Bob Hope made 'Thanks for the Memory' immortal by singing it to countless servicemen on countless radio broadcasts.
One of its writers did not live to see it. He died in a fiery Coachella Valley plane crash involving an Army pilot.
Ralph Rainger was born in New York in 1901. As an orchestra pit pianist, he inhabited the same Broadway milieu as Hope, but a few years earlier. He gained fame writing the music for 'Moanin' Low,' a big hit for Libby Holman in a 1929 revue called 'The Little Show.'
In 1930, Rainger went to Hollywood, where he worked for Paramount until 1938. About the time Hope was establishing himself at the studio, Rainger switched to 20th Century Fox.
'Thanks for the Memory,' co-written with Leo Robin, won an Academy Award in 1939. Hope, playing a divorcee, sang the lyrics 'we said goodbye with a highball' as a farewell to his ex-wife in 'The Big Broadcast of 1938,' adding a poignant moment to a comedy many critics found too lightweight.
It is Rainger's best remembered song, but he wrote others with a shelf life: 'Blue Hawaii,' 'I Wished on the Moon,' and the score for the animated 'Gulliver's Travels.'
At 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 23, 1942, Rainger boarded a Burbank-to-Phoenix flight aboard a DC-3. Forty-five minutes later, the airliner plowed into a ridge near Chino Canyon, killing all nine passengers and the crew of three. The accident took place 'in full sight of downtown Palm Springs,' The Desert Sun reported.
A joint inquiry by congressional investigators and the Civil Aeronautics Administration revealed that the DC-3's co-pilot had been out for cocktails in Los Angeles the night before with an army lieutenant ferrying a bomber to Dallas, Texas. The two agreed to salute each other over the desert.
The bomber, the faster of the planes, took off from Long Beach about the same time as the DC-3 left Burbank and circled twice over March Air Force Base, seemingly in wait for the airliner, which it quickly passed when both planes were over the desert. But the bomber didn't continue flying straight and the aircrafts converged.
The airliner suffered tail damage. The bomber sustained damage to one propeller and limped into Palm Springs, suggesting it had clipped the back of the DC-3.
Ferry pilot William Norman Wilson, 25, was courtmarshaled on manslaughter charges. Six-foot-tall, ashen-faced and stripped of his gold shoulder bars, he made a sympathetic witness in his own defense. He denied making any firm plans to reconnoiter with his friend on the commercial flight and said he would never engage in 'horseplay': A brother had died in naval air maneuvers three months earlier.
Wilson was acquitted in 37 minutes after two days of testimony. A private from the Palm Springs USO testified that he watched the crash and that the DC-3 had veered suddenly into the bomber.
The House committee reported otherwise: 'The specific cause was the desire of Lt. Wilson to show off to his friend. His human vanity became the kiss of death to his friend and 11 other innocent people.'
Elizabeth Rainger, the widow of the man who gave the world 'Thanks for the Memory,' sued the airline and won a judgment of more than $77,000.
