WELD COUNTY, Colo. (KDVR) — A lot has changed in the seven decades since Conrad Hopp grew up on a farm east of Longmont, but his memory of what happened in rural Weld County the night of November 1st, 1955, is unaltered.
“The plane was right in here,” Hopp said, pointing to two trees on the edge of a farm field.
Just 18 years old at the time, he’d spent that day harvesting sugar beets when the evening silence of the Eastern Plains was violently interrupted.
“There was a terrible explosion that sounded like all the windows in the house were coming in, and the house shook. And my brother and I ran outside, and there was a ball of fire southeast of us. And we jumped in my car. The ball of fire was coming down, and we got in behind it. And it hit the ground, and we were about one minute behind it,” Hopp told FOX31.
His high school sweetheart and future wife, Martha, was nearby and heard the mayhem too.
“We heard the boom. You just couldn’t believe it. All the roads were full of lights because everybody was doing the same thing, running up there,” she said.
Within minutes, hundreds of callers had flooded the police phone line, and thousands flocked to the farm fields of Weld County trying to figure out the origins of the fireball. Law enforcement officers soon arrived in droves, too, combing through the wreckage of what turned out to be United Flight 629, an airplane broken into pieces and scattered across six square miles of farmland.
“We knew it was an airplane. We could hear the roaring of it. We didn’t know it was a passenger plane until I was running back to my car, and here was a seat with a body in it, and I knew at that time that it was a passenger plane,” Conrad Hopp said.
They spent the night looking in vain for survivors and, believe it or not, guarding the bodies of those killed.
“And we’d find a body, and then we’d drive in a circle around that body to let somebody know that we had found one. You had to stay at the bodies because people, the looters, were stealing anything that looked valuable or loose. That was a real shocking thing,” Conrad Hopp said.
Within hours, it was clear to investigators this was no plane malfunction. They would soon learn it was sabotage. The first ever bombing of a commercial airliner in American aviation history. Forty-four people were killed on purpose by John “Jack” Gilbert Graham, 23, of Denver, who had a fraught relationship with his mother, Daisie King, 54, and planted more than 20 sticks of dynamite in her suitcase, along with a timer and a six-volt battery. It blew up the plane 5,700 feet above the ground near the homes of Martha and Conrad.
“My brother was nine years old, and he was supposed to stay in the house in the basement, and he crawled out a basement window, and he actually found a body. He was screaming for his dad,” Conrad Hopp said,
Martha returned to school the next day, but Conrad kept assisting in the search. Volunteers and law enforcement officials combed every square yard of farm land, meticulously looking for wreckage and clues. Those pieces were then taken to the hangar at Stapleton Airport, where the plane was reconstructed. The FBI’s investigation into the crash set the tone for future aviation probes. In their accident report released months later, investigators showed that 11 minutes after departure, an in-flight disintegrating explosion occurred. The explosion took place in the number four baggage compartment, and it was dynamite in the form of a bomb.
“When I got to the tail that night, I smelled dynamite. And I said right then, I smell dynamite. So I don’t think it really took too long for anybody to know,” Conrad Hopp said,
It was an act of sabotage the likes of which had never been seen in America, and an act of terror that changed everything about the way Americans fly.
“We didn’t want to fly for years. We were scared to get in a plane,” Martha Hopp said.
“It bothered me. It really did. I actually had kind of nightmares about the bodies and things,” Conrad Hopp said.
On Saturday, a memorial dedicated to the victims of Flight 629 will be dedicated at FlyteCo Tower, the former control tower for Stapleton International Airport. Family members of the victims and others will gather to unveil a monument with the names of those killed, according to Michael Hesse, president of the Denver Police Museum. The event is at 11 a.m., and the public is invited.
Conrad and Martha Hopp are part of a group trying to get a memorial built near the site of the crash in Weld County, as well. The group has started a fundraiser to kick off their efforts.
Anthony Sutton is a business strategist and writer with a passion for management, leadership, and entrepreneurship. With years of experience in the corporate world, he shares insights on business growth, strategy, and innovation through management-opleiding.org.
