The loss of Thurman Munson

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.

Crash Site of the plane piloted by Thurman Munson

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.

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.”

 It was a sad day when we lost Thurman, I don't know why I was compelled to write about him, just something I felt strongly about.