July 31, 1964 – Jim Reeves died on this day. The plane he was piloting crashed in a thunderstorm.
Reeves was one of the smoothest crooners on the airwaves in the fifties and early sixties. His velvety voice helped establish the Nashville Sound, which was a blending of country western and pop music that audiences around the world embraced.
July 30, 1871 – At 1:30pm a boiler exploded on the Westfield, one of the Staten Island ferries. The blast happened just as the ferry left lower Manhattan. It was loaded with over 200 passengers.
Recovering bodies from the Westfield Ferry disaster.
The New York Times offered this vivid account of the carnage:
Scores of human beings were cast upward with such force that a woman whose white dress made her a prominent object was lifted above the tower on the adjacent South Ferry-house, a distance of about thirty feet, and a babe was thrown upward until it seemed but a doll. Scores were cast into the water and disappeared beneath its surface. Scores were flung down into the wreck and buried in the debris. The shriek of agony that came simultaneously from hundreds of lips, mingled with the deafening crash of timbers, and with that most appalling of earthly sounds, the shriek of a horse in terror and pain, for one of these animals attached to a carriage in which were several persons, was enveloped in the deadly folds of steam and tumbled into the crater made by the explosion.
It’s estimated that 125 lives were lost.
The cause of the boiler explosion was never pinpointed. Jacob Vanderbilt, President of the Staten Island Railway was charged with homicide but he escaped conviction.
July 29, 1974 – Cass Elliot died on this day. She was only 32 years old.
Cass Elliot
She is most remembered as Mama Cass, the powerful voice that dominates many of the hits sung by the sixties pop quartet, The Mamas & the Papas.
Cass joined the band while on vacation in the Virgin Islands. She famously claimed that a freak accident caused her vocal range to improve by three notes. In a 1968 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Cass explained how some workmen dropped a copper tube on her head and knocked her to the ground.
I had a concussion and went to the hospital. I had a bad headache for about two weeks and all of a sudden I was singing higher. It’s true. Honest to God.
Whether or not the pipe story is true, The Mamas & the Papas went on to have huge success with hits like “California Dreamin,” “Monday Monday” and “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”
The band officially called it quits in 1971, but Cass had already established a very lucrative solo career. She played Vegas and made the rounds on all the TV variety shows of the era.
She had just finished 2 weeks of sold out shows at the London Palladium when she died in her sleep of a heart attack. False rumors still persist that she choked to death on a ham sandwich, but the coroner confirmed that no food was found in her trachea.
Ironically, the same flat where Cass Elliot died would host the death of another music legend 4 years later. Keith Moon, the dynamic drummer for The Who, died of an overdose in the same apartment in September of 1978.
