July 28th
Saturday morning, July 28, 1945, and Manhattan was wrapped in thick fog. Lieutenant Colonel William Smith, a decorated B-25 bomber pilot with combat missions over Europe behind him, was flying toward Newark Airport when he became disoriented in the murk over the city. At 9:40 a.m., his plane roared low over Midtown — and slammed into the north face of the Empire State Building, tearing a hole between the 78th and 80th floors. The world’s tallest building had just been struck by a ten-ton bomber going roughly 200 miles per hour.
The impact was catastrophic. Burning aviation fuel poured through the 79th floor, where the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s War Relief Services were open for Saturday work. One of the plane’s engines punched clean through the building and out the other side, landing on the roof of a building across the street. Fourteen people died — eleven office workers and the three men aboard the plane.
Then came the part nobody would believe if it were fiction. Betty Lou Oliver, a 20-year-old elevator operator, had been hurled from her post and badly burned by the blast. Rescuers loaded her into another elevator to rush her down for treatment — not knowing the crash had weakened its cables. They snapped, and Oliver plunged 75 stories to the sub-basement. The severed cables piling up beneath the car and compressed air in the shaft cushioned the fall just enough. She survived, and to this day she holds the record for the longest elevator fall ever survived.
And the building itself? The fire was out in about 40 minutes — the only major skyscraper fire ever brought under control at that height — and the Empire State Building opened for business that Monday morning. The crash later helped shape an important legal legacy too: the following year, Congress passed the Federal Tort Claims Act, giving citizens the right to sue the federal government. The building stood firm, the city moved on, and Betty Lou Oliver went home to Arkansas — with a story no one could top.
Also On This Day…
1868 — The 14th Amendment Becomes the Law of the Land On July 28, 1868, Secretary of State William Seward officially certified that the 14th Amendment had been ratified and was now part of the Constitution. Born out of the ashes of the Civil War, it declared that anyone born or naturalized in the United States was a citizen — full stop — and that no state could deny any person due process or equal protection of the laws. Those two phrases, “due process” and “equal protection,” would go on to become the most litigated words in the entire Constitution, shaping American life for the next century and a half.
1914 — The Telegram That Started World War I Exactly one month after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914 — and did it by telegram, the first declaration of war in history delivered by wire. Within days, the great alliance chains yanked one nation after another into the fight: Russia mobilized for Serbia, Germany backed Austria, and France and Britain followed. What Vienna expected to be a short punitive war against a small neighbor became the catastrophe that consumed a continent and redrew the map of the world.
1932 — The Army Clears the Bonus Marchers From Washington In the depths of the Depression, some 20,000 World War I veterans — the “Bonus Army” — had camped in Washington, D.C. for weeks, asking for early payment of a service bonus Congress had promised them for 1945. On July 28, 1932, after clashes with police left two veterans dead, President Hoover ordered the Army to clear them out. Troops under General Douglas MacArthur — with Major Dwight Eisenhower on his staff and Major George Patton leading cavalry — moved down Pennsylvania Avenue with tanks and tear gas, and by nightfall the veterans’ main camp across the Anacostia River was in flames. Three future giants of World War II, all on the same street, on one of the Army’s most somber days at home.
1996 — Two Spectators Stumble Onto a 9,000-Year-Old Man On July 28, 1996, two young men watching hydroplane races along the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, spotted a human skull in the shallows. Police first treated it as a possible crime scene — until scientists dated the bones at roughly 9,000 years old. “Kennewick Man” turned out to be one of the oldest and most complete ancient skeletons ever found in North America, igniting a two-decade legal and scientific battle over who he was and where he belonged. DNA testing eventually linked him to modern Native Americans, and in 2017 he was finally laid to rest by a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes.
From a bomber vanishing into the fog over Midtown, to fourteen words of the Constitution taking effect, to a telegram that set the world on fire — July 28th is proof that a single morning can echo for a century.
