Hawthorne Nevada Airlines DC-3 (N15570)

1969

A group of Southern Californians, winding down from a Monday night of gambling at the El Capitan Lodge & Casino in Hawthorne, Nevada, were on the “Gamblers Special” flight back home.

The plane never made it. Instead, it vanished in the wee morning darkness.

Travel ad in Long Beach’s Independent Press-Telegram, February 16, 1969

Adverse Weather Predicted

Piloted by Fred Hall, the twin-engine Douglas DC-3, carrying 32 passengers and two other crew members, left the Hawthorne Industrial Airport at 3:50 a.m. Hawthorne Nevada Airlines Flight 708 was destined for the Hollywood-Burbank Airport.

The weather forecasts for Hall’s route, which he’d navigated hundreds of times before, called for icy conditions above 6,000 feet and moderate to severe turbulence up through 15,000 feet. That night, a ferocious snowstorm dumped 40 to 50 feet of snow in the mountains over which Hall was to fly.

The Hawthorne Nevada Airlines plane was equipped with windshield and propeller anti-icing systems but no device to crack off accumulated ice mechanically, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). It also didn’t have a beeper or beacon that sends a signal when a plane hits the ground.

The last radio contact from Hall was at 4:06 a.m. with the flight service station in Tonopah, Nevada. It was February 18.

Hampered Search

Immediately, the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) began a full-scale hunt for the presumably downed aircraft along and around the flight path between Hawthorne and the Nevada’s-California border. The plane’s white color, with a blue stripe along both sides, made it even harder to spot amid the snowpack. The CAP didn’t find it.

By March 8, searchers had conducted 426 search missions, constituting 944.3 hours in the air, without success. The effort was halted. By that time, if there’d been any survivors, they likely had died.

“We’re kind of discouraged,” said Lt. Col. James Helm of the Hawthorne CAP (Reno Evening Gazette, May 5, 1969). “We just have to wait until the snow melts. We’ll find it eventually.”

Numerous pilots continued looking for the airliner in their spare time. The El Capitan Club offered a $10,000 ($71,000 today) reward to anyone who found it.

Persistence Pays Off

One of those volunteers was Stanford Pow of Bakersfield. After five months of repeated flying through the Sierra Nevada, separating coastal California from the Mojave Desert, they decided to look along the edge of the mountain range.

While cruising through that area, Pow’s wife Johnadene saw the sun glinting off of something in the snow. They suspected it was part of the aircraft but couldn’t confirm it.

Verification came the next day, Saturday, August 9, when Stanford got Eldon Fussel, his co-worker at Bakersfield’s Gold Seal Flying Service, to fly him out there in his helicopter. Fussel landed on Hogback Ridge, and the two surveyed the wreckage up close.

They saw three large plane pieces, scattered bodies and surrounding debris. All of it was on the east slope of Mt. Whitney, five miles off of the plane’s planned course.

“This is about as remote an area as you could find anywhere,” Fussel said (Nevada State Journal, Aug. 10, 1969). “There is no possibility that anyone could have lived through the crash. …it is my belief everybody aboard was killed instantly.”

It was six months since plane N15570 had disappeared.

Shift In Efforts

The Inyo County coroner and sheriff, forest service officials, and FBI and NTSB agents all got involved in recovering the plane’s passengers and investigating the crash.

Because the high-altitude terrain was too rugged for horses and two to 10 feet of snow still covered it, rescuers used two helicopters to transport the bodies to the town of Lone Pine. There, they transferred them to a vehicle and drove them to a makeshift morgue in Bishop, 60 miles away, where an FBI expert began identifying each one.

Five days later, the team had retrieved 27 of the 35 bodies. The searchers had trouble locating the remaining eight but finally did, in the fuselage remnant, the following day.

Cause And Effect

Hall had made this specific flight hundreds of times, but the winter of 1969 was severe, boasting record snowfall in the Sierra Nevada.

The NTSB indicated in its final report, following its investigation of the crash, that inclement weather had obscured Hall’s visibility, and the plane had hit “an oblong, bowl-shaped, east-west oriented canyon at a measured altitude of 11,770 feet” (Aircraft Accident Report, Feb. 4, 1970). Then it’d slid backwards about 500 feet, stopped and caught fire.

The board concluded that “the probable cause of this accident was the deviation from the prescribed route of flight, as authorized in the company’s Federal Aviation Administration-approved operations specifications, resulting in the aircraft being operated under Instrument Flight Rules weather conditions, in high mountainous terrain, in an area where there was a lack of radio navigation aids.

Finally, the NTSB purported that “a crash locator beacon, activated once the aircraft had crashed, would have provided an expeditious means of locating the aircraft.”

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Photo: by Bill Larkins

Sources

Clara A. Rowan in front of her Las Vegas gambling establishment

1931

Catalyzed by unexpected circumstances, Colorado-born Clara Antoinette Rowan (née Beggs) became the first woman to own a legal casino in the United States.

Her husband, Thomas “Tom” George Rowan and his partner Leo Kind obtained one of the first gambling licenses issued in Clark County after Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, for the Rainbow Club, a gambling house at 131-133 S. 1st Street in Las Vegas. Each man owned 50 percent of the enterprise.

The club, which employed 75 people and offered craps, 21, bingo and slot machines, was busy, circulating thousands of dollars nightly, in part because it was air conditioned in the hot months. Locals and tourists, including celebrities like Clark Gable, frequented the Rainbow.

Catastrophic Impetus

On Aug. 22 of the same year, Tom Rowan, 39, two of his employees, Jake Cohen, 32, and Edward Loomis, 36, Clara and Edward’s wife, were traveling at night in Tom’s Buick sedan when it stalled, apparently out of gas, on the Boulder Highway, about seven miles outside of Sin City.

The men exited the vehicle, with the headlights still on, intending to flag down an oncoming driver and borrow enough gas to get back to Las Vegas. The two women remained in the back seat.

Suddenly, an approaching Chrysler four door struck Jake and Edward, who’d been standing in front of Tom’s Buick. The Chrysler ran into the Buick’s fender and then Tom, who’d been inspecting his gas tank.

Immediately after the impacts, the Chrysler’s driver, later identified as Alton Silcox, didn’t stop but instead, kept traveling toward Boulder Dam.

Tom, Jake and Edward all passed away at the hospital in the early morning hours due to the injuries they’d sustained from being hit.

Facing the Consequences

About two weeks after the accident, Silcox turned himself in to law enforcement. He was charged with two gross misdemeanors, failing to stop and help at an accident in which he was involved and failing to notify the sheriff of the incident. He claimed that the lights from Tom’s car had blinded him as he’d driven up a sharp incline of the highway.

He was released on a $1,000 bond (about $17,000 today).

Ultimately, he pled guilty. In early October, Judge William E. Orr sentenced Silcox to 90 days in the Clark County Jail. (The maximum penalty was one year of jail time plus a $1,000 fine.)

“In sentencing Silcox, the judge considered that the defendant had plead [sic] guilty after giving himself up, and that there was no evidence that he had been drinking,” the Las Vegas Age reported (Oct. 2, 1931).

Plunging Into Entrepreneurship

Upon Tom’s death, his stake in the Rainbow Club went to his wife Clara, who was around age 37 at the time. Subsequently, in November, the widow bought out Leo’s stake for a reported $30,000 (about $506,000 today), thereby becoming the establishment’s sole proprietor. Despite hiring a man to manage the gambling house, she became and remained active in its operations.

“Unimpressed with any significance which may be attached to her unique position as the only woman operator of a gambling establishment, Mrs. Rowan is concerned only with the creation of new ideas, and plans for the improvement of her establishment and its facilities for both men and women,” noted the Las Vegas Age (Nov. 20, 1931).*

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* It’s unknown how long Clara (who remarried in 1932, becoming Clara A. Morgan), owned the Rainbow Club. According to Fuller’s Index Plus, it likely was until sometime in 1934.

Photo from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas University Libraries’ Digital Collection

Sources

1941

The brief union between Tony and Dorothy Stralla ended in a suspicious tragedy.

Antonio Cornero Stralla was a colorful, law defying, Southern California rumrunner turned gambler. He was involved, most often as the owner/operator, in a string of casino enterprises,  including the:

• Meadows (Las Vegas, Nevada)
• S.S. Rex (Las Vegas, Nevada)
• Stardust (Las Vegas, Nevada)
• Rex gambling ship (offshore, Santa Monica and Redondo Beach, California)
• Lux gambling ship (offshore, Long Beach, California)
• Montmartre Club (Havana, Cuba)

Dorothy Friend Thaxton was a nightclub singer known as Dorothy Carroll, and, prior to the marriage, Cornero Stralla’s publicist.

He, at about age 41 (records show various birth years), and she, at 25, tied the knot in Las Vegas, Nevada at 2 a.m. on Monday, May 5, 1941. He’d been married before, at least once. It’s unknown whether she had been.

Following their nuptials, she lived in his Beverly Hills home, and he resided in Havana, where he ran the Montmartre nightclub-casino.

The Bloom Is Off The Rose

About two months later, the couple separated following a heated argument at the Southern California house, to which the police were called and Friend Thaxton was taken to the local emergency room for care.

“She first said she had swallowed the contents of two bottles of iodine, and later said she had just stained her lips and hands with the brownish liquid,” reported the Los Angeles Times (July 10, 1941).

A week after that incident, Cornero Stralla filed for a marriage annulment, claiming Friend Thaxton hadn’t “fulfilled her marital obligations” and had pursued the union with him intending never to do so.

The Times noted, “‘Admiral’ Tony Cornero’s latest romance has faded — quick than a sucker’s bankroll aboard one of the floating gambling ships that formerly beckoned the unwary along the Southern California coast.”

“Cold, Harsh, Devoid Of Affection”

Friend Thaxton responded with a cross-complaint, citing cruelty and desertion and asking for separate maintenance. This is an order requiring a spouse to make support, or maintenance, payments to the other, via a separation agreement. In her filing, Friend Thaxton requested $150 (about $2,500 today) per month, 15 percent of Cornero Stralla’s monthly income of about $1,000 ($17,000 today). She denied her husband’s accusations.

On the couple’s subsequent court date in late July, Friend Thaxton showed but Cornero Stralla didn’t. He was away on business, his attorney said. Friend Thaxton told the judge that since she and Cornero Stralla had separated, her husband hadn’t supported her, thereby forcing her to pawn her jewelry and borrow money from friends.

In late July, a judge ordered the gambler to pay the monthly $150 in alimony but only temporarily. Even though the marriage was so short-lived, by California law he had to do so because he’d been the one to initiate the union’s dissolution. Were she to have filed for the annulment instead, he wouldn’t have had to support her.

Whiplash Of Extremes

A month later, the two dismissed their respective legal actions, supposedly having reunited.

Had Cornero Stralla coerced or manipulated Friend Thaxton into dropping her alimony request or had she done so willingly?

A week later, on September 4, the two were in a Las Vegas court, where Friend Thaxton was granted a marriage annulment.

Who Was Responsible?

Following the hearing, she was driving herself home to Hollywood, when she got into a serious car accident about 18 miles west of Baker, California. When she’d tried to pass another car along the shoulder, traveling at a high speed, she lost control. Her vehicle skidded about 140 feet, overturned three times and skidded another 150 feet. She was thrown about 70 feet from where the car came to a rest.

Cornero Stralla had been following her in his car, hoping to overtake her and get her to stop driving, as she’d been drinking and “in no condition to drive,” he told police (Los Angeles Times, Sept. 6, 1941). He claimed she’d exceeded 100 mph at times.

What really happened on that drive?

At 6:15 the next morning, Friend Thaxton died in a doctor’s office from her injuries, which included a skull fracture.

Sources

The Truckee River in downtown Reno, Nevada overflowed, the raging waters swelling high enough to deluge nearby businesses.

One was the Riverside hotel, where 4-plus feet of water amassed in the casino, restaurant and lobby.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons: “Truckee River” by Renjishino

1957

In 1957, Club Primadonna chartered passengers to and from San Francisco to the Reno, Nevada casino on “champagne tours.”

On the September 28 return flight, delayed from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. due to bad weather, the plane’s engines failed near the San Francisco International Airport. The pilot shouted, “Fasten your belts, loosen your collars. We’re going to ditch this thing” (Nevada State Journal, Sept. 28, 1957).

He crash landed the aircraft in the bay’s mudflats. From the marshy area, U.S. Coast Guard members retrieved all eight people aboard, all of whom survived.