[meteorite-list] Eyewitness Account of the Holbrook Fall

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:26:52 -0600
Message-ID: <10c901c74f37$f452c850$d9342b41_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi,

    Nice eyewitness account of the Holbrook fall.

Sterling K. Webb
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TEMPE RESIDENT REMEMBERS METEOR'S PLUNGE 86 YEARS AGO

30 May 1998

MESA, Ariz. (AP) _ Pauline McCleve of Tempe doesn't need to go to the
movies to see scary scenes of meteors streaking toward frightened
people. She can just rerun one of the memories in her head. Now 103,
McCleve remembers the explosion in the sky when a rock from outer space
fell near Holbrook in northern Arizona on July 19, 1912. ``That was the
loudest sound I ever heard in my life,'' she recalled recently.
``There was no sound from us except a gasp of terror.''

She was 17, standing outside her family home in Holbrook with her
parents and some of her 10 brothers and sisters. The meteor dominated
the early evening sky. ``It was coming right toward us. We thought we
were going to die. ``The closer it came, the more frightened we were.
We just stood there paralyzed.'' The boom was heard as far away as 100
miles north and south of the city, according to newspaper accounts from
that week. ``People ran into the streets and stared at the sky,'' the
Holbrook News reported. Witnesses in Winslow, 30 miles farther west,
saw a smoky trail streaking eastward toward Holbrook. McCleve
remembered it as a glowing fireball with a bright tail. The boom came
from a chunk of asteroid shattering into thousands of pieces.

It probably was about the size of an office desk when it first entered
the atmosphere, according to Carleton Moore, director of the Arizona
State University Center of Meteorite Studies. ``Holbrook is still the
only observed fall in Arizona,'' Moore said. ``All the other meteorites
in Arizona have just been found sitting on the ground.''

Observed falls, in which a meteorite is seen in the air and then
recovered on the ground, occur only about once every two or three years
anywhere in the world. Several pieces of the dense black stone now sit
in one of the center's public display cases on campus, including the
biggest chunk that hit the ground, weighing 14 pounds, and tiny bits
the size of peas.

McCleve remembered, ``It exploded like shrapnel.'' The pieces landed in
a 3-mile-long ellipse centered about six miles east of Holbrook. One
baseball-sized chunk knocked the limb off a tree. ``Papa said, `Oh, it
missed us, but that landed very close. I'll go out in the morning and
look for it.''' Other folks had the same idea, and many of them went
out to collect pieces of the dense black stones. More than 14,000
pieces were collected that summer, mostly from the surface of the
ground, but some of the largest were embedded up to 6 inches deep. Many
were purchased by a Philadelphia collector, Warren Foote, who wrote the
first scientific paper about the Holbrook meteorite four months later.

McCleve's father, Richard Decatur Greer, and her younger brother, Pratt
Greer, earned nearly $2,000 gathering and selling pieces of the
Holbrook meteorite, she said. The man she married the following year,
James Cyrus McCleve, made $400.

``It was hard times, and everybody was glad to get what they could,''
she said. In 1912, $2,000 was enough to buy a modest home. About 2,000
additional pieces of the Holbrook meteorite have been found since 1912,
some as recently as 1991.

Moore gave a talk about meteorites to the Kiwanis Club at the
Friendship Village retirement center in Tempe last month. Afterward, he
received a note that McCleve, a resident of the center, would like to
talk with him. Some of the pieces of the Holbrook meteorite at ASU were
part of Foote's collection, so some may have originally been picked up
by McCleve's father, Moore said. McCleve has remembered the meteor many
times in the past 86 years. ``That was the most terrifying time in all
my years,'' she said, ``Those few seconds of the meteor coming toward
us.''

http://www.swanet.org/ telnet://aztec2.asu.edu
Southwestern Archaeology (SWA) - History, Archaeology,
and Anthropology of the American Southwest!

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Received on Tue 13 Feb 2007 01:26:52 AM PST