United Airlines Flight 624 crashed at 1:41 PM daylight time just between Aristes, PA and Centralia, PA. Four crew members and 39 passengers on board all perished in the accident..
This is how the Pottsville REPUBLICAN reported “bodies all over the place” in 1948:
Among the dead: A Broadway famous man, a fashion designer, and the co-founder of ESQUIRE magazine.
It almost hit the then-active Midvalley Colliery 2..
Here is a website that documents all on board and where their graves can be found now.
The passenger plane was flying from San Diego California that day.. it stopped in LA.. Chicago. And was en route to LaGuardia in New York. But it met its fateful demise near Centralia on June 17…
Ed Darlington of radio station WCNR at nearby Bloomsburg said “there was no sign of life and apparently everyone was killed.” The scene of the wreck was in a sparsely wooded area about five miles from Mt. Carmel, a small town 135 miles from Philadelphia where delegates are gathering for the Republican National Convention. News of the crash brought excited whispering from the delegates. No one knew for certain whether any high Republican officials were on the plane.
Ira F. Roadarmel of Mt. Carmel, one of the first persons on the scene, said “everything was scattered. The largest piece of the plane left was an engine. The rest of the plane was in small parts — so small they could be carried.”
George Minnich, an employee of Midvalley Colliery No. 2, which the plane missed by only 100 yards in its descent, said that he saw the plane bank. “Suddenly there was a horrible crash,” he said. “All you could see was a mass of flames. It sounded as though the end of the world was coming.”
The plane’s logbook, found near the scene of the crash in a thickly wooded area, identified the plane’s pilot as Captain George Warner.
— The Sheboygan Press, June 17, 1948.
Among the passengers were Broadway theatre impresario Earl Carroll and his girlfriend, actress Beryl Wallace; Henry L. Jackson, men’s fashion editor of Collier’s Weekly magazine and co-founder of Esquire Magazine; and Venita Varden Oakie, the former wife of actor Jack Oakie..
The DAILY ITEM reported this several years ago in a story about this historical event,
The flight next passed over Sunbury airport at 12:33 p.m. at an altitude of 4,000 feet. As the lower flying plane approached Shamokin, it attracted ground observers who noticed it appeared to be flying erratically, out of control and descending. Just north of the city it made a shallow left turn.
Passing to the north of Mount Carmel and still descending, the aircraft, now close to the ground, made a turn and struck a transformer and high voltage wires, crashing in flames on the side of a hill. Fire from the debris burned an area in size equal to three city blocks. There were a number of prominent people and movie people on board the plane.
And the rest was history..
The plane dropped in altitude and continued eastward at a fairly low altitude. It passed over Sunbury at an estimated 1,000 feet then swung southeast toward Shamokin over which it passed at approximately 400 feet. It then continued eastward and passed over Kulpmont at such a low altitude that it startled townspeople who looked up and some claim they they could actually see the faces of passengers looking out of the windows. It continued eastward into the Richards valey north of Mt. Carmel and started ascending slightly. It continued past Wilburton No. 1 and when it came to Wilburton No. 2 was only about 30 feet off the ground. It was headed straight for the Midvalley breaker in which 80 men were working and veered to the right. When it did it’s wing tip hit a transformer substation carrying 66,000 volts of electricity. The plane exploded in a massive fireball scattering debris and human body parts up the mountain for 200 yards
