January 16, 1942: Carole Lombard Is Killed

Clark Gable (left) and Carole Lombard

January 16, 1942: Actress Carole Lombard is killed in a plane crash outside Las Vegas, along with her mother and 21 other people. She was only 33, and was trying to return to Los Angeles from a war bond tour.

Despite actor-director Orson Welles' theory that Lombard was raising too much in war bond sales, and the plane was shot down by Nazi agents, the Civil Aeronautics Board determined that the crash was due to pilot error.

Born on October 6, 1908 in Fort Wayne, Indiana as Jane Alice Peters, she was raised by a single mother in Los Angeles. She was only 12 when she acted in her first film, but the arrival of "talkies" coincided with her adulthood, and she became a star.

She specialized in what came to be called "screwball comedies," such as Twentieth Century in 1934 and My Man Godfrey in 1936. She was briefly married to actor William Powell. She had married Clark Gable in 1939, and they were an early celebrity "supercouple." Their house in suburban Encino, California became known as "The House of the Two Gables," after the Nathaniel Hawthorne story The House of the Seven Gables. (A "gable" is the generally triangular portion of a wall between the edges of intersecting roof pitches.) 

Gable married twice more, but Lombard was the love of his life. Their only film together, No Man of Her Own, was released a year before they were married.

Carole Lombard has been called "the first American woman to die in World War II." Her last film, the anti-Nazi comedy To Be Or Not to Be, in which she co-starred with Jack Benny, was released a month after her death.

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January 16, 1942 was a Friday. I have no scores for this historic day: Baseball and football were out of season, there was no NBA yet, records from the existing National Basketball League are hard to come by, and no NHL games were scheduled for the date.