Documents shed light on the life and death of Thurman Munson

 
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 4:38 pm    Post subject: Documents shed light on the life and death of Thurman Munson

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/sports/thurman-munson-plane-crash-yankees.html

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Documents Shed Light on the Life and Death of Thurman Munson
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Catcher Thurman Munson was a cornerstone of the great Yankees teams in the 1970s. He was also the team’s captain

The anguish still rises unmistakably from the pages of the deposition, which is now nearly 40 years old. In it, a witness named David Hall hesitates as he testifies, and a lawyer asks if he needs a short break. Hall declines and continues.

By the time he is done, he has provided a devastating account of the final moments in the life of Thurman Munson, the Yankees catcher who died at age 32 when the plane he was flying crashed short of the runway at Akron-Canton Airport in Ohio on Aug. 2, 1979.

Hall was in the plane when it slammed into the ground. In the deposition, he describes how in the immediate aftermath of the crash, Munson lay motionless, his head turned sideways and pressed against the instrument panel.

Munson’s neck, it turned out, had been broken by the impact of the crash. His body was paralyzed. Still, Hall testified, Munson managed to ask him and Jerry Anderson, the other passenger in the plane, if they were O.K.


And then, Hall testified, flames began to lick at the fuselage of the Cessna Citation turbojet, and Munson gasped, “Fire extinguisher.” What followed, Hall said, were the final words uttered by Munson, the hard-nosed All-Star and team captain.

“Help me, Dave,” he said.


Hall and Anderson tried. They strained to lift Munson’s immobilized body from his seat, to free him from the wreckage, but they couldn’t. And as smoke and flames engulfed the cockpit, Hall, a flight instructor who had previously taught Munson to fly propeller planes, and Anderson, a friend and business associate of Munson’s, had no choice but to make their escape.

Much has been written over the years about Munson’s shocking death on that August day, but until now the depositions that were given in two lawsuits that were filed after the crash had remained stored away, out of the public realm. One of the suits, filed by the Yankees, was dismissed before it ever went to trial. The other, filed by Munson’s widow, Diana, did go to trial, but the case was quickly settled after some initial testimony.

The depositions provide a kind of oral history of Munson’s life and death. They were uncovered this summer as a result of efforts made by Allan Blutstein, a lawyer who grew up on Long Island as a devoted Munson fan and has made a professional career of Freedom-of-Information actions, including recent, and controversial, filings involving employees at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Blutstein did not need to make a Freedom-of-Information filing to obtain the Munson depositions. He simply had to be diligent and spend some money. After acquiring the documents, he made them available to The New York Times.

The depositions, which include testimony from such notable Yankees as Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin and Graig Nettles, do not challenge the basic narrative of Munson’s death — that he was a standout athlete who began flying less than two years earlier, in part so he could get home to Ohio to see his family on days off, and that he died while practicing takeoffs and landings at the airport.

Allan Blutstein, a lawyer long interested in Munson’s career, decided this year to obtain depositions connected to the fatal crash.CreditJustin T. Gellerson for The New York Times
But what the depositions do provide is a revealing snapshot of Munson, who was sometimes a curmudgeon but was always the bedrock of a high-wattage Yankees team that had won the previous two World Series amid all the distractions served up by Jackson and Martin and George Steinbrenner, the team’s unpredictable owner.

It was Munson who continually played at a high level without creating controversies of his own. And it was Munson, the depositions suggest, who was both loyal and stubborn, both fierce and innocent.

“Thurman had a routine,” Gene Monahan, the longtime Yankees trainer, said in his deposition on May 29, 1981. “He used to come to the ballpark, have a couple of cookies and a glass of milk.”



Two months before Monahan’s deposition, Jackson — Munson’s co-star and rival, and then, eventually, his friend — testified that Munson had become weary of the sport he played and all the time spent away from his wife and three children.

“He was more interested in flying that (bleep) plane than he was in playing baseball — to me,” Jackson testified.

Martin, in his deposition, said he was worried, as the team’s manager, that Munson was draining himself by flying between games. “I just kept telling him, you know, ‘I don’t like to see you flying during the season,’ ” Martin testified.

In her deposition, Diana Munson was asked if her husband took greenies, when he played, a reference to the amphetamines that many players, in the decades before drug testing, took for the jolt of energy they provided. She said that he had, but added that she thought he had stopped doing so once he started flying.

“As a flier, he knew he could not take things into his body,’’ she testified. “So after he started flying, I never worried about greenies again.”

All of those who gave depositions did so for two concurrent lawsuits, meaning they had to testify only once. The lawsuit filed by the Yankees sought reimbursement for the remaining money on Munson’s contract. The wrongful death suit filed by Diana Munson sought $42 million in damages. Both suits targeted Cessna and FlightSafety International, the school where Munson learned to fly and became, by most accounts, a very good pilot.



Documents that were recovered from Munson’s plane after it crashed and burned short of the runway.CreditAkron-Canton airport
In her suit, Diana Munson claimed that Cessna pressured Munson to buy the $1.2 million twin-engine jet that crashed before he was ready to handle such a powerful machine. She also contended that her husband was not properly trained by FlightSafety International.



Once her suit went to court, in May 1984, the case was settled in a matter of days and the terms were not disclosed. James Wiles, one of FlightSafety International’s lawyers at the time, still contends there was no culpability in Munson’s death on the part of either company. But a trial, he said, was just too risky.

“You don’t go into northeast Ohio where he was probably the most famous athlete at the time, and go against his widow and kids,” Wiles, now 73, said in a recent telephone interview. “You just don’t do it.”

Wiles, who was present for all the depositions, recalled Martin being both cooperative and savvy in his testimony. He said Jackson had been notably profane but that his transcript had been cleaned up.

Hall’s testimony about Munson’s final moments, taken on May 19, 1980, brought forth tears, Wiles said, but other moments were less emotional.

He said that when Yogi Berra testified, he put a box of 24 baseballs in front of him and requested he sign them. Berra, who was a Yankees coach when Munson died, grudgingly obliged, but at one point asked if Wiles was authorized to make such a demand.

“It’s my deposition,” Wiles said he told Berra.

Much of the testimony from Yankees figures centered on Munson’s physical and mental state leading up to the crash. Martin testified that Munson was the best catcher in baseball, better even than Johnny Bench, and so smart that he was the only catcher he had ever allowed to signal for a pitchout.




But Martin also acknowledged that Munson, who played 11 years in the major leagues, was wearing down from the rigors of his position, and that he required more time at first base, the outfield and designated hitter to relieve pressure on his legs and knees.

Munson had begun flying in spring training of 1978, and quickly grew devoted to it. There was testimony that Munson spent much of his spare time reading flight manuals and instruction books, even in the Yankees’ clubhouse before games.

And both Martin and Jackson testified that Steinbrenner — who did not give a deposition — had granted Munson special permission to fly his plane from city to city during the season, separate from the team.

“He had a special deal with Steinbrenner,” Jackson said in his testimony. “You know, Thurman was the most special Yankee when he was here. He could do anything he wanted to.”

Jackson and Martin were passengers on flights that Munson piloted, as was Nettles. Nettles and Jackson flew with Munson from Seattle to Anaheim, Calif., after a game on July 12, 1979. Three days later, Martin flew with Munson from Anaheim to Kansas City, Mo., by way of Albuquerque.

Jackson and Nettles recounted how, on their flight, the oxygen masks dropped down after a loud noise. They said Munson remained calm and landed the plane without incident. Martin described a flash of flames from one of the engines. Neither account was linked to the cause of the crash.

Instead, the fault was attributed to pilot error, according to the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. It was determined that Munson was fatigued that day and did not properly go through his checklist and did not fasten his seatbelt.


Charles Berry, an Air Force flight surgeon and medical officer at NASA for 14 years, testified in his deposition that “pilot error caused by fatigue and overstress” was the culprit, and he speculated that knee pain might have caused Munson to sleep improperly the night before.

Critically, on the final approach, Munson never put down his flaps, which allow planes to fly at lower speeds. The plane crashed about 870 feet short of the runway at 4:02 p.m. and then slammed into a tree stump.

Both Hall and Anderson, who was also a pilot, had flown with Munson on that fateful day only because they had run into him at the airport. Both testified at the 1984 trial before the settlement was reached.

As for Blutstein, his route to the documents began in April on his way to pick up his daughter, a student at the University of Michigan. Driving through Ohio from his home in the Washington, D.C., area, he impulsively detoured to Munson’s grave site in Canton and left a Yankees cap on the headstone.

“I spent a good deal of time there,” he said, “and I started to think about what happened. I knew about the suit. I thought it might give me some answers to questions I had for most of my life.”

After returning home, Blutstein began requesting information on the decades-old case, and his work in bringing other documents to light made it a routine task for him, but one that was time-consuming and expensive. He said he spent over $1,000 in fees and numerous hours filing forms and doing research. Of the 21 Munson files he requested, four were missing, including Anderson’s. Those that were located, he said, had been stored in a warehouse in Chicago.




He has organized his trove and posted it on a Munson fan Facebook page for all to see, figuring that others must want the same information he sought. He was struck by much of what he learned, especially the poignant testimony by Monahan, the trainer, who had a close working friendship with Munson at the ballpark.

Monahan testified that upon learning of Munson’s death, he went to an empty Yankee Stadium and sat in front of Munson’s locker for about five hours, almost in shock. Curiously, he testified that he tossed Munson’s medical records into the trash.

Monahan did not respond to a request for an interview, and neither did Diana Munson. Hall and Anderson declined to be interviewed.

According to Nettles’s deposition, Munson’s death cast a pall over the season. At the time of the accident, the Yankees were 14 games out of first place in the American League East. That was virtually the same deficit they had overcome the year before, in one of the most notable comebacks in baseball history. It would not happen again.

“When Thurman got killed, you know, we just lost all — the whole season was just kind of lost,” Nettles stated. “We just realized we couldn’t do it and, you know, it demoralized a lot of us.”

Of everything he read, Blutstein said he was particularly moved by Hall’s testimony recounting the crash and Munson’s last words. As a boy, he said, he had often wondered how Hall and Anderson could have escaped the plane without saving his hero.



But after reading the depositions, he said he contacted Anderson to apologize for harboring such feelings. He said he also reached out to Diana Munson to apologize for the fact that the uncovered depositions would inevitably resurrect painful memories. He did not hear back from her.

Blutstein, himself, made news in December when it was learned that he had filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests to the E.P.A. and that many of them targeted employees known to be questioning how the agency was being run under President Trump. Blutstein is affiliated with two political-research groups, America Rising and Definers Public Affairs.

That, in effect, has put Blutstein in the middle of the political battles gripping the country. In contrast, his fixation with the Munson case speaks to something else — to heroism and heartbreak, and to fate.

And Blutstein said he would continue to spend money and invest time as he seeks the rest of the depositions in the Munson case. “I can’t stop,’’ he said.
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