Empire State Building Elevator Operator Betty Lou Oliver Still Holds Free-Fall Record (Exclusive)

Betty Lou Oliver’s last day on the job as an elevator operator for the Empire State Building was one for the history books.

Exactly 80 years later, she still holds the Guinness World Record for surviving the longest-ever elevator free fall — a harrowing nearly 1,000-foot plunge straight down in the country’s most famous skyscraper.

“She was working her last day and would have been off in two hours,” her daughter Annie Connally, 78, tells PEOPLE.

Connally says her mom never talked much about her experience, but Connally remembers being surprised that Oliver never had any qualms about getting back into elevators despite what she endured on July 28, 1945.

“I worked in a Denver high rise and when she came to visit, she just got into the elevator,” Connally says.

Pretty brave after nearly losing her life on a day that started out so filled with promise. The young woman described as “vivacious” by those who knew her at the time had been given gifts and good wishes on her last day on the job. She was going to meet a cousin at the Russian Tea Room after work and had bought a new outfit to meet her husband, Oscar Oliver.

He and Betty Lou hadn’t seen each other for two years while he served in the Navy during World War II. Then he called on her birthday that July to say he was returning home from duty.

Betty Lou reportedly took her job while she waited in New York for Oscar, a U.S. Navy torpedoman, to finish his service overseas. She gave notice so that the two could move back to their hometown of Fort Smith, Ark., to begin their post-war lives.

This is where history gets wild: On July 28, 1945, an American B-25 bomber plane flying over New York City took a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest building.

Betty Lou, who had turned 20 a little more than a week earlier, was operating elevator #6 — and joyfully singing the “The Saint Louis Blues” — when Lt. Col. William F. Smith’s plane hit the north side of the building between the 79th and 80th floors. 

The B-25’s wings sheared off, its gasoline tanks exploded and the fire took 40 minutes to extinguish. Dozens died or were injured.

What no one knew at the time was the right engine of the plane had smashed into the elevator shaft, crashing down and severing cables on its way.

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Betty Lou was badly burned by the blast and fire (Connally says she bore the scars decades later) but the worst was yet to come.

Some accounts say she was then placed into another elevator for evacuation to get medical aid. However, in an interview for the 1977 book The Sky is Falling, Betty Lou told author Arthur Weingarten that after the plane hit the building, she was trapped in the elevator car as it began free falling down, down, down.

It’s incredible, still, to hear that she didn’t die. But she did suffer a broken neck, back and pelvis and two broken legs.

“We were told that they thought she had died and they even had a toe tag on her and [she] was given last rites, even though she wasn’t Catholic,” Connally says now. “A doctor … tried a new procedure that brought her back.”

In Weingarten’s book, he describes how a Catholic priest prayed with Betty Lou after she was recovered from the elevator car by rescue workers.

An Associated Press story from the time reported that the “elevator girl” fell nearly 80 floors, or approximately 1,000 feet. According to the account, Betty Lou said she was alone in the car and remained fully conscious during her descent.

“The elevator seemed to stop and shudder for a moment,” she said. “Then it began plummeting downward. I tried desperately to stop it. Then a flash of fire enveloped me and I raised my left arm to protect my face.”

“The fire was gone in a moment and I tried again to work the controls. I picked up the telephone in the cage and tried to call the starter on the ground floor. Nothing happened,” she said. “I started yelling and pounding the floor.”

She “felt as though the car was leaving her.”

“I was going down so fast that I just had to hang onto the sides of the elevator to keep from floating,” she recalled.

The car ultimately crashed against an oil buffer at the bottom of the building — a kind of emergency fail-safe meant to stop falling elevators — and the buffer’s piston smashed through much of it. Except for about eight inches in one corner, where Oliver was standing.

“She was saved by a miracle,” George A Mount, district manager of the Otis Elevator Company, told a reporter at the time. “The concrete floor in the bottom of the shaft was crushed like an egg shell.”

Mount noted then that all six cables attached to the car had snapped and the automatic braking cable was destroyed, too, allowing the car to fall without any braking system at all.

The only thing which might have slowed the descent was air pressure in the shaft, he said.

Betty Lou had to be cut from the mangled wreckage of the elevator. She spent about four months in the hospital and a few more at the home of her aunt and uncle, in New York, before returning to Arkansas with her husband about eight months after the accident. 

Doctors at the time called her recovery a miracle.

Connally tells PEOPLE she didn’t know her mom had stayed with her aunt and uncle while she healed, but it makes sense since her uncle had helped to get her the job as an elevator operator in the first place.

An orphan, Betty Lou met husband Oscar at a dance while they were teenagers, Connally says. The couple had two sons and a daughter and seven grandchildren. In 1970. (Oscar died in 1986 and Betty Lou died 13 years later, at age 74, on Nov. 24, 1999.)

The New York Times had sought to interview her for the 25th anniversary of the plane crash, which resulted in the deaths of 11 people inside the building, the pilot and two crew members.

About 25 other people were injured.

The Times wrote that Betty Lou became “the closest thing to a popular heroine that the tragedy produced.” But she told the paper that she was “just plain not interested’’ in talking about it, because publicity “just embarrasses me to death.”

“That sounds like her,” Connally says.