October 25, 1999: The Payne Stewart Plane Crash

October 25, 1999: Golfer Payne Stewart and 5 friends die in the crash of a Learjet. The plane was flying from Orlando to Dallas, and suffered a loss of cabin pressure, meaning that everyone on board was dead well before the plane finally ran out of gas and went down, far off course, in Mina, South Dakota.

NOTE: For a long time, with this project, I resisted putting in references to golf, because of the kind of people who tend to play it. I finally caved in, although I haven't included as many references as I would if it were a real sport, which it is not.

William Payne Stewart was born in 1957 in Springfield, Missouri. He was known for wearing old-time golf clothing, including ivy caps and pants that were a combination between plus-fours for and knickerbockers, and also for diving into water hazards when he won tournaments. He won the PGA Championship in 1989, and the U.S. Open in 1991. Earlier in 1999, he won the U.S. Open, and participated in the U.S.' dramatic come-from-behind win in the Ryder Cup.

He boarded a Learjet 35 and took off from Orlando, Florida, heading for Houston, where he intended to play in the last major tournament of the PGA season, The Tour Championship. The others on board were the pilots, Michael Kling and Stephanie Bellegarrigue; Stewart's agent Robert Fraley, a former University of Alabama quarterback; Van Ardan, president of Fraley's agency; and Bruce Borland, who designed golf courses for Jack Nicklaus' company.

But the plane veered off course -- or, rather, it stayed on course, on automatic pilot, going far from its intended destination of Houston. Stewart was famous enough that the TV news networks broke in with a special report, knowing only that the plane was off course, and saying that the likeliest explanation was that it was on autopilot, everyone on board was already dead, and it would crash when it ran out of fuel.

The plane before its final flight

This was 3 months after the crash of John F. Kennedy Jr., and it was a similar situation: We were merely awaiting the inevitable announcement. Only it would come sooner, because there would be no water search: Since the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) already knew the plane was off course, the U.S. Air Force was able to track it, and escort it, to report on the eventual crash, or to escort it in the slim hope that someone could still land it.

Our Air Force wasn't the only one tracking it: Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was told that the plane might crash over the city of Winnipeg, and he gave the order (reluctantly, he admitted in his memoirs) to the Royal Canadian Air Force to shoot it down if it crossed the border. But right after he gave the order, he received word that the plane had already crashed in South Dakota. It was 12:13 PM, Central Time (1:13 Eastern). The plane had been in the air for 3 hours and 54 minutes.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that the plane failed to pressurize, and everyone was incapacitated by hypoxia as it passed Gainesville, Florida. Stuck on autopilot, the plane kept going in the same direction, nearly all the way across the country from Houston.

Stewart was 42. Over the next year, various golfers wore copies of his outfits in tribute in tournaments. He was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2001. The section of Interstate 44 that goes through his hometown of Springfield has been named the Payne Stewart Memorial Highway. A new course in Branson, Missouri was named the Payne Stewart Golf Club.

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October 25, 1999 was a Monday. Baseball was on a travel day in the World Series, in which the New York Yankees would sweep the Atlanta Braves in 4 straight. The NBA season was 8 days away from starting.

On ABC Monday Night Football, the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Atlanta Falcons, 13-9 at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh.

And there was 1 game played in the NHL: The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Dallas Stars, 4-0 at the Air Canada Centre (now the Scotiabank Arena) in Toronto.

January 17, 1938: Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater" Is Completed

January 17, 1938: "Fallingwater" is completed in Springfield Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. It is the most famous design of America's foremost architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright was born on June 8, 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin. He believed in designing in harmony with humanity and the environment, a philosophy he called "organic architecture." By 1900, he was already being hailed for his "prairie style" houses.

He fell into a bit of a rut after World War I, and by the 1930s, competitor Philip Johnson was calling him "the greatest architect of the 19th Century." And like a later Chicago-based legend, basketball star Michael Jordan, Wright took that personally. He upped his game, and the 1930s would feature his most-hailed designs.

Among these was a house he was contracted for by Edgar J. Kaufmann, president of Kaufmann's Department Store in Pittsburgh. He and his wife, Liliane, enjoyed outdoor activities like hiking and horseback riding. Their son, Edgar Jr., was a student of Wright's, and he introduced the design giant to his parents in 1934, at Taliesin, Wright's artists' colony in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

The Kaufmann's owned a remote property outside Pittsburgh, a small cabin near a waterfall, which they used as a Summer retreat. In December 1934, with these cabins deteriorating, Kaufmann contacted Wright, and asked him to build them a new house there.

Wright received the results of a survey of the area in March 1935. It took Wright until October 1935 to complete his final design, construction began in April 1936, and the house was completed on January 17, 1938. With its horizontal-dominated design of stone and concrete, built into the rock of a hill, what Edgar Jr. called "broad bands of windows," and an incorporation of the waterfall into the house itself, the construction cost $155,000 -- about $3.2 million in 2022 money. Almost immediately, the house was featured in Henry Luce's magazines Time and Life, and restored Wright's reputation as America's greatest architect -- living or dead.

Fallingwater was the Kaufmann family's weekend home from 1937 until 1963, when Edgar Jr. donated the property to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. Liliane died in 1952, and Edgar Sr. in 1955. Edgar Jr. taught architecture and art history at Taliesin and at Columbia University in New York, living until 1989. Wright died on April 9, 1959, 6 months before the opening of his last commission, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Due to the area's unusual patterns of sunlight and humidity, and the presence of the waterfall as part of the design, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has spent a great deal of money to restore Fallingwater. They now operate the house as a museum, with some of the Kaufmann family's art collection inside, including many paintings by Mexican artist Diego Rivera, who was a friend of theirs. The house also has a Museum Store. It is 67 miles southeast of Pittsburgh; and 45 miles north of Morgantown, West Virginia, home of West Virginia University.

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January 17, 1938 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL had no games scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.