Stone Gardens: Woman who survived 1000-plus foot Empire State Building elevator plunge buried in Fort Smith
On a foggy Saturday morning in late July 1945, twenty-year-old Betty Lou Gower Oliver arrived at the Empire State Building for what she expected to be her final shift as an elevator operator.
Born July 16, 1925, in Arkansas, the daughter of Llewellyn David Gower and Myrtle Emily Duckett, she had married Oscar Lee Oliver, a Navy torpedoman, while still in her teens after they met at a dance. With the war winding down and Oscar due home from service on a destroyer in the Pacific, she had given notice so the young couple could return to their hometown of Fort Smith and begin ordinary postwar life.
She had already bought a new outfit for a planned meeting with a cousin at the Russian Tea Room later that day, and coworkers had given her small gifts and good wishes. In elevator number 6, officially designated G Bank Car Number 6, she was singing “The Saint Louis Blues” when, at about 9:40 a.m., a B-25 Mitchell bomber struck the north face of the building between the seventy-ninth and eightieth floors.
Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith, a West Point graduate and combat veteran, had been flying the aircraft nicknamed “Old John Feather Merchant” from Bedford Army Air Field in Massachusetts toward Newark. Thick fog over Manhattan disoriented him; he turned the wrong way after the Chrysler Building and flew far below the minimum altitude required over the city.
The impact tore an eighteen-by-twenty-foot hole in the steel and masonry, sheared the wings, exploded the gasoline tanks, and started fires that took roughly forty minutes to bring under control. One engine and landing gear fell into an elevator shaft, severing cables; the other engine passed through the building and crashed onto a nearby roof.
Fourteen people died, three of them the plane’s crew and eleven civilians inside offices of war-relief organizations. About two dozen others were injured. The Saturday hour and the fog that kept many workers away limited the toll.
Betty Lou was on the eightieth floor when the plane hit. The blast threw her from her stationary car. Burning fuel and debris filled the corridors; she suffered severe burns. First-aid workers reached her and placed her in another elevator to carry her down for medical care. No one yet realized that debris from the crash had already cut the cables of that car.
As the elevator began its descent, the remaining cables snapped. Alone inside, she plunged roughly seventy-five stories, more than one thousand feet, into a sub-basement. She stayed fully conscious. She later described the sensation of falling so fast that she had to cling to the sides of the car to keep from floating, yelling and pounding the floor while she tried, uselessly, to work the controls.
A flash of fire enveloped her; she raised her left arm to shield her face. At the bottom the car smashed into an oil-filled buffer and embedded itself several feet into the concrete foundation. The floor of the shaft was crushed like an eggshell. All six supporting cables and the safety cable had failed, so there was no emergency braking.
What saved her, engineers later concluded, was a combination of the relatively airtight shaft, which compressed air beneath the falling car and slowed it, and the great coils of severed cable that had piled up in the pit and acted as a crude spring.
Rescuers had to cut her from the mangled wreckage. She was covered in hot oil, burned, and critically injured: her back broken in three places, her right leg broken in seven places, her pelvis and neck fractured, her right eye cut open, along with concussion and shock. At first responders believed she was dead; a toe tag was prepared and last rites were offered even though she was not Catholic.
A doctor revived her with a then-new procedure. She was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where she remained for about four months. During her stay she earned the nickname “Sunshine Girl” for the steady cheerfulness she showed despite her injuries and the braces she would need.
On the day of her discharge in early December she was still on crutches. She went straight back to the Empire State Building and rode an elevator all the way to the top. Within less than eight months, she had recovered enough to leave New York with Oscar, who had returned from the Pacific, and settle in Fort Smith.
There they raised three children, including a daughter named Annie Connally, and eventually seven grandchildren. Betty Lou lived quietly as a housewife. In 1961, at age thirty-five, she said she was completely normal and entirely happy, describing the life she had fought and prayed for as a second, God-given chance.
She continued to ride elevators without hesitation; years later, when she visited Annie in a Denver high-rise, she simply stepped into the car.
She declined publicity. When the New York Times sought her for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the crash in 1970, she replied that she was “plain not interested” because attention embarrassed her to death.
She died on November 24, 1999, at the age of seventy-four, in Fort Smit. . She is buried beside Oscar, who had died in 1986, in Fort Smith National Cemetery, plot 10 0 108.
The record she set that July morning, the longest fall ever survived in an elevator, remains unbroken.
