Airliner Explodes Over Longmont
Suitcase Bomb Destroys Plane
Denver—November 1, 1955
Sounds like a headline from the nineties. But this dreadful explosion happened November 1, 1955. A United Airlines DC-6B exploded eleven minutes after takeoff from Denver's Stapleton Airfield. All 44 passengers and crew were killed. The dead included Dr. Harold Sanstead, Deputy Secretary of the U. S. Public Health Service, and two General Motors executives.
The crash itself was shocking enough, but Denver and the nation were apalled to learn that the airplane had been deliberately bombed. Then the full story emerged in unimaginable detail. John Gilbert Graham had put a bomb in his mother's luggage — then purchased a $37,500 life insurance policy from an airport vending machine. He'd paid $1.50 for the insurance.
Graham never collected the money. He was arrested on Nov 14, tried, convicted, and on January 12, 1957 was executed in Colorado's gas chamber at Canon City, Colorado.
Several years earlier, Graham had plead guilty to charges of forging over $4,000 in checks. He had been paying restitution for those crimes, and at the time of the bombing, he only owed $105.34 of the restitution.
No other U. S. airliner had ever been successfully bombed, though other attempts had been made. In Canada, twenty-three people had died in the explosion of a Canadian Pacific DC-3, near Quebec, in 1949.
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© J. C. Adamson, 1996
President Suffers Heart Attack in Denver
Denver—September 24, 1955
President Dwight Eisenhower often vacationed in Denver. He was on the forty-second day of one such visit when he suffered a heart attack — a coronary thrombosis — on September 24, 1955. Ike had played 27 holes of golf the day before the attack. He was hospitalized until November 11 of that year at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital, outside of Denver. He of course fully recovered, was re-elected the following year, and served until John F. Kennedy's inauguration in January, 1961.
An interesting side-note is that Colorado's Governor, "Big Ed" Johnson had suffered a similar heart attack just three weeks before Ike's, and was still hospitalized in Denver when the president was taken ill.
When in Denver, Ike stayed at the home of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Elvira Dowd, in a quiet residential neighborhood, near downtown Denver. He worked at a Summer White House, at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver. Eisenhower loved Colorado, and named his presidential plane The Columbine after Colorado's delicate official state flower.
© J. C. Adamson, 1996