Cape Cod History

1958: Worst Cape and Islands air crash ever; 1971: Where the tennis buffs roam.

1971: Truro and the Kahns of Cape Cod

In 1971 the Lower Cape was even more bucolic and ratified than today, but it had E.J. Kahn in situ for the summer.  E.J. didn't just write 27 books and wax eloquently for The New Yorker for five decades, he fathered a literary family which graces our sands to this day. On this day in 1971 he wrote the New York Times this amusement which begins:

Oh, Give Me a Home Where the Tennis Buffs Roam And the Shrinks and Sinologists Play

Where in the world are all your people this summer? At least three times in the last several years you have dispatched staff men to Outer Cape Cod to recount how psychiatrists spend their traditional August holidays in Province-town, in Wellfleet, and, particularly, in Truro, where I am now rusticating in reasonably good mental health... read the story here and see a reprint below.

1958: Flight 458 left 24 of 34 passengers dead on Nantucket
Weather delayed departure, crashed short of runway

   There were not many recognizable parts of this Convair CV-240 except the wing looming over the trees in the upper right corner above.

On this day in 1958, a Northeast Airlines plane landed 300 yards short of the Nantucket Airport runway. Although the story in the New You Times the next day reported that nineteen passengers were killed, later reports and the book published by islander Cindy Houghton, "Out of the fog", revealed that all by ten of the thirty-four passengers were killed. Read the story in the next mornings newspaper below.
___________________________________________________________________________