The history of the NBA took a turn at the end of the 1959-60 season when the Minneapolis Lakers relocated to Los Angeles.
However, about two months earlier, the season nearly took a much more dramatic and tragic turn.
First, a little history about the franchise.
The Lakers’ franchise actually started as the Detroit Gems in the National Basketball League.
In 1947, Ben Berger and Morris Chalfen purchased the Gems for $15,000 from owner Maury Winston. A 26-year-old Minneapolis Tribune sportswriter named Sid Hartman played a behind-the-scenes role in putting the deal together and later played a key role in assembling the team.
One of the first moves Hartman initiated was getting John Kundla of the College of St. Thomas to be their first head coach.
Hartman said in his book, Sid!: The Sports Legends, the Inside Scoops and the Close Personal Friends, that one reason he was allowed to avoid a conflict of interest with the paper was that at that time every member of the paper’s staff had an outside job as a PR man for either the wrestling promoters, boxing promoters, etc.
The team, renamed in recognition of the state’s nickname as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes” saw a lot of success after the move to Minneapolis.
They won three straight titles in three different leagues starting with the 1948 NBL title.
The next season the Lakers moved to the two-year-old Basketball Association of America and won that league’s title in 1949.
In August of that year, the BAA and NBL merged to form the NBA and the Lakers would once again win the title in 1950.
In 1951, the Lakers lost in the divisional playoffs to the eventual champion Rochester Royals.
Minneapolis would bounce right back and claim three straight NBA titles, winning in 1952, 1953, and 1954.
George Mikan was the Lakers first and biggest star, playing with the Lakers from 1947-1956.
The Lakers played home games at the Minneapolis Auditorium from 1947-1959.
The team played its final season at the Minneapolis Armory.
Late in their time in Minnesota, the Lakers ran into several conflicts for dates in Minneapolis and had to play some home games (including playoff contests) in St. Paul at Hamline University.
In the 1959-60 season, their final season in Minneapolis, the Lakers finished in third place in the NBA Western Division with a record of 25–50, 21 games behind the St. Louis Hawks.
In the playoffs, the Lakers defeated the Detroit Pistons 2-0 in the Western Division semifinals before losing the West Finals to the Hawks 4-3.
Now, back to the day that could have altered a lot of NBA history.
After Mikan’s retirement, the Lakers began to struggle a bit at the gate.
In February 1957 a pair of Missouri men were ready to buy the team and move it to Kansas City. But owner Ben Berger first agreed to give local interests a chance to match the Missouri groups offer.
There was a civic drive to sell stock in a corporation to purchase the team, and a group of more than 100 firms and individuals purchased the team.
Local attorney, trucking magnate, and political maverick Bob Short was elected president of the Lakers, who would remain in Minneapolis. At least for the time being.
Short was known to be, well, putting it kindly, frugal.
On Jan. 18, 1960, the Lakers were flying home after a loss to the Hawks in St. Louis.
“We were playing cards, and then the lights went out, and it got cold,” Elgin Baylor told David Aldridge.
The remainder of this newsletter is taken from Aldridge’s excellent story on the event.
“And for a while, the pilot didn't say anything. And finally everybody wanted to know what was going on, and he said the only thing that was working was the generator. (Not) the instrument panel, nothing. They couldn't see anything.”
Returning to St. Louis was not an option, because the plane's radio, like everything else, wasn't working. The pilots tried to fly above the storm, but couldn't get out of the snow.
The pilots had to open the windows of the cockpit to brush off the snow, because the windshield wipers were inoperative. One of the pilots was frostbitten across half of his face. No one knew where they were, but everybody knew the plane was running out of fuel and had to land soon.
“The moon was out and we were lost, so we started following this car,” Bob "Slick" Leonard said. “They weren't flying that high. They thought the headlights would lead them into a town. And that damn thing was heading up a hill. And all of a sudden (the pilot) yanks up on that thing and we go back up.
“Finally, the pilot said 'listen, I'm going to go down; I think I see a field that we might can land (in),' and he told everybody to get ready," Baylor said.
First, though, the pilots had to make several passes over the land to try and figure out the terrain of the countryside. Also, they had to fly around and over power lines, as well as a water tower.
"Your life really passes in front of you," Leonard said. "I had three little kids at the time and a lot of things go through your mind. But I didn't think we were gonna die."
At last, the pilots dropped the plane down into the field. While Baylor says it was "the smoothest landing I ever had," Leonard recalled it a little differently.
"The story is that, and I didn't turn around to see it, so I don't know if Elgin was laying in the aisle or not," he said. "The (corn) shucks were still up and it was just ripping through there. We were in that crash position. And then we stopped and one pilot had that backdoor open real quick, and now, here we are in a cornfield, and we're so happy. The snow was clear up to your chest ... we started throwing snowballs at each other and everything."
They were in Carroll, Iowa, and they were lucky. About 75 yards or so ahead, Leonard said, was "a drop off like you wouldn't believe. That plane would've gone down that gorge and probably exploded."
The first civilian to greet them, imponderably, was the town mortician, whose house the plane had buzzed.
"We told him, 'no business for you today,'" Baylor said.
The players rode hearses into town and stayed the night at a local senior retirement hotel.
"There was a small bar there, that sat maybe five or six people," Leonard said. "And some of these old retirees, they came out, the ladies had their nightgowns on, and they wanted to know what was going on. And old Larry Faust, he's dead now, he saw that liquor cabinet had a lock on it. He took a hold of that lock and just twisted that thing off and got himself a big glass and poured himself some VO and sat down."
The Lakers took buses back to Minneapolis. The next trip out was a few days later, to Cincinnati. On the same plane.
"We told Short, 'we're not getting on that baby,'" Leonard said. "He said 'you either get on, or you're out of a job.' We got on that baby and flew again."
"They assured us everything was fine," Baylor said. "So we fly to Cincinnati and we play, and get back on the plane and we're flying back. And the late Jim Krebs, he was on one side of the plane, and he was looking out, and he said 'hey, look, the airport.' We were only like 400 or 500 feet up. We thought it was an emergency for a plane that was coming in, or something like that. Fire trucks, you see the lights. It was for us. What had happened was, we had an oil leak, and the engine caught fire."
After that, the Lakers moved to Los Angeles, and they were certain they'd seen the last of the demon plane.
Two years later, they were in the Midwest for an exhibition game.
"We chartered a plane at Butler Aviation in Chicago, and we landed there, so we were going to use that," Baylor said. "The plane looked sort of strange. It was a DC 3, nice interior, well done, new engines. I said 'this plane reminds me of that old Laker plane.' We asked the pilot; he didn't know, he said he just flies them. But he said the owner would be flying back with us from Fort Wayne.
"When we met the owner at the airport, I asked him where he got the plane. He said 'I bought it from some SOB named Bob Short.'"
The place where the plane landed was in rural Carroll at the time. Now it’s in the city itself.
And in the exact location of where the plane landed that snowy January night in 1960 sits what is known as Laker Court. The Los Angeles Lakers donated $25,000 toward the project.
A dedication was held in the 50th anniversary year in 2010 that was attended by crash survivors and Lakers executive vice president Jeanne Buss.