Radiotopia from PRX.

From PRX's Radiotopia, this is Radio Diaries.

I'm Joe Richman.

Today on the Radio Diaries podcast, the view from the 79th floor.

It was strangely cold and foggy on the morning of July 28, 1945.

But World War II was coming to a close, and the mood in New York City on that Saturday was cheerful.

Millions were eating breakfast, running errands, and one 20-year-old woman was on her way to the 80th floor of the tallest building in the world.

Her name was Betty Lou Oliver, and she spent her days going up and down and up and down,

the Empire State Building, as the operator of elevator number six.

While Betty worked that morning, in her crisp uniform, smiling at passengers, she couldn't

have known that outside the building a young U.S. Army pilot on his way to LaGuardia Airport

was lost in the thick fog and flying low over Manhattan.

She couldn't have known that the pilot of that B-25 had just narrowly missed hitting the

Chrysler building, then Grand Central.

She might have heard the roar of the plane as it got closer, and she might have wondered what it was,

as she got called up to the 80th floor just before 10 a.m.

At the exact moment, the plane slammed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building.

Betty experienced every elevator rider's worst nightmare. Down she fell, floor by floor, more than a thousand

feet to the sub-basement. What happened next put Betty Lou Oliver in the Guinness Book

of World Records. Somehow, air pressure built up as the elevator dropped, slowing the fall.

At the same time, thousands of feet of loose elevator cables were coiling up on the bottom of the shaft.

When the elevator car reached the bottom, those cables acted like a giant spring to cushion the landing.

...