[meteorite-list] Eyewitness Account of the Holbrook Fall

From: JKGwilliam <h3chondrite_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:58:46 -0700
Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.0.20070213075049.01d30e38_at_pop.west.cox.net>

Some of us had the great fortune to know Pauline McCleve personally. She
was a neighbor of mine from 1988 until her death. She passed away just a
few years ago at the ripe old age of 106. Even in here later years, she
never got tired of telling the Holbrook meteorite story. I can remember
sitting with her on several occasions listening to her give her eyewitness
account of the fall. One funny thing was that she always insisted that it
was a comet and not a meteorite.

Best,
John Gwilliam

At 11:26 PM 2/12/2007, Sterling K. Webb wrote:
>Hi,
>
> Nice eyewitness account of the Holbrook fall.
>
>Sterling K. Webb
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>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 09:58:46 AM PST