Lefty Williams, the White Sox starting pitcher for the final game of the 1919 World Series. His performance was so bad that he was taken out of the game after one inning and replaced by Big Bill James, who was not in on the plot, but who performed badly all on his own.
And so it came to an end, at least for now.
The headlines seemed to say it all. But as a win goes, it will forever be remembered as a false victory. One obtained because certain members of the Red Sox not to win, but rather to accept money in payment for losing.
The loss was pathetic. Rumors started nearly immediately that the game had been thrown and one noted sports reporter write a column that no World Series should ever be played again.
In less than a year, the cover of the plot would be off.
As the series ended, news of the air race started to dominate the local papers. The speed of the new mode of transportation was evident. The race had just started and planes were already over Wyoming.
Airco DH-4
Not reported in these editions, one of the planes had gone down in Wyoming, killing the pilot. It was the first fatal air crash in Wyoming's history. It occurred when Lt. Edwin Wales DH-4 would go down in a snowstorm near Coad Peak (near Elk Mountain). Specifically it went down over Oberg Pass. His observer, Lt. William C. Goldsborough, survived the crash and walked into an area ranch for help.
Hard to discern in this photograph of the old rail bed of the Union Pacific, you can see Kenneday Peak, Pennock Mountain and Coad Peak. The pilots had been following the Union Pacific and were diverting to what looks like low ground to the right, Oberg Pass.
Oberg Pass is the low ground between Pennock Mountain and Coad Peak. In decent weather they would have been fine, but flying in 1919, in a snowstorm, they likely iced up right away. They no doubt knew they were in big trouble pretty quickly and the plane went down in rugged ground.
Elk Mountain as viewed from Shirley Basin. This was to the north of the where they went down and they were trying to go to the south of the substantial peak.
This crash is often inaccurately noted as having occurred "west of Cheyenne". It was "west" of Cheyenne, but west a long ways west of Cheyenne. It was northwest of Laramie and the closest substantial town was that of Medicine Bow, if you consider Medicine Bow a substantial town. The destination was Wolcott Junction, which doesn't have an airfield today. Of course, the DH-4 didn't take much of a run way of any kind to land on. Going through the pass would have shaved miles off the trip and avoided a big curve around the substantial Elk Mountain.
The Air Derby had already proved to be a fatal adventure, and it would continue to be so. Lt. Goldsborough would carry on after recovering however, by which we mean carrying on in the Air Corps. He lived until age 73 and retired to Redondo Beach, California. He went to Hawaii with the Air Corps in 1923 and therefore was a very early aviator there.
Not surprisingly, given the infancy of aviation, Goldsborough would go on to endure other incidents. As a Captain he ground looped a Boeing P-12 C in 1937. In 1938 he'd be involved in another airborne tragedy, as a Major, when he was the pilot of a plane that left Langley Field for a flight to Jacksonville Florida and weather conditions so obscured the ground that he could not land. Both he and a civilian government employee passenger were forced to bail out of the aircraft as it ran out of gas. The passenger's parachute failed to open and he was killed. The then Major Goldsborough successfully landed. The incident ended up in a lawsuit against an insurance company. He must have still been in the Air Corps when World War Two started, but at that point, I've lost track of him. At age 46, and a Major, he would have then been a fairly senior officer.
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