Sign Over Alabama

"Night had gathered her sable robes over the highest cliffs, and my ship reached through a shoreless sea of silver cloudlets brushed with the glint of the moon and myriad jewels in the dome above. Earth was behind as though my soul itself had left it. Heaven must be like this, I said. . . ."

This supercharged description of an air ride over the Sierras led off an address before a section of the Eighth National Eucharistic Congress in New Orleans last week. The speaker: strapping, jovial Joseph Vincent Connolly, general manager of all Hearst newspapers. His subject: "The Press and the Church." Glowing with indignation against the "diabolical paganism behind Nazi and Communist persecutions," he reminded Catholics that Jesus was a Jew and "our beloved Mother Mary" a Jewess, offered a slogan on which the Church and the Hearst press might well agree: "The time to fight in America is NOW." Joe Connolly had just been at San Simeon. So his sincerely spoken words seemed also to mean that old Mr. Hearst, who has been on both sides of many a public question in the past half century, had now decided to turn on his ex-pals the Fascists.

Seven hours later, in the night sky over Alabama, Joe Connolly experienced some-thing an earlier age would have called a miraculous sign of approval for his good works and words.

Few minutes after a take-off from Montgomery Airport, the right motor of an Eastern Air liner bearing him and ten other passengers to Atlanta caught fire, shook off. Fire licked along the wing. Bracing himself for the inevitable crash Passenger Connolly took from his coat pocket the rosary his convent-school daughter, Mary Jac, 13, gave him just before he left New York.

While Copilot Clyde Russell sprayed a fire extinguisher on the burning wing, Pilot Dave Hissong coolly took his time, retracted his wheels, came down belly-flat in a ditch-scarred field. Steward Frank Gibbs shoved each man as far into the open air as he could. They had not stumbled more than 20 yards when flames swept through the cabin.*

Pious Mr. Connolly did not forget he was a Hearstman. He scrambled across barbed-wire fences to a farmhouse telephone and shot the story to his International News Service in Manhattan, scooping other services by an hour or more; kept the only list of passengers in his pocket after rival newshawks arrived. Afterwards he got bandages around two cut fingers.

When he first realized the plane was burning, he said later, he found his lips murmuring a prayer he had not repeated for 35 years:

Infant Jesus meek and mild Look on me a little child Pity mine and pity me And suffer me to come to thee.

*Cause of the accident, first serious airline crash to occur since Civil Aeoronautics Authority was established, was undertimined at week's end.

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