It was a bright, sunny Friday afternoon. I was a sophomore in high school, walking home after a day of classes when I heard the news.
An airplane carrying members of the Wichita State football team had crashed into the mountains in Colorado. I don’t remember the details because the news made me numb. But I do recall my first thought: Was Shocker broadcaster Gus Grebe injured or killed?
Fortunately, Grebe was on a second plane carrying the team, administrators, boosters and coaches to Logan, Utah, for a game against Utah State the next day.
The 35th anniversary of the tragedy is coming up and I still give pause every year to one of the defining events of my youth. I was a Wichita State football fan in those days. I attended all the home games with my dad.
Anyway, for those of you old enough, I’m interested in knowing the impact the Shocker plane crash had on your life. And even if you weren’t alive at the time, send along your comments.
The Derby football team had a game that night at Campus, our biggest rivals. Of course, Derby won the game. But it was a somber atmosphere as people awaited the latest news from Colorado.
I had lived through the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. And, locally, the tanker plane that crashed on North Piatt in Wichita in 1965 definitely caught my attention. But I was so young then and really not capable of assimilating such news.
By 1970 that had changed and the Shocker plane crash was devastating for me. To think that players I had followed so closely on the field had suddenly died was difficult for me to comprehend. One of those players, Steve Moore, was from Derby. I knew where he lived; his younger sister was an acquaintance.
I can still feel the raw emotion of the day. Of feeling like a typical teenager without a care in the world one minute, and in the next feeling as if the world needed for me to care. And I did.
Some would say I have never grown up. But on that day _ Oct. 2, 1970 _ I’m pretty sure I did.