WWII pilot offered plane's-eye view of the Ice Bowl

Check out the photographs that accompany this story.

That’s Lambeau Field, on Dec. 31, 1967.

You’re looking at the only aerial photos known to exist of the Ice Bowl, taken from a Cessna 140, a single-engine, two-seat aircraft owned and flown that frozen day by Richard Jerow of Kaukauna.

The photos were taken by Judy Michelson Ambelang and sat in a closet at her home in Phoenix for more than 40 years. A couple years ago, she stumbled upon the five slides and mailed them to her friend Bonnie Jerow, Richard’s daughter.

“My slide projector doesn’t work, so they just sat there,” Judy said. “Finally I thought, ‘I haven’t looked at those for 30 years. I’m going to mail them to Bonnie.’ I sent her the slides. Oh, my gosh, she just went crazy.”

Bonnie had never seen the photos. Nor, for that matter, had anyone else.

“I just said, ‘Wow!’ ” Bonnie said. “They’re historic.”

Richard Jerow was a skilled pilot who served in the Marine Air Corps during World War II. He wanted to see what the NFL Championship Game looked like from the air. Bonnie wanted no part of such an adventure, and who could blame her?

The temperature at Austin Straubel Airport in Green Bay was 17 below zero. Who knows what it was at 10,000 feet?

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But Judy, who was visiting that day – she and Bonnie were first-year schoolteachers in Menomonee Falls and on Christmas break – jumped at the chance to be co-pilot.

“You didn’t think twice about the cold,” Judy said. “Why would you think about it if you had a chance like that? I think Papa Dick – that’s what we called him – knew I’d never been up in a plane like that.”

While Bonnie stayed home to listen to the game on the radio (until 1973 games were blacked out on TV stations located within 75 miles of a team’s home city), Richard and Judy took off from a farm field and headed east.

Judy remembered to bring her instamatic camera and snapped the pictures, three as the plane approached Green Bay and two of Lambeau Field.

“I remember it was a haze of white and so still,” she said. “It was eerie to see it from up high. You can’t really see anything (in the photos) but you can feel the eeriness of it all.”

Bonnie said her father made only a couple passes over the stadium before turning back toward Kaukauna because the cockpit windows started to fog up.

“They were gone maybe an hour,” Bonnie said. “Judy was just frozen when she got out of the plane. I can still see her red nose. Her hands were like ice.”

Richard Jerow died in 2010. He was the navigator in an observation plane that flew over Japan after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Bonnie said, and later worked as a railroad switchman.

“He was a rugged guy and a good pilot,” she said. “Who else would be crazy enough to fly that day?”

John Biever, who took the iconic Ice Bowl photo of Starr plunging into the end zone for the winning touchdown and went on to a distinguished career at Sports Illustrated, was astonished to learn that aerial photos existed of the game.

“They’re very valuable,” he said.

Bonnie took the photos to the Packers, hoping they would be displayed in the team’s Hall of Fame, but said she was told they weren’t clear enough.

“You know what?” she said. “They don’t have to be.”

She’s right about that.

What they show very clearly is history, from 10,000 feet.