Images Of Marshall Football Team's Plane Crash Still Vivid After 20 Years

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. - Twenty years later, the images are still as vivid as a nightmare that startles you to consciousness in the dark hours of the morning.

A penalty in the waning minutes thwarts a possible tying field goal in another three-point loss. The chartered Southern Airlines DC-9 disappears from view as it approaches the ridge-top runway through the rain. The debris smolders on a muddy hillside. The campus is shrouded in black.

The years have deadened the pain but not erased the memories of 75 Marshall University football players, coaches, administrators and fans who died 20 years ago last week in the nation's worst sports-related disaster.

``There isn't a day that passes that I don't think of it,'' said Ed Starling, who as assistant athletic director was the highest ranking athletic department official not on board when the plane slammed into a hillside just short of Tri-State Airport Nov. 14, 1970.

It was the team that was supposed to turn Marshall's football fortunes around, to bring respectability back to a Thundering Herd team that had broken a 27-game winless streak just one year before.

Quarterback Ted Shoebridge had set a school career record for touchdown passes in one year. Argentina-born Marcelo Lajterman had kicked seven field goals in his first varsity season. Larry Sanders had intercepted eight passes in two years.

The team that year was 3-6 but showed promise. Two of the losses were by three points and one loss was by two.

Marshall lost one of those heartbreakers on Nov. 14, 17-14 at East Carolina University when Shoebridge was called for an intentional grounding penalty with 30 seconds to play. The team then boarded the plane for the flight home - the only time that season Marshall traveled by air.

The pilot apparently came at Tri-State Airport too low, skimming the trees on one ridge top and slamming into the next at 160 miles per hour, about two miles short of runway 11. Relatives and friends waiting for the plane's arrival at the airport terminal were stunned as the plane disappeared from view, followed by a explosion that sent flames 400 to 500 feet in the air.

There were no survivors.

Among the dead were 37 players, Coach Rick Tolley and four assistants, Athletic Director Charles Kautz; Gene Morehouse, sports-information director and radio play-by-play announcer; Brian O'Connor, university admissions director; three local doctors, a Huntington city councilman, two reporters and a member-elect to the state House of Delegates.

Seven players were transfers from Ferrum College in Virginia. Four were childhood friends from Tuscaloosa, Ala. Three were teammates from Moeller High School in Cincinnati.

Sixty-three children lost at least one parent. Twenty-nine were orphaned.

``I'm mindful of it, painfully mindful of it, every fall, and I certainly don't believe that the memories of it, the feelings, will ever go away,'' said Dr. Donald Dedmond, at the time acting president of Marshall and now president of Radford University in Virginia.

``Although I guess nothing in this world happens without bringing some good . . . the dimensions of it were so huge and horrible,'' said Dedmond, who attended 28 funerals in five days. ``On the other hand, I believe it brought out the strength of a great number of people.''

Many of today's Marshall students hadn't been born yet when the crash occurred, yet their lives remain linked to the tragedy.

Students eat lunch at the Memorial Student Center or enjoy a sunny afternoon waiting for friends at the Memorial Fountain. Twin Towers Dormitory residents walk to class past a plaque honoring the players. Pi Kappa Alpha members enter their fraternity house past a statue of a kneeling football player, in honor of five members who died. The basketball team hosts the Memorial Invitational Tournament each season.

And every year, students, faculty and administrators gather for a brief memorial service on Nov. 14.

This year's memorial service was Wednesday night. As always, the Memorial Fountain was turned off for the winter at the end of the ceremony.

Among the speakers were Starling; Naval Academy Athletic Director Jack Lengyl, Marshall's first coach after the crash; and Courtney Proctor Cross, a Marshall graduate whose father died in the crash.

``I think it's very important not to dwell on the loss but to celebrate the accomplishments that those individuals achieved while they were here,'' said Parker Ward Jr., a Marshall athletic booster who was 12 when his father, also a Marshall supporter, died in the crash.

``I think it's always good to reflect and remember and to look forward to the years to come.''

Starling remains convinced that at least two players - defensive back Larry Sanders and kicker Marcelo Lajterman - eventually could have played professionally. The starting quarterback, Ted Shoebridge, was inducted into the school's athletic hall of fame last month.

``This group would have turned it,'' said Starling, who has retired from the athletic department. ``They would have been winners. If not that year, then the next year, because they had a lot of good players, coaches, and the chemistry was right for a successful season.''

Instead, Marshall struggled through a disastrous decade, winning 21 games, losing 78 and tying one for the worst Division I record in the nation. The Herd's first post-crash winning record didn't come until the 6-5 1984 season.

By 1987, though, Marshall capped the long road back, losing 43-42 in the NCAA Division I-AA championship game to Northeast Louisiana. The next season, Marshall was briefly ranked No. 1 in Division I-AA en route to a 11-2 record.

But it's the 6-5 season that Ward thinks marked the end of Marshall's football comeback.

``When we went 6-5 and had the winning season, winning the last game of the season down at East Tennessee State University, I think that was a big hurdle in showing the community and the area that they could have a winning program,'' he said.