My son's take on "We are Marshall"
.... from his live journal Web site:I am a bit ashamed.
At 7:37 p.m. on Saturday, November 14, 1970 as the Marshall University football team was returning from a narrow defeat at Eastern Carolina, a chartered jet carrying 75 members of the football team, coaches and several fans crashed 30 seconds short of Tri State Airport, instantly killing everyone aboard.
I was in-utero then. My father, a reporter at the time for The Herald Dispatch in Huntington, WV went to the crash site, 2 miles West of the airport to cover the tragedy. The lightly wooded field where the plane came down was littered with bodies and metal hunks from the plane. This would be one of a series of West Virginia tragedies my father would have to report on over the years.
Growing up in Huntington, it was an ever-present cloud that hung over the community, but since I was so young the tragedy didn't touch my generation like it did the previous generation... or so I thought.
I cannot even remember when I was first told about the largest sports tragedy in the history of the United States of America. It seemed like a far-off land to me. I didn't understand the full impact that this tragedy had on my little hometown. Perhaps I still don't, but with the mostly-accurate historic mass-market movie "We are Marshall" I now understand a little more about what shaped my hometown and why Marshall University is so completely tied to the town.
I am proud to be from Huntington West Virginia. I'm proud of Marshall University. I'm proud of the people of West Virginia... yes... even those dirty Morgantowners...
The movie gave me a far greater understanding of one of the enormities that shaped my home. I am ashamed that it took something as trivial as a Hollywood movie to enlighten me as to the occurrances surrounding the Marshall plane crash and subsequent years.
I will always be fiercely proud of where I am from. I will, as usual, suffer the barbs of the nescient masses out there who consider West Virginia to be a land of slack-jawed yokals whose only interests culminate in such lofty pastimes as drinking beer and riding ATVs while hunting deer and relax in the evenings to the latest NASCAR event.
I have lived many places: The Greater Detroit Metro Area of Michigan (including Ann Arbor), Washington D.C., New York City and Cleveland, OH. I was born in West Virginia, and if God is kind to me, I will die there as well. It will always be my home.
"We are Marshall"
posted by Dave Peyton @ 11:40 AM
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