Flight 401: RESCUE IN THE SWAMP
35 years after an Eastern Air Lines jet plunged into the Everglades, a rescuer looks back.
By JEFF KLINKENBERG, Times Staff Writer
Published September 16, 2007
This is the story about the night a jumbo jet landed among the pig frogs and alligators, the cottonmouth snakes and yellow-crowned night herons, in the Everglades. Robert L. Marquis - "Bud" to friends - wanted to eat frogs' legs. He was out there gigging frogs when it happened.
A yellow flash. Boom. Blackness. Silence.
It was closing in on midnight on Dec. 29, 1972. Speeding across the 'glades in his airboat, Bud was the first rescuer on the scene. He saw tangled metal and smelled aviation fuel. He saw mangled bodies and heard the pitiful moans of the dying.
He rescued some terrified folks - he doesn't know how many - before the regular cavalry of official rescuers arrived in helicopters, directed to the carnage by his head lamp. He carried survivors to safety and made them as comfortable as he could.
Then he was pretty much forgotten.
Old and sick now, he lives in near poverty on the edge of the Everglades. His name showed up recently on a Web site about the 35th anniversary of a tragedy that killed more than 100 passengers and traumatized dozens more.
Folks from South Florida's sporting community, mostly hunters, fishers and airboaters, heard, many for the first time, about Bud. "He's one of us," says John Canti, a firefighter, paramedic and outdoorsman. "He's an airboater."
In recent months Canti and others have made pilgrimages to Bud's screened door to hear his story. The ultimate "yes sir, no sir" man, Bud shuffles reluctantly onto the porch, blinking furiously in the sunlight, wondering what's up. Then he tells the story the best he can.
"Nobody paid him to go out there and try to rescue people," says Ken Pine, who recently fixed Bud's roof. "He was just a guy out there frogging and minding his own business who knew he had to help people in trouble. In my mind, that makes him a real hero."
Pine and others want to do something nice for Bud, perhaps honor him with a special day, raise cash for Bud's taxes, groceries and medical bills.
You know what would make Bud Marquis happy? If one more time he could harvest a mess of frog legs in the Everglades.
- - -
He knows exactly how he'd go about it. He'd launch his airboat at the Miccosukee Indian Reservation on the Tamiami Trail and race north into the river of grass.
On a moonless night, in the beam of his head lamp, the frog eyes would glow like rubies. He'd cruise up on the frog, spear the frog with the 3-pronged gig, knock the frog off the gig into a sack, all the while moving forward in the airboat while getting ready to gig another frog. Mama, heat up the frying pan. We're having legs tonight.
Even at 78, Marquis is an old-fashioned country boy. Born in Arkansas, he grew up in South Florida when everybody seemed to be poor. His fishing and hunting skills helped put supper on the family table.
He likes to think about those days. He also likes not to think about those days. In his mind, he's still a strapping young fellow with big muscles. The bent, white-haired man in the mirror has a bad heart and breathes from an oxygen machine, hasn't been frogging in a coon's age, and hasn't been in his airboat since, well, he can't remember. It's broken, just like him.
At least he lives near his precious Everglades. At night, when he sits on his porch, he can hear the wup-wup bellows of the pig frogs and the heh-heh-heh chatter of the leopard frogs beyond the trees. Of course, hearing them from the porch isn't the same as being in the middle of them armed with a gig, taking a long breath of Everglades air, feeling utterly alive.
Back in the day, when he spent so much time in the wilderness, only the airplanes overhead reminded him of civilization. He'd see the lights and hear the roar as the jets climbed into the black night over the swamp or descended toward Miami International Airport.
- - -
He isn't a talker to begin with, unless it's about boats or engines or the 'glades. He has never taken pleasure in talking about what he saw after Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 went down and how he felt about it. His wife Nancy - they married when she was 15 - could always tell when it was on his mind, though. He'd get that look.
Before a bad back forced an early retirement, Bud laid carpet, grew avocados and worked as a game warden in the Everglades. A friend once warned him: "One day you'll work a plane crash out there." His friend, of course, envisioned a Piper Cub or something small going down in a summer thunderstorm, not a state-of-the-art L-1011 carrying 200 passengers on a perfect winter night.
Bud spent his time arresting grizzled gator poachers and rough-cob deer thieves, cane-polers with too many bream on their stringers and feral teenage boys selling protected Indigo snakes to pet stores.
Sometimes, back when there were no cell phones or GPS electronics to help navigate, he'd get lost at night. He'd stay calm, look at the stars for direction, think things through, then crank up the airboat engine and find his way back to the Tamiami Trail.
At home, waiting sometimes fearfully, was Nancy, a pretty barefoot country girl in a cotton dress. "You didn't have nothing to worry about," he'd tell her, finding a seat on the porch, from where he could hear the barred owls and their singular "who-cooks-for-you" calls, exciting and mournful at once.
- - -
Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 traveled from New York to Miami. The plane, a new "Whisperliner," could transport 229 passengers. On Dec. 29, 1972, it carried 178, including crew.
It promised to be an exciting week in Miami, especially for people who had bucks for a meal at Joe's Stone Crabs and a night at the Fontainebleau Hotel, where the sexy dancer Ann-Margret was headlining. Rowdy fans of Notre Dame and University of Nebraska, scheduled to play on New Year's Day at the Orange Bowl, were poised to take over the town.
Bud no longer worked as a game warden - his day job was laying carpet. After dark he moonlighted as a commercial frogger. He had promised to show a slight acquaintance, Ray Dickinson, how to gig frogs.
Flight 401 left John F. Kennedy at 9:20 p.m. The trip to Florida, by official accounts, was pleasantly routine. "Welcome to Miami," the pilot announced during the descent at 11:30.
Altitude 900 feet.
Something was wrong with the landing gear or the landing-gear light on the control panel. Anyway, the pilots couldn't tell if the wheels were down. At 11:32, they aborted the landing, climbed to 2,000 feet and swung west over the Everglades to work out the problem.
They turned on the autopilot. At least they thought they had. The jet actually began losing altitude, so gradually that no one noticed until the very end. Nobody, not the pilots nor passengers, knew anything was amiss. A glance out a window, after all, would have shown nothing but the black Everglades below.
"Hey, what's happening here?" the pilot asked at the last second.
That was the last transmission before the left wing sliced into the Everglades at 225 mph. The jet bounced once, then hit again. Survivors described a flash or spark that exploded through the cabin as the jet ripped apart.
- - -
Bud Marquis had experienced better nights of frogging. But he and his helper had 30 pounds of legs.
"Then I saw this great big fireball and the whole 'glades lit up. Then zip, the light was out."
Bud revved up the engine and headed northwest.
That section of the Everglades is a tangle of sawgrass, tree islands, canals and levees. Fortunately, Bud was an expert. With the engine dangerously wide open - the boat slipped over the grass at 35 mph - he maneuvered around all obstacles.
Then wham! Aground. When he stopped the engine to push the boat back into the water, he heard a chorus of terrified human voices, hollering, moaning, shrieking.
He cranked up the engine and moved toward the sound. He shut down the engine again to listen. "Hey! Hey! Hey!" Someone had seen his frogging light.
In the narrow beam of his head lamp he now saw enormous strips of torn metal. He saw openings in the sawgrass created by sliding chunks of broken airplane. He saw a man standing, shocked, in knee-deep water.
"He was naked. A lot of the people I saw were naked. I guess their clothes got blown off them."
Bud helped the man into the airboat and poured him coffee from the thermos.
"Help us!"
Three women on the jetliner's tail, about 20 feet above the water, begged Bud to save them.
"Ladies, you're safe up there. You don't want to be in the water with me."
Water saturated by jet fuel filled his boots, burning his legs.
He felt helpless, hearing what sounded like hundreds of voices coming at him from different directions. He had lost contact with his frogging helper, Ray, too. Forgotten about him, actually. They didn't find each other until morning. They never met again, never talked again, and never will: Ray died years ago in Arcadia.
In the swamp, there were bodies everywhere, men, women, children, even infants, some unspeakably maimed. Bud saw bodies strapped into seats upside down in the water. If he saw legs kicking, he turned the seat over.
He saw a man, sitting in the water with a neck injury, trying to remain upright. "When I tried to prop him up it felt like every bone in his body was broken."
After about an hour, he saw the first helicopter. It seemed to be miles off course. Bud waved his light until the helicopter took notice.
When the Coast Guard helicopter attempted a landing, the prop wash threw hunks of debris dangerously around. Bud waved the helicopter toward a nearby levee. That's where the helicopters, one after another, landed that night, and where ambulances arrived to load the dead and injured.
- - -
Officially, 103 passengers and crew died. Seventy-five miraculously survived.
Bud's heroics were featured prominently a few days later in the Miami Herald. He was mentioned in a book, The Crash of Flight 401, later made into a B-movie, and helped a Hollywood writer with the awful Ghosts of Flight 401, about commercial jets haunted by the dead pilots.
Several survivors tracked him down to thank him personally. One gave him money. He can't remember anyone's name now.
In 1985, his years as a manual laborer caught up with him. Carpet layers need strong backs. His required surgery. The government considered him totally disabled.
In 1992, Hurricane Andrew blew the roof of the house across the street through his front windows. The other house is gone; his still requires repairs.
"It's 100 degrees in the house, honey," Nancy says, joining him on the porch. Only their bedroom has an air conditioner.
Bud asks his wife to look for his scrapbooks. She returns with a musty volume that smells like a lion's den. Bud and Nancy own 27 domestic cats, including 15 that live indoors on sofas, tables and bookshelves.
Flipping through the pages, Bud smiles for the first time in hours. He looks at the photo of the primitive camp he built in the cypress trees so many years ago when he was young and strong and could hunt and gig frogs and look at the stars.
"I'd like to go there," he says.
"Remember what the doctor said," Nancy chimes in. His doctor warned him not to travel alone, not with his weak heart and lungs and aching back.
- - -
Clutching his walking stick, Bud shuffles past a mango tree into the backyard.
The old airboat, the airboat in which he carried injured passengers, waits on a rusty trailer with flat tires. It is 12 feet long and 7 feet across. It has a flat bottom and a high seat and a cobweb-draped engine and propeller.
"I could get it running," he says, fighting for breath. "It needs new points and plugs, maybe a new set of rings. It wouldn't take much."
A Web forum, Southern Airboat, which attracts thousands of worldwide participants, plans to take care of the repairs.
On Dec. 3, Southern Airboat and other organizations also plan to honor Bud and the victims and survivors of Eastern Flight 401 with a service and a barbecue in Miami.
Afterward, folks hope to take the old man into the Everglades, in his own airboat, if he wants. Bud wants to. He wants to show them how to gig frogs.
"You have to keep your eye on the frogs real good when that airboat is moving - I mean not take your eyes away - and be quick with the gig," he says, in what amounts to the Gettysburg Address for him.
"I think I can still do it. I really do think I can gig some frogs if I had to."
Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com.
Elsewhere on the Web
Helping hand
- To learn more about the crash of Eastern Flight 401 go to eastern401.googlepages.com.
- To find out how you can help, type Southern Airboat, Robert Marquis in your Web browser.
- To contribute to the Bud Marquis Fund by mail, write P.O. Box 2492, Orange Park, FL 32067-2492.