Seventy years ago this Sunday, people in New York City stopped what they were doing to look up at the sky. They saw something extraordinary — the zeppelin Hindenburg, the largest aircraft that ever flew, as big as an ocean liner. It had crossed the Atlantic from Germany and was flying over New York en route to an airfield in Lakehurst, N.J., where it burst into flames, killing 36 people.
Commentator Joe Pacheco is a retired New York City school superintendent. He wrote the following poem about seeing the Hindenburg before it met its fateful end.
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