Throwback Thursday: Notre Dame's Knute Rockne Dies In A Plane Crash, And America Mourns

The call was to appear in a football movie for a reported $50,000 payoff, which was seemingly too much money for Knute Rockne to resist. This was five times his yearly salary as the head football coach at Notre Dame in 1931, and it felt like easy work: Hop on a plane—as he often did, even in those nascent days of commercial air travel—fly to California, fly back home. As much as Rockne thrived on competition, wrote biographer Ray Robinson, "his desire for money wasn't far behind."

Rockne was 43 years old, and his legend had already burgeoned into mythology. He had altered college football by popularizing the forward pass as a player at Notre Dame; by coaching the Four Horsemen and winning repeated national championships, he had been responsible, at least in part, for the widespread popularization of the sport in the Catholic enclaves of New York City and beyond. He was one of the most famous sporting figures in America, up there with Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, but he couldn't keep coaching forever. His health was in decline, so much so that one unconfirmed report claimed that doctors at the Mayo Clinic had told Rockne he only had three years left to live.

As it turned out, fate would intervene sooner: On March 31, 1931, 85 years ago today, Rockne boarded TWA Flight 599, en route from Kansas City to Los Angeles to film that football movie. And that plane, a Fokker F-10 trimotor, crashed in the southeastern Kansas prairie, killing Rockne and seven others.

It was a shocking tragedy, one that would wind up radically altering the safety standards of the airline industry. But in the moment, there was only shock, one of the first moments of collective national mourning that would grip America throughout the 20th century. The country, in the midst of the Great Depression, mourned Rockne as the unimpeachable icon that he was. The operators at the Chiago Tribune, overwhelmed by calls, began answering the phone, "Yes, it's true about Rockne." The New York Times dedicated nearly its entire front page to the crash; the king of Norway (Rockne's birthplace) sent his condolences, and President Herbert Hoover declared Rockne's death "a national disaster."

Rockne had long been a proponent of air travel, in part because it was an easy way to bring in extra cash. As much as he had come to represent the purity of sport, he had also used his name to make thousands of extra dollars through endorsements, syndicated columns, and coaching clinics. He had a financial arrangement with Studebaker, the automobile company, which entailed him traveling around the country to address sales meetings. Flying, he found, was the easiest way to get back and forth, and the safety of it never really concerned him, even though there had been six major accidents the year before Rockne's crash occurred. "With a good pilot and a good plane," he said, "it's as safe as any other method."

So Rockne had gone from South Bend to Chicago to spend a few hours with his mother, and then he had gone on to Kansas City to visit with his sons, who were attending school there. From there, he would fly to Los Angeles, where, despite ensuring Notre Dame's president that he had no real interest in the movie project, he thought there "might be a chance to put out a picture that might be instructive and educational as regards Notre Dame in every sense of the word."

The plane took off into a light snowfall, got trapped in a thick fog, lost part of its left wing, and landed hard in the snow. The scene was grisly, the mangled bodies spread out around the plane, the onlookers and souvenir-hunters gathering up debris, the mailbags and letters—the plane was scheduled to do a mail-drop in Wichita—the baggage and the clothing. One witness claims to have seen a rubber wrap that Rockne wore to control his phlebitis. Another report stated that Rockne had his rosary gripped tight in his right hand.

In the aftermath, of course, the mythology surrounding Rockne only grew. A substitute story circulated that Rockne was not going to California to film a movie, but to fulfill a promise to a friend and make a speech. Newspaper editorials "practically promoted Rockne into secular sainthood," Ray Robinson wrote. The Rockne family received thousands of cards and letters and telegrams. The Star-Spangled Banner, adopted as the national anthem in 1931, was briefly replaced by the Notre Dame Victory March. Rockne's funeral on the Notre Dame campus drew thousands, and CBS radio broadcast the services nationally.

Rockne's high profile elicited demands for a public inquiry into the crash. A series of investigations proved to be fruitless or based on false information. Amid this uncertainty, conspiracy theories were bred; Rockne's death altered the way aviation disasters were investigated in the future, allowing for the creation of an independent agency separate of federal aviation oversight agencies, and prompted the construction of safer and more reliable planes.

The final ironic twist, of course, is that Rockne's myth would eventually be solidified by another football movie, this one featuring future president Ronald Reagan. In 1940, Knute Rockne, All-American, would immortalize Rockne's "Win one for the Gipper" speech. It is a speech that, in all likelihood, never happened—but by then, Rockne had already become a larger-than-life figure, both for the way he lived and the way he died.