Terror from the sky: The day a plane crashed at a Phoenix elementary school

Almost 80 years later, Bill Baker can still recall the strange noise he heard on the playground at Phoenix’s Wilson Elementary School in 1944. “My best pal, Jim Piercy, also a sixth grader, was with me on the monkey bars,” he says. “We heard an engine sound that differed from the normal ones coming from Sky Harbor Airport.”

Baker kept a diary then and recalls later writing in it, “This was the most important day of my life because a large plane crashed at school.”

At the time, Wilson Elementary, with 1,600 students, was the largest rural elementary school in the nation. Located outside of Phoenix in the countryside, the school property was bordered on the south by the Salt River, on the north by the airport, on the west by 24th Street, and the east by a farm. “One year, the farmer grew sugar cane, and some of the older boys would hop over the low fence and cut pieces of cane to chew on,” Baker says.

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Baker’s grandparents owned a home at 1805 E. Mojave St., about a mile west of the airport, and his parents rented a house nearby. “Most of their neighbors had chickens, cows, horses, and other farm animals,” he says. “Grandma had chickens and rabbits.”

Wilson Elementary had dismissed classes that Friday afternoon, according to Baker. “Normally, I would have taken a bus home by then, but I was waiting at school for my uncle to pick me up because I was going to spend the weekend with him.”

During World War II, the military used Sky Harbor Airport to train pilots, according to Baker. “We thought nothing of seeing them practice taking off and landing, so we were used to engine sounds. However, this noise was much different and also closer. I looked toward the sound and saw a large airplane coming from the north and in our direction, with the wings vertical and the engine roaring as the pilot tried to gain control.”

Baker recalls sprinting away for safety and hiding behind a large trash barrel. “It was obvious that the plane would crash,” he says. “As I ran, I looked over my shoulder and saw the bomber’s right wing cut through the roof of a classroom. Then the plane cartwheeled onto the playground where we were just playing.”

Then Baker saw his uncle, Buck Harris, running toward the crash. “I called out to him and was very glad to be safe. It was very scary. I found later that Jim was safe too. Uncle Buck took me home, and I did not spend the weekend with him.”

The following day in The Arizona Republic, the story read, “Death flirted with nearly 500 school children yesterday afternoon when a two-motor B-25 bomber, one of its engines dead, crashed in the teeming Wilson School yard …killing two of the three occupants of the plane. Miraculously, only one child was struck by a plane part, and she was released after a hospital examination.” The article noted that a plane wheel hit a power line, stopping the school’s clocks at 3:50 p.m.

The B-25 was on a routine flight from Deming, New Mexico, to Mather Field near Sacramento, California. The pilot who died, William J. Brown, was a Phoenix Union High School graduate who had tried to make an emergency landing at Sky Harbor Airport after one of his engines had died, according to the Republic.

In the mid-1960s, Baker returned to Wilson Elementary as a science teacher and worked there for almost 30 years. “On the classroom that the bomber’s wing had hit, I could still see a diagonal line of different color roofing material caused by the crash,” he says.

The airport continued to be a problem for Wilson Elementary and nearby residents, especially with the advent of jets. “The noise in homes became unbearable as windows would shake, the conversation would stop, and the TV would go snowy until the jet passed,” Baker says. “The noise took a terrible toll on school children’s ability to learn.”

Eventually, the city paid residents to relocate from the area bounded by the airport west to 16th Street and from the Salt River to north of Buckeye Road. “My mother and aunt moved in 1978, and in the early 1980s, the city relocated Wilson Elementary to its present location on 30th Street north of Van Buren.”

Over the years, Baker never heard or read anything more about the B-25 crash. Recently, however, he talked to another former Wilson Elementary student who recalled it and then found the newspaper article. “It proved what I can recall very clearly today,” he says.

Douglas C. Towne is the editor of Arizona Contractor & Community magazine, http://www.arizcc.com/, the 2022 winner of the Arizona Historical Society’s Al Merito Award.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: The day a plane crashed at a Phoenix elementary school