09/05/2026
December 23, 1986. In Fargo, North Dakota, a four-month-old boy named Michael McCann died of crib death. His parents, Karen and Steve, donated his heart.
In California, that heart was the only thing that could save another baby.
Andrew De La Pena was five months old. He had been born with endocardial fibroelastosis, a heart condition that had already killed his older sister. He was running out of time.
There was one problem. Fargo is 1,288 miles from San Francisco, and doctors wanted the heart transplanted within four hours.
A Learjet had flown up from California carrying a surgical team from Stanford. They recovered the heart at 11:45 p.m. and brought it to Hector International Airport, where the jet was waiting to take them home.
In the North Dakota cold, one of its engines would not start.
The team was stranded in Fargo with a heart and a clock running on it. Someone called the governor.
Sixteen minutes later, Governor George Sinner reached the North Dakota National Guard and asked whether a fighter at the Fargo base could fly an emergency mission. First Lieutenant Robert Becklund, on duty that night, accepted it.
The F-4 Phantom is a two-seat supersonic fighter with no cargo hold. So the heart, roughly the size of a golf ball, was packed in ice inside a red and white picnic cooler, and the cooler was strapped into the empty back seat.
A Stanford nurse named Marguerite Brown carried it out to the flight line and handed it to Becklund.
At 3:06 a.m., he took off alone.
A second pilot was supposed to take over in Salt Lake City. He never came, so Becklund refueled and went the rest of the way himself.
He landed at Moffett Naval Air Station at 4:43 a.m. Pacific time.
They had missed the four-hour window. The transplant worked anyway.
Andrew De La Pena grew up. He became a teacher, learned several languages, and married.
Years later he stood for a photograph between the pilot who flew his heart across the country and the nurse who put it in his hands.
