Tom Wills was the only Jacksonville reporter to have walked amongst the wreckage of the plane in the woods, and he shared the tragic story of Lynyrd Skynyrd with thousands of mourning hometown fans and beyond.
This week’s Insider Deals are so good you’ll want all of them– On Oct. 20, 1977, a Convair CV-240 airliner took off from Greenville, South Carolina.
“I was not familiar with the band’s music, but our 11 o’clock producer, Mark Darden, was. I was soon to get an education about Lynyrd Skynyrd,” Wills said this week, recounting that night nearly 47 years ago. But then it was time to get to work documenting the tragedy. Nothing could have prepared Wills for what he saw at the crash site.
“I believe he agreed to let me interview him because of a decision I had made when he and other injured survivors were hospitalized in McComb and Jackson, Mississippi,” Wills said. “Friends of the band who had come to McComb asked me not to go to the hospitals and to give the injured their privacy. I agreed not to go to any of the hospitals.”“All I saw was treetops,” Powell said during the interview. “I looked out my window, I was in the middle of the airplane on the right wing.
Tom Wills Retirement Lynyrd Skynyrd
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