If I can for example have my health I can work. I don't care if I'm a janitor. I don't care if I drive a cab. As long as I have a decent job, I will work. I know these players that they've been rich and they lost everything they have and they kill themselves because of the money. To me, I can be a person like me-I make a lot of money, but at the same time I live the life of the common fellow. I am not a big shot. If you go outside the ball park you are never going to see me trying to put on a show or pull attention, because that's the way I am. I am a shy fellow and you see me with the same people all the time. If you want to be my friend you have to prove to me that you want to be my friend and you want to be aware that I need lots of time when I play baseball. Now in the wintertime we can be as slow as you want, but in the summertime we have to call it short. So I would say I don't worry about what I am going to do after I stop playing baseball. Probably I will stay in some capacity in baseball. But I don't worry one way or the other. I just worry that I be healthy and live long enough to educate my sons and make them respect people. And to me this is my biggest worry: to live for my kids to be people that people look at them and respect them and they respect other people."

Clemente had a busy winter ahead. He had been hired on a three-year contract by Eastern Airlines as a special sports consultant, which meant the company could use his name on promotions and call on him to speak at conventions and sales meetings. In return, Eastern would sponsor baseball clinics for underprivileged children in Puerto Rico, which Clemente viewed as a precursor to his larger dream for a sports city. The planning had already begun for clinics to be held in October and early November in Carolina, Ponce, Mayagez, Arecibo, and Aguadilla. Clemente had also asked his friend Ramiro Martnez to help him organize a Bob Prince Day celebration for later in October. Arriba! Clemente believed that Prince had always treated him fairly, and he wanted to show his appreciation by honoring the Gunner in San Juan. (When the time came, Clemente showed how deeply he cared for Prince by presenting him with one of his most cherished possessions, the Silver Bat he was given for winning his first batting t.i.tle in 1961.) And there was more: Osvaldo Gil, president of the Puerto Rico amateur baseball federation, had asked him to manage the Puerto Rican team at the world champions.h.i.+ps in Nicaragua, a job that would take three weeks in November and early December.

On October 14, the night before he left the mainland for his off-season in Puerto Rico, Clemente joined several teammates for Al Oliver's twenty-sixth birthday party at his apartment in Pittsburgh's Greentree section. "Everybody's lips were moving," Oliver later said of the party. "That's one thing about the Pirates, all of us can talk. We enjoy talking and we really liked each other . . . Roberto I remember was bringing a sermon. He always did. He gave sermonettes. This time he was talking about life, people getting along, that's all he talked about, how he just can't understand why people can't get along. I was in his amen corner. He had a tendency to use his hands when he spoke, and he had a pa.s.sion about what he believed in that was so obvious."

Late that night, before they scattered, Oliver asked his teammates to gather around him. "Okay, let's all take a picture," he said. "It might be the last time we'll be together."

13.

Temblor

THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, AT FIVE-THIRTY ON A Friday afternoon, President Richard Nixon drafted a congratulatory note to his friend Howard Hughes. Nixon was in Florida, unwinding at the Southern White House compound on Key Biscayne that he shared with his loyal friend Charles (Bebe) Rebozo. Hughes, the billionaire recluse, was in Managua, Nicaragua, holed up in a seventh-floor suite at the Hotel Inter-Continental, where he oversaw his business enterprises from a darkened room, dealing exclusively with male secretaries, security guards, and nurses, who at his insistence had to be Mormons. It was the same hotel that Roberto Clemente had left fourteen days earlier after managing Puerto Rico's team in the world amateur baseball champions.h.i.+ps.

Nixon and Hughes were longtime acquaintances, the knot of their connection tightened by power and money. Hughes had ingratiated himself with the Nixon family by once making a $205,000 loan to the politician's brother, Donald. He also had funneled a hundred thousand dollars in secret donations to Nixon's recently completed 1972 reelection campaign (though the existence of those donations would not be revealed publicly until Senate Watergate Committee hearings a year later). The campaign money arrived in briefcases full of hundred-dollar bills, and the person to whom a Hughes aide handed the cash was none other than Bebe Rebozo.

The President considered his friends.h.i.+p with Hughes so important that he wanted his message delivered in person by the U.S. amba.s.sador to Nicaragua, Turner B. Shelton. A written note had become necessary because Nixon-even with one of the world's most sophisticated communications systems at his disposal-could not get a telephone call through to the obsessive-compulsive germ-freak who was hiding from the world up in his cave-like hotel suite. The occasion was the approach of Hughes's seventieth birthday, or so Nixon thought. There was mystery even to the inception of Howard Hughes: while his commonly stated birthday was December 24, 1905, court doc.u.ments in Texas recorded another date, September 24. In either case, Nixon was wrong about the age. Hughes was sixty-seven.

"Threescore years and ten is a major milestone in any man's life, and you especially have much to look back on with pride and much to look forward to with pleasure from this vantage point," Nixon wrote. "I'm sorry that circ.u.mstances don't permit me to congratulate you by telephone on this important birthday, as I had wished to, but I trust that the warmth of my good wishes can be conveyed by this means as well. Not only have I greatly valued your support, but I also have enormous respect for the contributions you have made to the nation during the course of a long and brilliant career. Pat joins me in wis.h.i.+ng you a very happy birthday, and many more to come. Cordially, Richard Nixon."

The birthday greeting was sent from Key Biscayne up to the White House and then conveyed by telex from the Situation Room down to the amba.s.sador's residence in Managua. Shelton was to hand-carry it to the hotel the next morning. It never happened.

This was the start of a joyous weekend in Managua, the height of Christmas season. Colored lights festooned the shops along Avenida Centrl and glowed from the pyramid-shaped hotel up on the hill. Holiday revelers were out strolling along the narrow streets of the old city late into the night. For days, it had been hot and oddly still, following the worst drought of the century, but now, after midnight in the first minutes of December 23, a sudden wind blew in, cold and strong. The animals could tell. And Pedro Chamorro, with the alert instincts of an opposition newspaper editor on guard against danger, also noticed something. The leaves rustled as if in warning, he thought. Then came the first tremor and the earth shuddered side to side. Soon a second rumble, more up and down than horizontal, like some gargantuan creature bursting to the surface from deep underground. Later a third quake, again up and down, more violent than the second-and in a thunderous spasm the city collapsed on itself. The temblor, registering 6.5 on the Richter scale, flattened 350 square blocks in two horrific hours, pipes erupting, fires flas.h.i.+ng, debris and soot choking the air, people running, staggering, screaming, ripping off their burning clothes, dazed, blood everywhere. The clock atop the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception at the epicenter of the earthquake stopped at exactly twelve twenty-seven.

When the oscillating began, Amba.s.sador Shelton was at his residence in the El Retiro section on a hill above town and had just tuned his radio to listen to the news. Chairs started flying, paintings, small tables, gla.s.sware, anything loose. The lights went out. He dashed upstairs to check on his wife, who was safe, then retreated to his study, where he had an emergency generator and radio. Within minutes, he learned that the American emba.s.sy had been in the vast destruction zone. His secretary, Rose Marie Orlich, had been trapped inside, one among the probable thousands of victims. Shelton sent a Morse code message that made its way to the State Department's relay station in suburban Was.h.i.+ngton. Emba.s.sy destroyed. Will require help. More later.

Nicaragua's military leader, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, was next door, inside his sprawling ranch house with his wife, Hope, and the three youngest of their five children. At the first tremor they ran from the house into an alley. The second and powerful third tremors bounced them around so much, Somoza later said, that "we thought we were pieces of ice in a c.o.c.ktail shaker." When the rumbling ended, Somoza climbed into a car he used as supreme commander of the Armed Forces of Nicaragua and began working the radio, contacting police and guard headquarters. He learned that the guard building downtown had been destroyed, with ma.s.sive casualties, and the national communications center, housed in the presidential palace, also had been knocked out of commission. He decided to set up emergency headquarters at his ranch house, which suffered only minor damage. Somoza was not the president of Nicaragua-he had relinquished that t.i.tle temporarily to satisfy a const.i.tutional requirement-but there was no doubt about who ran the country. Earlier in the month, in fact, the Nixon administration had given him the security protection of a head of state when he visited the Kennedy s.p.a.ce Center to watch the night launch of Apollo 17, the last manned flight to the moon. Now, with the earthquake crisis, Somoza dropped all pretensions and seized full control.

Over at the Inter-Continental, there was much commotion in the postquake darkness. With its squat base and pyramid shape, the building had not collapsed, though there were several cracks and the top floors listed slightly. The elevators were useless because of the power outage. Guests escaped down emergency stairwells, weaving their way past junked furniture that was being stored on the landings of several floors. Julie Sinkey, a Pan Am stewardess, scrambled down the steps and outside in her nightclothes. She had been asleep, and the rumbling split apart a wall so that when she rose from bed she could see the people in the room next door. Somehow, on the way out, she had remembered to bring along her ten-dollar camera, and from the hillside she took pictures of the inferno raging below in the old center of town. Howard Hughes was said to have had a fear of dying in a natural disaster, but when this one struck he remained so unruffled that his staff had trouble persuading him to leave his protective suite. "He was cool, so cool," recalled aide John Eckersley. "Everyone was saying we must evacuate immediately, but he said no. He wanted to be sure it was absolutely necessary." His delay gave aides time to pack his clothes and medicines, which were scattered about the suite. He was so frail that they carried him down the darkened stairwell and placed him in a Mercedes-Benz limousine in the hotel parking lot. At dawn, they drove him to the nearby residence of Somoza, the man who ten months earlier had invited him to use Nicaragua as his hideaway when he had scooted from the Bahamas. The strongman general and phobic billionaire had a few things in common, foremost that they were both friends of the President of the United States.

The Clementes, at their house on the hill in Ro Piedras, awoke on December 23 to news of the deadly quake. To them this was not some distant tragedy, but so close in time and memory that it felt like a family disaster. The old city, the shops where Roberto had bought fine clothes for Vera, all in ruins. What happened to the many people he had met during his more than three weeks in Nicaragua? The merchants, baseball fans, restaurateurs, the workers and farmers who reminded him so much of the poor in Carolina, the ones to whom he had given coins every morning. And the young boy at the hospital waiting for artificial legs to be fitted so that he could be the Puerto Rican amateur baseball team's batboy next year-what happened to him? "As soon as we heard about the earthquake early that morning we were very upset because we met some very nice people down there and felt like we lost someone-you know, a relative or someone. We felt very involved with this," Vera Clemente said later. Roberto wanted to know more than the San Juan media could tell him. Friends at a local radio station said they had no direct communications to Nicaragua.

Clemente eventually found a ham radio operator who was picking up detailed reports of the earthquake. A team of radio operators from San Juan to Chicago to Caracas to the State Department shortwave station in Was.h.i.+ngton had formed a link with a Managuan identifying himself as "Enrique," who was broadcasting in Spanish from a mobile unit inside a truck as he drove around the remains of the city. There were still minor tremors, Enrique reported. It looked like five or six thousand people were dead. Maybe a hundred thousand homeless. Two of the three major hospitals were destroyed, along with the presidential palace, the newspaper offices of La Prensa and Novedades, the U.S. emba.s.sy, and two of the three major hotels, the Balmoral and Gran. The main fire station had collapsed, trapping essential equipment and making it more difficult to fight the fires. Even a giant statue of Somoza's father had toppled from its pedestal. "People run through the streets like zombies, with terror. Big buildings are cracked," Enrique reported over his mobile radio. "There is blood on people's faces, legs, and arms as they leave their houses. We have never seen a catastrophe like this."

What did people need? Clemente asked. Everything, was the answer-food, clothing, medical supplies.

The disaster relief effort was underway. At seven-thirty that morning, a telex from Amba.s.sador Shelton requesting immediate medical help had crossed the desk of Colonel Maurice Berbary at the United States Southern Command in the Panama Ca.n.a.l Zone. While larger tactical hospital units were readied to fly in from Fort Hood in Texas and MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa the following day, Berbary had the first forty-six-man medical team loaded inside a mammoth C-130 and on its way to Managua before noon. The Red Cross and other volunteer groups were traveling to the devastated capital from Mexico City, South America, the United States, and even Europe. Only a year earlier, in the wake of a humanitarian crisis in Biafra, a small group of French doctors had formed a new medical a.s.sistance organization called Doctors Without Borders, and upon hearing of the Managua earthquake they went into action for the first time.

It was right then, twelve hours after the temblor, when many were coming to Managua's rescue, that Howard Hughes made his escape. Somoza had hoped that Hughes might somehow a.s.sist in the recovery. But as soon as the general pa.s.sed word along to his guest that the runways at Las Mercedes International appeared undamaged, Hughes and his entourage left directly for the airport. When they got there, an aide asked a local rental car agent, who was also an amateur radio operator, to send a message to Florida. After some trouble with the equipment, a second ham radio operator was found, and the cryptic message he sent, as he recalled it later, went like this: We're okay. Leaving on Lear jet. Destroy all records and x-ray. Proceed immediately to Miami. When arrive in Miami call 31 Los Angeles for ultimate destination. And with that, Howard Hughes fled Managua at its time of greatest need. American soldiers arriving from the Ca.n.a.l Zone in the first C-130 remembered seeing the private jet take off just after they landed.

On that first long day of the Managua disaster, the attention of President Nixon at his compound in Key Biscayne and millions of sports fans around the United States was focused on something else: the first round of playoff games in the National Football League. Interest was especially intense in Pittsburgh, where the resurgent Steelers were hosting the Oakland Raiders at Three Rivers Stadium. The Steelers had been perennial losers, known for getting beat and beating the h.e.l.l out of the other team at the same time, but now, for the first time since 1947, they were playing in the postseason. After calling Henry Kissinger in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., Nixon settled in to eat lunch and watch the game in the living room of his vacation house at 516 Bay Lane. It was a defensive struggle with little action until the end. With a minute and thirteen seconds remaining, the Oakland quarterback, Ken Stabler, ran thirty yards for a score to put the Raiders ahead 76. Then, with Pittsburgh's last gasp, came one of the most memorable plays in NFL history.

Fourth and ten, ball on the Steelers' forty, another sixty yards to score. Twenty-two seconds left. Art Rooney, Pittsburgh's owner, resigned to a loss, was taking the elevator from his box down to the clubhouse to deliver a consolation speech. Bill Nunn Jr., the former sports editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, now a personnel man for the Steelers, thought the game was over and sat in the team box cussing out the defense for the breakdown that allowed Stabler to score. Terry Bradshaw, the third-year quarterback, called the play: 66 Option. Bradshaw back and looking, looking for someone to throw to . . . fires it downfield . . . It's caught in the air . . . The pa.s.s was intended for the halfback Frenchy Fuqua, but Oakland's fearsome safety, Jack Tatum, arrived with a wallop just as the pa.s.s got there, and the ball ricocheted back several yards and was s.n.a.t.c.hed out of thin air at ankle level by rookie running back Franco Harris, who swept across the field and down the sideline for the winning score.

Myron Cope, the Pittsburgh sports figure who had written the seminal story on Clemente's aches and pains for Sports Ill.u.s.trated in 1966, was now the color announcer for Steelers football. He had left the broadcast booth with two minutes to go and was on the field, standing behind the corner of the end zone as Franco thundered toward him. After conducting postgame interviews in the bedlam of the Steelers locker room, Cope went to dinner and then drove to the WTAE-TV studios to write a commentary for the eleven o'clock news. Pecking at his typewriter, he took a call from a woman named Sharon Levosky, who said she was celebrating with a group of delirious Steelers fans at the Interlude bar downtown. One of her friends at the bar, Michael Ord, had thought up a name for Franco's miracle catch-the Immaculate Reception-and told her to call Cope to spread the word. Cope thought it was a phrase well worth appropriating, so he wrote it into his commentary, and it caught on from there. Forever after, the Immaculate Reception meant only one thing to any pro football fan-perhaps the most stunning last play in pro football history.

If one were to point to the moment when pro football permanently surpa.s.sed baseball as the sporting pa.s.sion of Pittsburgh, when the Steelers became a winning rather than losing tradition, that might be it. The Immaculate Reception transcended even Maz's home run in the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series. It was the talk of western Pennsylvania all weekend and all week through Christmas and the days leading up to the next game against the Miami Dolphins on New Year's Eve. The disaster in the rubble surrounding the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Managua seemed far, far away.

All day long Clemente had been tracking the ham radio reports from Managua and thinking about what he could do to help. He called his friend Osvaldo Gil, the amateur baseball president who had been at his side all those days in Nicaragua. "What should we do?" he asked. Before Gil could answer, Clemente added, "I don't know what you're going to do, but I'm going to do something about it." Luis Ferre, in his final week as governor of Puerto Rico, and Rafael Hernndez Coln, the governor-elect, had both issued public expressions of sorrow and promised to help Nicaragua. That night, Roberto and Vera went to a nightclub he owned, El Carretero, in Carolina, then drove downtown to the San Jeronimo Hotel for a banquet at which he was to receive another award. He was tired, but felt an obligation to go. Vera wore the elegantly embroidered dress that Roberto had bought for her in Managua. Ruth Fernndez, the singer and political activist who had just been elected to the Puerto Rican Senate, was there, along with Luis Vigoreaux, a local television personality. They huddled with the Clementes to talk about the temblor, and Vigoreaux suggested that as well-known figures in the community they should take prominent roles in the relief effort. Clemente, as a national hero, would lead the way. What came to be called the Comite Roberto Clemente Pro-Nicaragua was born.

The next morning, a Sunday, Christmas Eve, President Nixon took breakfast at eight forty-five in his Key Biscayne bungalow. The morning papers were full of reports about the devastation in Nicaragua. According to the daily diary kept by his secretaries, Nixon began making long-distance calls as soon as he finished breakfast. There were two people in Managua that he especially wanted to reach. First he tried General Somoza at his residence, but the call was not completed. Then, two minutes later, according to the diary, "the President telephoned long distance to Howard R. Hughes, President of the Hughes Tool and Manufacturing Company, in Managua, Nicaragua." That call, too, went unanswered, since Hughes by then was long gone. A half hour later, the President finally got through to Somoza. His concerns were personal and political. Nixon had first met Somoza in 1955 when he was Vice President and toured Central America. Sixteen years later, as President, he had hosted Somoza at a White House dinner. The general had arrived with six boxes of cigars for Nixon and a gold lapel pin for the First Lady. Nixon, in his toast, had congratulated Somoza for "a quarter-century of service to the cause of peace and freedom." Now, in his call to the disaster zone, Nixon was rea.s.sured to learn that Somoza and his family were safe. But he was worried that chaos in the aftermath of the natural disaster might lead to civil disturbances and give an opening to Somoza's opponents. His instinctive fear was that the tumult might lead to a Communist uprising.

Along with medical teams and combat engineers, Nixon would dispatch a battalion of paratroopers to keep order in the Nicaraguan capital.

At the White House, the President's military adviser on the National Security staff, General Alexander M. Haig Jr., was receiving hourly updates on Nicaragua. At five-fifteen that morning, the first of fourteen C-141s, departing in one-hour intervals, left MacDill Air Force Base with medical supplies, equipment for a field hospital, and emergency communications. The planes, Haig was informed, were to bring back "some one hundred dependents of American personnel and nonessential staff members as well as those nonofficial Americans who want to be evacuated." People everywhere were doing what they could to help. In Atlanta, workers at an Army depot spent the day filling more than four thousand five-gallon jugs with water. Fire stations in New Orleans became collection centers for food and supplies. The a.s.sociated Press noted that a church congregation in Mountainview, Ohio, "donated its entire Christmas Eve offering." The offices of Lanica, the Nicaraguan national airlines, served as Red Cross relief headquarters in Miami, whose large Latin population responded generously to the crisis, some people coming in with their Christmas turkeys and pigs.

In San Juan, Clemente and Ruth Fernndez made a public plea for a.s.sistance on WAPA-TV, getting air time between telecasts of horse races at El Comandante Racetrack in Carolina. They announced that the parking lot of Hiram Bithorn Stadium, the winter league ballpark for San Juan and Santurce, would be used as the collection point for aid for the entire Christmas Day. By then, Clemente had developed a direct ham radio connection to a hospital in Masaya, thirteen miles from Managua, and was told how much they needed medicines and X-ray equipment. Masaya itself had been hard hit. The size of the town, known for its handicrafts, had nearly doubled to more than sixty thousand because of the exodus from the capital. Many houses there had red flags hanging from windows indicating there were survivors inside. Conditions could not be more urgent. Clemente decided to lease a plane to get supplies to Nicaragua faster.

On Christmas morning, Pedro Chamorro circled Managua on his motorcycle, weaving his way through what he called the rubble zone. No one was thinking about the religious holiday, he noted. "However, on the sidewalks, patios and parks of the fallen city, those who were still together shared their things-and the earth stopped shaking." His city, the editor of La Prensa observed, seemed "crushed by a sort of incomprehensible peace." Nicaraguan troops were stationed at street corners in the downtown section, their concentrations most obvious outside banks and government buildings. The stench of death was overwhelming. On some blocks, hundreds of mutilated bodies still littered the streets and many more remained trapped under debris. "We are fighting against time," said Jorge Cogna, a Red Cross volunteer from Mexico City. Health officials were concerned about the spread of typhoid and other diseases if the dead were not recovered and buried soon. In contrast to the sharing that Chamorro saw, General Somoza thought the best policy was to instruct all service agencies to stop feeding the poor and hungry in the center of town; it was, he argued, a matter of public health, the only way to force people to obey his evacuation orders and leave the dangerous precincts. A six o'clock curfew was imposed, but late into the night the old city echoed with gunfire. Some looting had begun, people walking off with whatever they could find in the rubble. Somoza now issued another order. He directed his civil guardsmen to shoot looters on sight.

Dawn on the morning of December 26 "broke with the arrival of parachutists," Chamorro recalled. They were U.S. troops dropped in from Panama to supplement Somoza's guard. But the tension only increased. Chamorro, in his lyrical style, described "the thousands and thousands of hands extended toward emptiness, asking for the food, which was kept in the same place as the limousines . . . under custody of the government tanks. They didn't give out the food. They didn't give out the food." The paradox grew starker; more aid, less help. Chamorro was amazed at how the "boxes of medicine and food continued to arrive at the airport and the tent hospitals waved flags from all countries." Yet as aid was coming, residents were leaving. "Processions of people left the city from the three roads, barbed wire stretched around the most destroyed parts and the sounds of dynamite blasts could be heard smas.h.i.+ng walls and sinking rooftops. Buses, trucks, small carts loaded with paintings, dressers, scissors, suitcases, trunks pa.s.sed over the ashes and rocks looking for an exit." A ma.s.sive white tent city was arising on the edge of town. At the general cemetery, they dug a ma.s.s grave and buried the first thousand bodies. Most of the old city had been declared a contaminated area. U.S. Army engineers, following a block by block grid system, began systematically clearing the ground in the hundred-degree heat. Demolition crews used bulldozers and dynamite to level anything that had managed to stand after the quake. Lime was spread over the rubble. For the first time, on that day after Christmas, vultures circled overhead, drawn by the odor of death.

Clemente spent the day at the parking lot of Hiram Bithorn Stadium in the Hato Rey section of San Juan, across from the Plaza Las Americas shopping center. From eight o'clock that morning, the action seemed to orbit around him, all the incessant noise and bustle of people coming and going, dropping off food and cash. Every so often, Clemente grabbed the microphone and instructed people on how to make donations. "Don't give money that you cannot afford," he said. "If you can give money, so there is no problem, make your checks out to the Roberto Clemente Relief Committee for Nicaragua, not to Roberto Clemente. Thank you very much." The mood was urgent, pulsing, always more to do, arrangements to be made for crates, boxes, trucks, medical supplies, and squads of fit young students who could unload here and load there. Enough had been collected already for more than one trip. The committee had reached an agreement with an air transport company based in Miami to lease a Lockheed Constellation known as the Super Snoopy for three round-trips between San Juan and Managua, each at a cost of $3,700.

At the end of the day, Clemente and Ruth Fernndez drove to Channel 4 to promote the relief effort again, this time on Luis Vigoreaux's 8 P.M. television show. The program itself was a comic absurdity in contrast with the seriousness of events in Nicaragua. It was known as Sube, Nene, Sube-or Up, Baby, Up. Engaged couples would appear on the show, with the woman yelling words of encouragement-Pa'arriba, Papi, Pa'arriba, or Get There, Daddy, Get There-as her fiance tried to climb a greased pole and retrieve a flag planted on the top. If he succeeded, they would win an all-expenses paid honeymoon. It was after that segment of the show that Vigoreaux turned his attention to the Managua earthquake. He explained the magnitude of the disaster and said that all Latins were coming together to help their brothers and sisters in Nicaragua. Fernndez spoke next. "I want to say to the people of Puerto Rico, the best way to serve G.o.d is to serve the other people," she said.

Arriba! Arriba! For all those years, that had been Bob Prince's exuberant radio greeting whenever Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates rose from the on-deck circle and stepped toward the plate. Day after day, year after year for eighteen seasons, Clemente met the challenge. Pa'arriba, Papi, Pa'arriba! Fernndez turned to Clemente to speak. He focused on what the disaster meant to young people and how they had responded. It was apparent that Roberto's dream of a sports city for Puerto Rican kids remained at the front of his mind. "I want to take this opportunity to thank the people of Puerto Rico," he said. "The teenagers have been very helpful in picking up the boxes and gathering everything for the planes. They are from twelve to sixteen years old and they have helped us a lot . . . The young people of Puerto Rico are the ones most worried about this."

Howard Hughes, after refueling stops in Florida, Newfoundland, and Ireland, had arrived at Gatwick Airport on the southern rim of London by then. Authorities detained him inside his ten-seat Lockheed Jetstar for more than a half hour as they sought to determine his ident.i.ty. His American pa.s.sport had expired. Through the intervention of his local sponsors, N. M. Rothschild & Sons, the London bankers, his entry was finally approved, and he was chauffeured in a fleet of four Rolls-Royce sedans to the Inn at the Park, overlooking Hyde Park, where he was put up in a $2,500-a-night suite. His wing of the hotel was sealed off, all the fire escapes in the hotel were blocked, and Rothschild security guards patrolled the sidewalks below with walkietalkies. A wealthy guest from Canada, quartered at the same nightly rate on the other side of Hughes's floor, was vexed to discover that overzealous guards had seized a brace of pheasants he had bagged in a weekend hunt and had hung proudly on the hotel balcony. But if Hughes was looking for seclusion, it was not to be had. Fleet Street reporters and television crews huddled outside, recording any sc.r.a.p of news about him. At one point, apparently without irony, an aide came out and told the a.s.sembled press corps that his boss was hoping to "live more of a life, if people will let him."

The first step in living a more normal life, officials at the U.S. emba.s.sy suggested, might be for Hughes to fill out an application form and pay the $12 fee for arriving without a valid pa.s.sport. In Managua, a reporter for the New York Times drove up to the Hotel InterContinental and thought about how the place had been abuzz ten months earlier when Hughes had arrived from the Bahamas, and now here it stood, overlooking the fallen city, "black and empty."

Volunteers in San Juan worked overnight to load the Super Snoopy with supplies donated to the relief effort. There was an X-ray machine and other medical equipment for the hospital in Masaya. The plane would leave the next morning at dawn. Raul Pelligrina, a major in the Puerto Rico National Guard and close friend of Osvaldo Gil, had agreed to accompany the crew and shepherd the delivery to Managua, along with Ana Salaman, a registered nurse from Carolina. The Clementes came to the airport to see them off in the dark, misty chill. Vera remembered looking over at her husband as the plane rolled down the runway and wondering whether that was a tear she saw in his eye.

Nicaragua is the largest country in Central America, about the size of Iowa, but the least populated. In 1972 it had about 2 million citizens, a quarter of them in metropolitan Managua. The people were known for their beauty, the nation for its poverty. More than half the populace was illiterate. Like other Central American countries, Nicaragua had its own difficult and peculiar history with the United States. It was long coveted by American interests as a pathway to the Pacific and the gold of California, and was the first proposed route of a ca.n.a.l that eventually was built in Panama. In 1855 an American freebooter from Tennessee, William Walker, invaded the country with the idea of transforming it into a slave-holding colony, and for a brief time, before he was driven out, he established English as the official language and called himself emperor. U.S. Marines arrived in Nicaragua in 1909 and were there much of the time until 1933. Three years after they left, the reign of the Somoza family began. Describing the singular hold the Somozas had over Nicaragua for nearly fifty years, University of Denver professor Tom J. Farer once wrote, "If El Salvador was the country of the fourteen families, Nicaragua was the country of only one." The first Anastasio Somoza ruled for twenty years until he was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 1956, but power was pa.s.sed along to his sons.

Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who would be the last in the Somoza line, took power in 1967. He spoke fluent English, went to prep school on Long Island and in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and was a member of the U.S. Military Academy cla.s.s of 1946. He graduated 752nd out of 875 cadets but excelled in marksmans.h.i.+p and military tactics. At home in Nicaragua, Somoza also came to excel at using power for financial gain. By 1972 it was estimated that he and his family controlled 25 percent of the gross national product. The Somozas controlled cattle ranches, coffee and sugar plantations, sugar mills, distilleries, auto dealers.h.i.+ps, textiles, hotels, airlines, and a newspaper, Novedades, while also owning vast stretches of real estate on the outskirts of Managua. Looking back on the years of Somoza's rule, a commission on Central America chaired by Henry A. Kissinger declared that the general's "galloping greed discouraged foreign investment, distorted the economy and progressively concentrated in his hands capital a.s.sets and investment opportunities." The Somoza family's selfishness, the commission report stated, reached its fulfillment in the person of Anastasio, "whose achievements gave new meaning to the term kleptocracy, that is government as theft."

By December 27, on the fifth day after the earthquake, the greed of Somoza and his cronies was becoming apparent. Red Cross volunteers wondered where all the aid was going. Money seemed to disappear. Raul Pelligrina returned to San Juan that night after a round-trip to Managua with the first delivery from Puerto Rico. He went directly from the airport to the relief committee headquarters outside Hiram Bithorn and could barely contain his disappointment. It was awful, he told Clemente. The moment they landed, Somoza's soldiers surrounded the plane and tried to take everything. Nicaragua was in chaos. No one knew whether aid was getting to the right people. Pelligrina, calling the military's bluff, said that if they didn't let him through he would reload his aircraft and fly back to San Juan and tell the great Roberto Clemente what was happening. Finally, Somoza's son Tachito came to see who was giving his soldiers trouble. Upon hearing the invocation of Clemente's name, Tachito relented and let them go on to Masaya. But it was a ha.s.sle from beginning to end, and it seemed to Pelligrina that most supplies were being diverted. Osvaldo Gil stood nearby as Pelligrina told this story. Clemente was silent, but it was apparent how angry he was, Gil said. They could see it in his eyes. When Pelligrina finished, Clemente, his voice reaching a high pitch, said they had to do something to get the aid to the people who needed it. If he had to travel to Managua himself to make sure Somoza and his guards weren't stealing it, he said, then that is what he would do.

Special missions had been reaching Managua every day during that week between Christmas and New Year's Eve. On the same day that the Super Snoopy flew in from Puerto Rico with the first s.h.i.+pment from Clemente's relief committee, a small chartered plane arrived from Jamaica carrying Bianca Jagger, her husband, Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, and some medical supplies. Bianca, then only twenty-two, had grown up in Managua and was worried about her divorced parents, neither of whom she had been able to reach since the earthquake struck. Her mother, Doris Macias, ran a shop in the old section of Managua, where everything was rubble. Mother and daughter shared a love of politics and an intense dislike of Somoza; during a student protest when she was a teenager, Bianca had been tear-ga.s.sed by Somoza's National Guard. What she saw as soon as they landed at the airport in the aftermath of the earthquake only intensified her feelings. Soldiers were everywhere, she recalled in an interview with journalist Kurt Jacobsen, but they were just seizing supplies and taking them to government warehouses. Nearby, on the other side of the fences, hungry people were shouting for food and water, their pleas ignored. With the help of a British journalist, the Jaggers roamed the city in search of Bianca's parents. As it turned out, her mother and father had made it out of Managua safely and were staying in Leon, where they were reunited two days later. But her experiences during those few days in her hometown affected Bianca Jagger so much that she persuaded her husband and the Rolling Stones to perform a benefit concert for the Nicaraguan people. She would never forget the arrogance of the Somoza regime, she said, nor the "stench of burned flesh" that overwhelmed her as they drove through the ruins.

From the North, arriving within hours of the Jaggers, came a thirty-three-member medical team organized by health officials in Rockland County, New York. At the end of a long flight, as the Pan Am jetliner was descending, Dr. Hart Achenbach noticed a jagged trench running parallel to the sh.o.r.es of Lake Managua that stretched for miles and was so deep he couldn't see the bottom. He was stunned to realize that earthquakes really did open the ground and swallow people and buildings into the great maw. Once the plane touched down, the doctors were met by one of Somoza's sons, who asked them whether they brought any barbed wire so he and his troops could put it around the cargo. This was the same demand that had been made of Major Pelligrina when the Clemente aid came in from Puerto Rico. The Americans ignored young Somoza and loaded four hundred cartons of a mobile hospital into trucks that they had arranged to have waiting for them.

Once they set up their hospital tents on the edge of downtown, the doctors were overcome by the stench. "The smell was incredible. There were lots of dead, though we didn't see them, we could smell them," Achenbach recalled. "It was sickening. We would take handkerchiefs and wet them and put them over our faces." His colleague, Dr. Frederick Zugibe, chief medical examiner for Rockland County, antic.i.p.ated that the doctors and nurses would be overwhelmed with patients, but there were more dead than injured. They did treat 250 Managuans and deliver twenty-five babies, but what Zugibe remembered most was that some of his patients had been wounded by soldiers, not injured from falling debris. "I had more individuals that I treated who were shot," he recalled. "They were shot for looting. It was amazing. Young kids. I remember operating on young kids to remove bullets."

At about the time that Dr. Zugibe was removing bullets from a young patient on the afternoon of December 28, President Nixon placed a call to Maurice J. Williams at his holiday retreat in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Williams was the deputy administrator of the Agency for International Development, and the President had just picked him to be his representative at the earthquake scene. "I want you to go to Managua and take charge of the relief effort," Nixon said. "I'm concerned that the Communists may take over the country. Somoza is a personal friend of mine; I will have a letter for you to carry to him."

Williams caught a flight from Was.h.i.+ngton to Panama and then reached Managua by military helicopter. His first impressions were like all the others: desolation, smoldering rubble, unG.o.dly stench. He visited the field hospitals and noticed that many casualties had resulted from gunshot wounds. Maybe, he thought, there had been an attempted revolt, as Nixon had feared. Then he went up the hill to visit Somoza, carrying with him the President's letter. The first thing he noticed was a platoon of U.S. infantry soldiers armed and camped on the site-there, he a.s.sumed, by order of President Nixon. "Quite a character," Williams said later of the Nicaraguan general. "Somoza impressed me as an entrepreneurial type. Certainly he had extensive business monopoly interests and apparently was milking the country economically." Williams tried to set up rigid accounting practices for the U.S. aid. "However, I found that relief supplies from other countries and private agencies were being received by Somoza's son, a young man in the uniform of an Army lieutenant, who stored them in a locked warehouse outside the city. One had a sense of inefficiency and corruption."

Clemente was determined that his own efforts would not fall victim to corruption. To several friends in those final few days of 1972, he made the same request: I'm going to Nicaragua. Come with me. He called his friend Les Banos, the Pittsburgh photographer, explained his distress over the corruption in Managua, and said, "Why don't you come down and take pictures?" If not for the Immaculate Reception, Banos replied, he would be there no questions asked, but because the Steelers won he would be covering their next playoff game against the Miami Dolphins on New Year's Eve. Clemente turned to Orlando Cepeda, who was home in Puerto Rico after the most difficult season of his career. Cepeda had been traded from the Atlanta Braves to Oakland the previous June, but underwent knee surgery after only three at-bats with the A's and never got back on the field. After fifteen productive seasons in the big leagues and a total of 358 home runs and 1,261 runs batted in, Cepeda found himself struggling to keep his career alive. Oakland had placed him on waivers at season's end, and not a single club had put in a claim for him. Now, after Christmas, came the deflating news that the A's had given him his unconditional release. That often meant a career was over, but Cepeda, at age thirty-five, was not ready to give up. He wanted to exercise his troublesome legs back into shape, and in any case he loved being in Puerto Rico during the holiday season, and that is why he said, no, sorry, when his friend asked him to come along to Nicaragua. No was not an easy thing to say to Roberto Clemente. "He was angry with me for not going," Cepeda remembered.

The earthquake relief collection site was moved after a few days from the Hiram Bithorn parking lot to a larger lot across the street at Plaza Las Americas because San Juan and Santurce were back playing at the stadium. The Senadores team was a virtual Pirates South, stocked with Clemente's Pittsburgh teammates, including Richie Zisk, Rennie Stennett, Milt May, and Manny Sanguillen. Before a game one night that week, Clemente took a break from his volunteer work and visited the clubhouse, where he immediately fell into the comfortable routine of razzing in a mix of Spanish and English, mostly with Sanguillen, his cheery little brother from Panama.

"Sangy, what position do you play in the winter league?" Clemente asked, fixing a serious stare on Sanguillen. He knew the answer. The sports sections that week had featured stories about how the hot-hitting catcher was learning to play outfield.

"Right field," Sanguillen said. "I play twenty games in right, one in left."

The first crack of a smile showed on Clemente's face. "Sangy, you play left field or go back to catching. You have no chance to take my job."

"I play right field real good now," Sanguillen responded. "Not as good as you, but real close. I may be the best right fielder in the league when you quit."

Now Clemente was laughing. "You never come close, Sangy. Besides, I think I'm a better catcher than you."

When Clemente said something like that, no one could be certain whether he was kidding. He thought he could do anything. He always insisted that he could throw a curveball better than the pitcher Steve Bla.s.s. He couldn't, of course, nor could he catch nearly as well as Sanguillen, but that was Clemente. At least he wouldn't feel slighted for not being universally regarded as the best pitcher or catcher in the world. But the very idea of Sangy out there in right challenging his position, that wasn't quite a laughing matter, no more now than it was a month earlier when Edgard Tijerino, the Nicaraguan sportswriter, suggested that a young Cuban outfielder had an arm that could match El Magnfico's. But the beauty of Sanguillen was that he could ease whatever tension Clemente was feeling at the moment. Now Clemente was joking with him again about the monkey that he brought back from Nicaragua after the amateur baseball tournament. At home, he called the monkey Tefilo, but when Sanguillen was around he always joked that the monkey's name was Sangy. Sangy was acting up, he said. Sangy bit one of the kids and went wild at Don Melchor's house and made a mess of all the fruit, fake and real. Had to give him to the zoo. Then Clemente said: I'm going back to Nicaragua, Sangy. Come with me. But Sanguillen couldn't go, either. He had some more baseball games to play in right field.

And there was Osvaldo Gil, his compatriot on the baseball trip to Nicaragua. "Valdy, will you go with me?" Clemente asked, and Gil, without giving it a second thought, said sure. But that night, when he told his wife that he intended to go back to Managua with Roberto Clemente, she fled to the bedroom without saying a word. When Osvaldo came in, she was crying. She was feeling sad, she told him, because they had just been married a few months when he left for Nicaragua the first time, and now he was leaving again. Gil realized that she was right. The next morning, at Plaza Las Americas, he told Clemente, "I talked to my wife, and I'm not going."

"And you're the one who says we shouldn't listen to the women?" Clemente answered, recalling with a touch of sarcasm how Gil, during their earlier trip to Managua, had teased him so much for reflexively consulting with Vera before making a decision.

"But you're right," Clemente now said to Gil. "You shouldn't go. I'll go by myself."

14.

c.o.c.kroach Corner

IN THE WIDE WORLD OF AVIATION THERE ARE DARK little corners of desperation. One of them during the early 1970s was a back lot of Miami International Airport known as c.o.c.kroach Corner. It was said that you could buy anything for a song at c.o.c.kroach Corner, occasionally even planes that had a decent chance of taking flight. The place looked like a mechanical graveyard, creaking with rickety old surplus DC-3s, DC-6s, Lockheed Constellations, and DC-7s, but in fact it was more of a winged bazaar. What were known in the industry as tramp operators did business there, buying, selling, and leasing planes to anyone looking for a cut-rate deal. It was at c.o.c.kroach Corner that a twenty-six-year-old operator named Arthur S. Rivera bought another old plane on July 12, 1972. This DC-7, powered by four Curtiss Wright 988 engines with Hamilton Standard propellers, would double Rivera's cargo fleet, supplementing his twin-engine DC-3 in hauling goods between San Juan, his home base, and other Caribbean islands.

Rivera had obtained a commercial pilot rating four years earlier, but knew nothing about DC-7s, which were more than five times heavier than DC-3s, so he could not fly his plane back to Puerto Rico. It remained at c.o.c.kroach Corner until sometime in September, when he finally found a pilot. When they ferried it from Florida to the island, Rivera rode along in the right seat as copilot. They parked the aircraft at a cargo ramp at San Juan International Airport on Isla Verde, and there it remained throughout the fall. Word soon spread about Rivera's folly, the only DC-7 at the airfield. The plane had a registration number, N500AE, but seemed anything but airworthy. Among other deficiencies, its No. 3 propeller was said to be feathered, indicating engine malfunction. "It was never seen to fly, and everybody wondered what Mr. Rivera was going to do with the plane. That probably included Mr. Rivera," Michael Pangia, a Justice Department aviation lawyer, observed later. What Rivera did was spruce up the exterior. He gave the fuselage a new paint job of silvery white and added the bravado touch of a lightning bolt, orange with black trim, that ran horizontally along both sides above the windows and zigzagged below the c.o.c.kpit. The same color scheme was applied to the tips of the propellers, creating the effect of tiger stripes. With that superficial remodeling, Rivera placed advertis.e.m.e.nts in the local newspapers, announcing that his outfit-he called himself the American Air Express Company-had a DC-7 available for lease. The phone in his home office on Loiza Street in Santurce did not ring off the hook.

On the Sat.u.r.day morning of December 2, Rivera and a relative, who knew even less about DC-7s than he did, took the plane out for what was called a run-up, meaning they would taxi around the airstrip, warming up the engines, but not try to fly. As practice runs go, this one was a fiasco. Rivera, in the pilot's seat, forgot to close the hydraulic pump bypa.s.s, which caused him to lose steering control. He shut down all four engines in an effort to slow the plane's momentum, but it ended up rolling into a drainage ditch. When it came to a stop, the nose of the plane was leaning down and the wings were so low that two propellers touched the ground. It is not every day that a DC-7 plunges into a ditch. Everyone who worked at the airport knew about the "incident" (as it was called, rather than an accident), especially since it blocked the taxiway for several hours and forced air traffic controllers to reroute traffic until heavy equipment was brought in to hoist the plane out of the ditch and tow it ignominiously back to the east ramp. If Federal Aviation Administration officials in San Juan needed a reminder to keep close watch on the comings and goings of Arthur Rivera, this was it, but with his aviation history, one might a.s.sume that no further warnings would have been needed.

From the moment he came down from Atlanta and began transporting cargo out of San Juan International in November 1969, Rivera had been a constant irritant to inspectors at the FAA's Flight Standards District Office. Day after day, he offered his DC-3 out for hire as he made island hops from Puerto Rico to St. Thomas to St. Croix and back to San Juan, hauling leisurewear, rugs, dry goods, and luggage. But despite repeated warnings from federal aviation officials, Rivera refused to obtain the proper certification for a commercial operator, acting instead as though he were merely flying the plane for his own personal recreation. This allowed him to avoid more frequent inspections and the far stricter flight standards of commercial aviation. Acting on a complaint from a licensed compet.i.tor, the FAA finally launched a formal investigation, compiled a list of sixty-six illegal trips that Rivera had made, and issued an emergency order in August 1970 revoking his pilot's license. In taking that step, the FAA said Rivera's "aviation knowledge and experience was relatively limited" and that he was an "extremely independent and headstrong person who would not take advice."

That characterization was an understatement. To Rivera, the federal regulators were enemy combatants whose sole purpose was to put him out of business. A typical run-in occurred on the Thursday afternoon of April 2, 1970, when he arrived at San Juan International from St. Thomas and parked his DC-3 at its normal spot on the east cargo ramp. Representatives from the Customs Bureau and the FAA were there waiting for him. When Rivera stepped down from the c.o.c.kpit, inspector Juan L. Villafae asked to see the papers and manuals of the airplane.

"You people are always picking on me, and on account of that I'm losing a lot of money," Rivera snapped, according to later testimony of the customs officer, Abraham Irizarry. Then Rivera padlocked the door to his plane. When Villafae noted that a copilot was required for this flight and asked where that person was, Rivera said that he was locked inside the plane. After much haggling, the inspectors made their way in and found 224 pieces of luggage, a load that Rivera had carried for Caribair Airlines, but no copilot. Asked to explain the disappearance, Rivera claimed the copilot "escaped through the hatch." Then, in what the inspectors interpreted as a threat of violence, Rivera said that Villafae had better watch out if he walked the streets of downtown San Juan.

The chief of the FAA's flight standards office in San Juan then was William B. Couric, a University of Miami engineering graduate and veteran fighter pilot who flew combat missions in World War II. Couric was such a stickler that his office nickname was Deputy Dog, in honor of the little cartoon character who insisted on doing everything by the book. The Couric v. Rivera relations.h.i.+p took on a bit of a cartoon nature, with the inspector in constant but often frustrating battle to keep the freewheeling pilot on an acceptable course. Couric had counseled Rivera many times before moving to yank his pilot's license, urging him to follow the rules, to no avail. During each discussion, Couric later reported, Rivera would "exhibit a temper and raise his voice." After the emergency order was issued, Rivera simply ignored it, further frustrating Couric. One afternoon Couric confronted Rivera after watching him land his DC-3 at the airport, arriving from what was likely another illegal run. "Why do you continue to fly?" Couric asked. Rivera claimed that he knew nothing about the emergency order. When Couric handed him a copy, Rivera said that he'd worked hard to get his license and would not give it up.

Rather than reform his desperado ways, Rivera went on the offensive. He shadowed Couric around the airfield, occasionally stopping his car to take pictures, as though he were the one doing the enforcement work. There appeared to be no "rhyme or reason" to Rivera's behavior, Couric wrote in a memo to his superiors. "His actions appear irrational and maybe require psychological examination." But Rivera was writing his own memos and letters higher up the chain. He penned what was later described as "a lengthy diatribe" to Alexander P. b.u.t.terfield, then FAA administrator in Was.h.i.+ngton, accusing federal aviation officials of waging a personal campaign to put him out of business. He was just a small businessman trying to follow the American dream, he claimed, while the San Juan investigators were corrupt and taking bribes from his compet.i.tors. Aiming even higher, he sent a two-page telegram to President Nixon in which he made the same arguments. There is no evidence that b.u.t.terfield or Nixon read Rivera's rants or acted on them in any way, but something did happen in the aftermath that stunned and disappointed Couric and his crew. An appeals court judge, while ruling that Rivera had violated Federal Aviation Regulation 121.3(f) in not having proper certification for commercial flights, nonetheless reduced his penalty from revocation to a 180-day suspension of his pilot's license. The court bought Rivera's argument that the government should not deprive him of his livelihood.

Couric was soon promoted and transferred to another posting in Miami, but Rivera stayed around to live out his dream, eventually expanding his fleet with the DC-7 he found at c.o.c.kroach Corner.

The battle of wills between Arthur Rivera and the San Juan regulators was played out in the context of a tragic accident that had jolted the world of aviation safety at the beginning of the decade. On October 2, 1970, at a time when Rivera was ignoring Couric's emergency order, two twin-engine Martin 404s left Kansas carrying members of the Wichita State football team to a game against Utah State in Logan, Utah. The first leg of the flight from Wichita to Denver was uneventful. It was a bright fall day, and on the final leg, the pilot of one of the planes decided to give his pa.s.sengers a better view of the brilliant autumn colors as they crossed the Continental Divide. He flew into a box canyon, not realizing until too late that he was trapped. The next mountain ridge was approaching too soon for the plane to gain enough alt.i.tude to pa.s.s over it. The pilot banked sharply to try to turn around but the aircraft stalled and crashed into a forested area near the base of Mount Trelease. All but eight of forty people aboard died, and interest in the disaster was inevitably heightened by the fact that so many college athletes were among the thirty-two dead.

During the investigation, several problems emerged as factors in the crash. The crew had a minimal amount of training on the aircraft, the plane was overloaded, and the pilot made a fatal error by intentionally and unnecessarily flying into a troublesome area. But beyond all that, federal aviation officials came to realize that this case was symptomatic of a larger problem. Air transport companies, especially tramp operators, were using a scheme to get around commercial aviation regulations. In the specific case of Wichita State, the athletic department did not hire a standard airliner for the flight to Utah, but turned to an outfit called Golden Eagle Aviation. In what was known as a "dry lease," Golden Eagle leased the plane to Wichita State, making the university the operator of the plane. In effect it was a deal where Golden Eagle said my right hand will lease you the airplane, so that you are in charge, and my left hand will provide you pilot services. This was cheaper than chartering a commercial airliner, but it also was irresponsible. Companies using dry leases could claim their flights were not commercial operations, since customers who signed the lease were in effect flying themselves-and this allowed