Photo courtesy Special Collections, University of Memphis Libraries.
Looking back, it’s surprising that more people weren’t killed when a U.S. Army B-25 crashed into a parking lot in Midtown.
The tragedy began on the morning of April 29, 1944, when people in the Poplar and Cleveland area looked up and noticed a large twin-engined plane in distress. Some said the aircraft actually flipped over; most noticed the engines were sputtering and trailing smoke. The Commercial Appeal conveyed the horror of what happened next: “The brief staccato bark of a dying motor, a plane plummeting earthward, the terrible sound of impact, a dense cloud of black oil-smoke billowing skyward.”
Piloted by a Memphian, Capt. Ralph Quale, the B-25 was on a training flight, with only two other men aboard, when the engines failed minutes away from landing at Memphis Municipal Airport. The dying plane skimmed just a few hundred feet over Tech High School, filled with kids that day, clipped a home on North Claybrook, and finally crashed into the parking lot behind Southern Bowling Lanes. All aboard the plane were killed, along with the four residents of the house on Claybrook.
