richard harvey 🍊

Carol Burnett was 68 when she buried her eldest daughter. Carrie Louise Hamilton died on January 20, 2002, at 38, of pneumonia that followed lung cancer which had already reached her brain. The woman who had spent decades making millions laugh found herself unable to face the morning. Grief did not arrive as a stranger. It arrived carrying the same familiar luggage—alcoholism, poverty, fractured hopes, and a love that had always been real and never simple. Burnett was born in San Antonio on April 26, 1933, to Joseph Thomas “Jody” Burnett, a movie-theater manager, and Ina Louise Creighton, a publicity writer. Both parents drank. After they separated, Carol and her younger half-sister Chrissie were raised mainly by their maternal grandmother, Mabel “Mae” White, in a cramped Hollywood boarding-house apartment. Money was so scarce that someone might arrive with a chicken to fry, or clothes might arrive already worn by someone else. Down the hall, adults fought over liquor and unpaid bills. In that one-room world, the girl who would become a star practiced drawing perfect families that did not exist outside her imagination. Both parents died young of alcoholism—her father in 1954 at 47, her mother a few years later at 46. Carol, still a teenager, became responsible for Chrissie. The same girl who had lived on hand-me-downs reached Broadway in 1959 in Once Upon a Mattress. By 1967 The Carol Burnett Show had made her a household name. Viewers saw the ear tug that said hello to Nanny, the Tarzan yell she had taught herself as a child, the open-mouthed laughter. They did not see the weight she carried from the boarding-house years. In 1963 she married producer Joe Hamilton. They had three daughters: Carrie, born December 5, 1963; then Jody and Erin. Carrie was creative, bright, and, by her teenage years, caught in addiction. Burnett has spoken of that period without softening it. She put Carrie into treatment before she turned 18, during a stretch of years Carrie later called hell—years when her daughter hated her for doing the only thing a mother could do. It was not the television version of motherhood. It was love that chose the painful step first and then waited years to be understood. Carrie eventually got clean. She became an actress, writer, singer, and playwright. Mother and daughter later worked together adapting Burnett’s memoir One More Time into the play Hollywood Arms, drawn directly from the childhood poverty and the women who had raised her. In August 2001 Carrie was diagnosed with lung cancer. It spread to her brain. Five months later, cancer-related pneumonia took her. Burnett had already buried both parents. Now she was burying a daughter. She did not pretend the grief was graceful. She has said she did not want to get out of bed. Her husband told her she owed it to Carrie and to the director Hal Prince to finish what they had started. She went to Chicago for the play her daughter would never see. In the hotel room, birds-of-paradise flowers waited—the same flower Carrie had tattooed on her shoulder. A bottle of champagne arrived labeled “Louise,” Carrie’s middle name and the name of Burnett’s own mother. On opening night it rained. Burnett has said she and Carrie always loved the rain, and she felt her daughter near. What stayed with her most was Carrie’s fierce way of living. A person lives on, Burnett has reflected, in the people they touch, in the inspiration they give, in the way they alter someone else’s plan even for a moment—get them to think, rage, cry, laugh, argue, or walk around the block dazed. She has said she never got over Carrie. She learned to breathe around the empty space. Some hearts keep laughing because stopping would hurt too much. 🌹

On a bright January afternoon in 2000, Alaska Airlines Flight 261 lifted out of Puerto Vallarta bound for San Francisco and Seattle. The McDonnell Douglas MD-83 carried 88 people—many of them airline employees and their families heading home after a holiday. In the cockpit sat Captain Ted Thompson, 53, with nearly 18,000 hours, and First Officer Bill Tansky, 57, with more than 8,000 hours on the MD-80 family. Both were former military pilots. Both were highly experienced. Neither had any reason to expect what was coming. Somewhere over the California coast, the horizontal stabilizer—the small wing-like surface on the tail that sets the plane’s pitch—began to bind. The jackscrew that moves it had worn down after years of extended lubrication intervals. The pilots felt the problem early, contacted maintenance, and worked the checklist while holding altitude by hand. For a time they managed it. Then the mechanism failed more completely. The stabilizer slammed to a full nose-down position. The jet dropped from roughly 31,000 feet toward 24,000 in about eighty seconds, descending at rates that pushed the airframe and the crew to their limits. Thompson and Tansky both hauled back on the yokes—together applying more than 130 pounds of force—and arrested the dive. They asked for a diversion to Los Angeles but requested to remain over the water. Thompson’s concern, even then, was the people on the ground. Controllers gave them the ocean. As the crew prepared for an emergency approach, the jackscrew assembly finally separated. The stabilizer was free. The airplane pitched steeply downward and rolled inverted. What followed was a short, remarkable piece of airmanship. Thompson called “Push and roll, push and roll.” By deliberately pushing forward and rolling, the crew reduced the dive angle from roughly 70 degrees to about 9 degrees while the airplane was completely upside down. For nearly a minute they flew inverted over the Pacific, buying a few more seconds of controlled flight. Thompson’s voice on the recorder, calm and precise, noted, “At least upside down we’re flying.” Seconds later, as the engines began to fail from the extreme attitude and altitude ran out, he said, “Ah, here we go.” At 4:21 p.m. the MD-83 struck the water about 2.7 miles north of Anacapa Island. Everyone on board was lost. Investigators recovered the jackscrew from the ocean floor. Its Acme nut threads had been stripped smooth by friction and lack of lubrication. Alaska had lengthened the interval between greasings with FAA approval; the design of the system had no adequate backup once the threads failed. The NTSB’s probable cause was the in-flight failure of that jackscrew assembly, rooted in insufficient maintenance. The accident led to tighter lubrication requirements and closer oversight of critical flight-control components across the industry. Captain Thompson and First Officer Tansky were posthumously awarded the Air Line Pilots Association Gold Medal for Heroism—the first time the medal had been given posthumously to an airliner crew. Their families accepted it on the first anniversary. Colleagues described the decision as straightforward: two pilots who, facing an unrecoverable failure, used every remaining skill they had and still thought of the people below them. At Hueneme Beach in Port Hueneme, a memorial sundial stands facing the Channel Islands. Designed by sculptor James “Bud” Bottoms, it carries the names of all 88 on bronze plates around its base. Each year on January 31, at the hour of the crash, the gnomon’s shadow falls across a heart-shaped marker. Families still gather. The ocean remains quiet. The record of what two pilots did in those final minutes remains one of the clearest examples of professional skill under impossible conditions.