I've talked about this before, in passing, but it's upon us now. Everybody has those dates, some are our own and some we share. November 22, 1963. September 11, 2001. August 29, 2005. For me, November 14, 1970 was one of those dates. Tomorrow is the release of the movie We Are Marshall. I don't have, in either my financial or my time budgets, any wiggle room for seeing movies in the theater (although this was something to which I was devoted earlier, in another life), but I may have to see this one.
On November 14, 1970 I was sixteen, and a senior at Huntington High School in Huntington, West Virginia (alright, I was almost 17). On that particular Saturday, I was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, visiting my Sweetheart, a freshman Sigma Chi pledge at Wake Forest. I was with my good friend and two doors down neighbor, Barbara, who was also a senior at HHS, and who was also visiting her sweetheart, also a freshman at Wake. Her parents drove us, missing their usual trip with the Marshall University Booster Club. They normally traveled to away games with the football team and coaching staff.
Wake won their game that day. We attended, as was the style in those days (is it still?), all dressed up and corsaged with what seems in retrospect to have been a rather enormous ball of a chrysanthemum, bright gold with gold and black ribbons and a cute little WF made from pipe cleaners in the middle of the flower itself. We had a lovely steak dinner out with a group, before returning to the adjoining rooms of our hotel. Barbara and I and our Sweethearts were in one room and her parents next door because we all wanted to see the news, the sports, because we needed to know the results of the Duke game, which would determine whether or not Wake won the ACC that season (they did). The Duke score (I can't remember if we needed them to win or lose) was the lead story on the local 11:00 news but it was fast and followed very quickly by, "...but on a sadder note, the Marshall University football team...". It's hard to describe the rest. We ran into Barbara's parents' room, hysterical, disbelieving, and began the process of trying to reach folks at home for news. It was a gray and somber drive home the following day, and I remember Barbara's father, a bank president, crying quietly as he drove.
I did not know any of the football players who were on that plane, but I knew the Booster Club members. They were some of the most prominent members of the community, the parents of many friends, physicians, and business leaders. Seventy minor children lost parents in the crash, and eighteen of those lost both parents. Schools had to close for memorial services. We, as a town, endured the NTSB investigation, because the crash site, a particularly gruesome one, was there, out by the airport. I remember every detail (I don't know if my memory is correct, because sometimes memory plays tricks, but here goes). The Southern Airways DC-9, chartered for the trip to Greenville, North Carolina and back, was a bigger plane than would normally be scheduled to take off or land at Huntington Tri-State Airport (HTS). The weather was bad, with fog and freezing drizzle. HTS was not equipped with a glideslope. The plane's barometric altimeter malfunctioned (oddly enough, this happens frequently, particularly in bad weather). A map, charting the hills surrounding HTS (which is, itself, on a sliced-off hilltop) listed the highest elevation of a particular hill without including the tall trees that stood on it. The plane, coming in to land, too low because of the altimeter failure and the lack of a glideslope, and in poor conditions with little or nonexistent visibility, clipped the trees with the landing gear and flipped into the next hill, exploding. There was never any question of survivors.
We had moved to Huntington in the middle of my sixth grade year, from Atlanta, when my mother remarried after my parents' divorce. I don't know much about Huntington now, because my family (my mom, step-father and younger sister) moved away (to Austin, TX) the summer after I graduated from high school. I went off to a small woman's college in North Carolina (that would be a small college for women, rather than a college for small women, although I qualify, either way) and moved my base of operations, so to speak, back in with Daddy, in Atlanta. By the time I graduated from college my step-father had completed his PhD at UT and moved back to Atlanta too. I did go back many times during and after college, as my friends got married and because my Sweetheart's family remained there, and we remained sweethearts through college and into our mid-twenties, but once that was over, I no longer had any ties to the little town in West Virginia in which I had grown up.
I am surprised by the depth of feelings that this movie has created in me, that seeing the promotional television interviews has stirred. All these years later, with a long and rich life lived, including almost seven years in service on the planes of MississippiRiverLand Air Lines (not its real name), I have never thought about this incident the way I am thinking about it, now that the movie is being released. It appears that this movie is about redemption, about the rebuilding of the Marshall University football program, about the healing of the heart of the university that is the heart of Huntington, a redemption, which I'm only now realizing, I mostly missed. A little bit of uplifting redemption sounds pretty good to me right now. I hope I get to go see it. It's an intensely moving story, and now that I think about it, the only thing that surprises me about it being made into a movie, is that it took this long.
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