Today’s Date in History (January 16, 1942) is a sad one:

Only a little over five weeks after Pearl Harbor, actress Carole Lombard, returning from a War Bond drive, is killed when the DC-3 on which she is a passenger crashes into Mt. Potosi, near Las Vegas.

I used to show My Man Godfrey during the Great Depression unit in my U.S. History, and my students, I think, loved the film–they were enchanted by William Powell’s butler and a little exasperated with Lombard’s ditzy heiress, Irene, who had the advantage of playing against an evil older sister, Cornelia (played by Gail Patrick, in real life a very nice human being.) In fact, Powell and Lombard—the love of Jean Harlow’s life was William Powell–were briefly married.

Irene dismayed me a little until I began watching more Lombard films–To Be or Not to Be, with Jack Benny and an impossibly young Robert Stack, Made for Each Other, with James Stewart, True Confession, with Fred MacMurray. It began to dawn on me that Lombard was one of the time’s most gifted comediennes and, of course, she was beautiful.

When she fell in love with Clark Gable–who, by the way, filmed 1940’s Strange Cargo with Joan Crawford, in Pismo Beach, stayed at today’s Pismo Hotel, and played a pickup softball game with some SLO High kids on the beach–he was inconveniently married.

Gable was a minor-key Hemingway–a “man’s man” who loved to hunt and fish. So Lombard began to learn how to do those things, too, in a strategic campaign that, in its duration and care, rivaled Eisenhower’s plans for D-Day. Gable loved dogs, too–including Irish Setters–but that was no stretch. If you google “Carole Lombard dogs,” you’ll see what I mean.

The invasion was successful. Gable and Lombard were married in 1939—seeking to avoid publicity, they got the necessary blood test and marriage license in what was described as “a sleepy little town,” San Luis Obispo.

The photographs from that time show two people obviously in love. But, three years later, her devotion to him was not always reciprocated. Gable thought himself a man’s man in other ways, and Lombard could’ve concluded her War Bond tour with a train trip home, but rumors that her husband was having an affair changed her plans.

She boarded TWA Flight 3, bound for Burbank, in Indianapolis. The plane stopped in Albuquerque, where the civilian passengers were asked to surrender their seats for Army Air Forces personnel headed for Los Angeles. Lombard refused to give up hers. Fifteen minutes after a fuel stop in Las Vegas, the DC-3, seven miles off course, crashed, killing its twenty-two passengers and crew.

Gable became a B-17 gunner and photographer who flew at least five missions; the old story goes that he was so grief-stricken over Lombard that he was actively seeking a death in combat. That’s probably apocryphal.

Nineteen years later, Gable would film John Huston’s melancholy neo-Western The Misfits, with Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. It was the last film the three movie stars made.

But, of course, thanks to what Hollywood likes to call the magic of film, all of them–luckily for us–all of them, including Carole, are still alive.