{"id":31325,"date":"2025-11-01T07:00:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=31325"},"modified":"2025-10-31T13:27:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T18:27:09","slug":"historical-note-parental-guidance-suggested-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=31325","title":{"rendered":"Historical note. Parental guidance suggested."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>70 years ago today, United Flight 629 (a DC-6B) disintegrated near Longmont, Colorado. There were no survivors among the 44 passengers and crew.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I am being slightly misleading when I say the plane &#8220;disintegrated&#8221;: it did disintegrate, but it did so because someone had planted a bomb on board.<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"480\" height=\"270\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/KIxLZ19npqs?si=XZDvdkA2pES4eS1u\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center><\/p>\n<p>By dint of dogged, unrelenting work by the police and FBI, it was determined that John Gilbert Graham (also known as &#8220;Jack&#8221;) had placed the bomb in his mother&#8217;s luggage and taken out insurance on her before the flight. Graham confessed on November 13th.<\/p>\n<p>I remember a line from &#8220;Law and Order&#8221; back in the good old days: &#8220;A psychotic believes his doorman is sending him signals through a radio in his teeth. A psychopath believes the way to stop the signals is to kill his doorman&#8230;and six other people as well.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Graham was a psychopath. His mother put him in an orphanage when he was five years old (after the death of his father). She never bothered to get him out: they were estranged until he was 22, and he remained angry at her. It seems like she tried to make it up to him with material things. I&#8217;ve seen in some sources that she bought him a restaurant (other sources say it was her restaurant, and she just made him manager). The restaurant was destroyed by a gas explosion in 1955. I&#8217;ve also seen reports that she bought him a new pickup truck. which was destroyed by a train shortly after the purchase. Graham collected insurance money on both the restaurant and the truck. He also served time in prison for check forgery and &#8220;illegal transport of whiskey&#8221;.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jack_Gilbert_Graham#Arrest_and_conviction\" target=\"_blank\">Graham&#8217;s confessions gave details about the bomb that matched the evidence from the plane&#8217;s wreckage. He also told prison doctors that he &#8220;realized that there were about 50 or 60 people carried on a DC6, but the number of people to be killed made no difference to me; it could have been a thousand. When their time comes, there is nothing they can do about it.&#8221;<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>United 629 was only the second plane blown up by a bomb in the United States. (The first was <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/United_Air_Lines_Flight_23\" target=\"_blank\">United Flight 23<\/a>, on October 10, 1933.) There is a general belief that Graham was inspired by a 1949 Canadian aircraft bombing, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Canadian_Pacific_Air_Lines_Flight_108\" target=\"_blank\">Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It is a curious and interesting fact that, at the time, there was no Federal law making blowing up an aircraft in flight a crime. But murder is always a crime, and the local authorities in Colorado decided to prosecute Graham for the first degree murder of his mother. If they had missed, I guess they would have had 43 other chances.<\/p>\n<p>But they didn&#8217;t miss. He was convicted on May 5, 1956, and sentenced to death.<\/p>\n<p>Graham was executed in the gas chamber on January 11, 1957, one year and 72 days after the crime.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/United_Air_Lines_Flight_629#Trial\" target=\"_blank\">One source has his final words being &#8220;Thanks, Warden&#8221;, after Warden Tinsley patted him on the shoulder. TIME magazine quoted a lengthier statement, &#8220;As far as feeling remorse for those people, I don&#8217;t. I can&#8217;t help it. Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That&#8217;s just the way it goes.&#8221;<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"480\" height=\"270\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/3P4psy1oPeA?si=eQhzDmzXzXKK2ns7\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center><\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"480\" height=\"270\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6Titp4mAuNw?si=JqRKk41Rxx81w5G0\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center><\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"480\" height=\"270\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/drXbq_XAr7g?si=fWxSC0pmboqlB57_\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fbi.gov\/history\/famous-cases\/jack-gilbert-graham\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Famous Cases and Criminals: Jack Gilbert Graham&#8221; from the FBI<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>70 years ago today, United Flight 629 (a DC-6B) disintegrated near Longmont, Colorado. There were no survivors among the 44 passengers and crew.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,9,188,97,23,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cops","category-explosives","category-fbi","category-history","category-law","category-planes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31325"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31373,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31325\/revisions\/31373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}