We Will Rise

by Steve Beaven

  The funeral commenced at 2:00 p.m. and included hymns by the Phelps Brothers Quartet: “O What a Sunrise” and “How Great Thou Art.” Father Clyde Grogan, who had been the priest at Mike’s church, urged mourners to consider all that the two young men had given them, rather than what had been taken away.

  “We gather here not just because they are dead, but because they lived,” he said. “They’ve been part of us. Helped us to laugh, to have dreams, and even to get into arguments, all the complexities that we call life.”

  When the service ended, pallbearers carried the caskets outside and placed them in the waiting hearses. A dual procession several blocks long snaked through downtown until the hearses reached the intersection of State and Locust, where they separated, taking Mike and Kevin to different cemeteries.

  Bob Brown stayed behind, inconsolable, lingering near the Eldorado locker room. Two of his former team managers stood with him, holding him up. The two young men had been so close to Mike and Kevin that, rather than having to choose between one burial service or the other, they skipped them both altogether.

  Bobby Watson was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Gardens, a rural cemetery near Pittsburgh. Seven men lowered his flag-draped casket into the ground on a sunny hillside next to his father’s. Deidra Watson wept quietly as the minister delivered a eulogy to 175 mourners.

  “God has hold of his hand,” the minister said, “and He will never let go.”

  But it was Weenie Miller, Watson’s coach at VMI, who asked the question that hovered over every memorial service, every funeral: “You’ve just got to wonder,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes. “Why?”

  It was a question with no answer. In a deeply religious community like Evansville, faith informed our understanding of a confusing world, the mysteries we confronted every day, and the existential questions of life and death. When we couldn’t grasp the answers to these questions, we attributed them to God’s plan because we believed that He had a plan for all of us. And yet, in the days after the crash, it felt as if God had abandoned us. We couldn’t understand the horror, couldn’t fathom the random brutality, the infliction of unendurable pain and suffering. Hadn’t we been faithful? Hadn’t we tried to live by the virtues of kindness, humility, sacrifice, and all that He asked of us? How could a merciful God allow this?

  The ministers tried to make sense of it, at dozens of funerals that stretched from Evansville to Indianapolis; Colorado Springs; Cincinnati; Goldsboro, North Carolina; and small towns throughout Indiana: Tell City, New Albany, and Munster.

  On the same day that Mike and Kevin were laid to rest, Bob Hudson was buried at Park Lawn Cemetery in Evansville. After a graveside ceremony, mourners returned to their cars and drove across the street to Holy Rosary Catholic Church for the funeral of Jeff Bohnert. The church would host a service for UE comptroller Charles Shike later in the day. At Alexander Funeral Home on Evansville’s east side, hundreds turned out for separate services to celebrate the lives of Marv Bates and Mark Kirkpatrick. Bates was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery. An hour later, Kirkpatrick was buried a few yards away.

  University officials and the three assistant coaches fanned out across the country to attend funerals and comfort families. Stafford Stephenson attended services for Bryan Taylor in Tell City, Mark Siegel in Indianapolis, and Kraig Heckendorn in Cincinnati. He joined more than sixteen hundred people at a Goldsboro auditorium for the joint funeral of Warren Alston and Barney Lewis. “There were no eulogies,” Goldsboro High School principal Patrick Best said afterward. “Their lives were their eulogies.”

  Condolences poured in from across the country. Middle Tennessee State hosted a campus memorial service that drew two hundred people. Players wore black armbands with their blue and white uniforms as Head Coach Jimmy Earle read the scouting report on the Aces in tribute to the dead. President Jimmy Carter, who had been monitoring peace talks between Israel and Egypt, sent a note addressed to “Members of the University of Evansville Community”:

  Rosalynn and I were saddened to learn of your tragic loss. You have our heartfelt sympathy. May each of you find comfort in the prayers and concern of those of us who share your sorrow.

  The athletic director from Marshall University called Jim Byers to express his sympathy. He’d been through this before: a crash in November 1970 killed seventy-five people, including Marshall football players, coaches, and fans, when their plane slammed into a hill as they returned from a game in North Carolina.

  In Evansville, striking farmers offered sympathy from the picket line. Members of the American Agricultural Movement stood in the freezing cold not far from the airport with signs that said “Can You Live on Peanuts and Billy Beer?” and “We Want Parity.” One striker, bundled up in gloves and a hat, held a homemade placard that said: “God Bless the U of E Purple Aces.”

  Two weeks after the crash, at halftime of the championship game of the Eldorado holiday tournament, school superintendent Kenneth Walker presented Kay Barrow with Mike Duff’s old number 40 high school jersey and then handed her the microphone. The stands were full, but the crowd was hushed and expectant, the silence interrupted only by scattered sobs.

  “Mike would be very proud that you have retired his jersey,” Kay said, standing straight and dignified. “It makes me very proud, too.”

  They gave her a standing ovation, and for once she knew how Mike felt on so many nights in that very gym, embraced by the good people of Eldorado, held tight in the cocoon of a small town.

  Eldorado enveloped Kay and her family. The school renamed its field house the Duff-Kingston Memorial Gym and hung a plaque etched with the likenesses of Mike and Kevin. A display case in the lobby was crammed with photos, jerseys, and other memorabilia. A scholarship was created in memory of the boys. Sometimes townspeople would stop by John Barrow’s doctor’s office, at the front of the house on Organ Street, and show Kay their old snapshots of Mike.

  But the outpouring was not limited to Eldorado. The loss was so transparently devastating that it moved strangers to reach out to Mike’s family. A rival high school sent a check for seventy-five dollars to the Eldorado principal and a note that was passed on to Kay:

  Our students remember Mike from our meeting with him in the semifinals of last year’s State 1A Basketball Championships at Champaign. His attitude and performance epitomize what we look for in a student athlete. He was a credit to his family, church, school, and team.

  Another letter, just two sentences, was typed neatly and dated December 15, 1977:

  Dear folks:

  I have just read about Mikes [sic] terrible death. I don’t know if we are related or not, but it strikes home, as we lost a 21-year-old boy about five years ago.

  Sincerely,

  Mr. & Mrs. T. C. Duff

  Beloit, Wisconsin 53511

  Kay saved the condolence letters, placing them neatly in the scrapbooks she kept to commemorate Mike’s life. On this page, a newspaper story announcing Mike’s victory at the Pitch, Hit, and Throw contest for twelve-year-olds in Harrisburg. On the next, a letter from US senator Thomas Eagleton (“Mike, I was delighted to learn of your plans to attend the University of Missouri this fall!”). Certificates from Ed Macauley’s Camp for Boys, where Jerry Sloan met Mike for the first time.

  In the days after her son perished, Kay sent her own letter to the Sunday Courier & Press, expressing her gratitude to everyone who had looked after Mike, before and after the crash: volunteers, ministers, funeral directors, the university, and its students. She thanked the radio and TV stations for handling the crash with such dignity and respect. She thanked the sportswriters by name for the stories they’d written about Mike over the years, the good times they’d preserved. Mike loved Evansville, she wrote, and considered it his home. He would surely want to see a new Aces team carry on UE’s long tradition of excellence.

  “We always hoped and prayed that Mike would use his God-given talent as a stepping-stone to higher and greater rewards.”

  Quiet and
somber, David Furr slid into the passenger seat of his mother’s car outside his dorm early one afternoon for the drive home to Olney, Illinois. He had skipped his math exam after the professor, none other than Arad McCutchan, told him he could take it when he came back in January. But David stayed in town for a few days so he could go to the funerals, as many as he could. Now, with Christmas approaching, there was nothing left for him in Evansville. It was the middle of basketball season but all of his teammates were gone.

  The drive from Evansville to Olney was ninety minutes, a straight shot on flat blacktop, nearly seventy-five miles north. David didn’t say much on the trip home. But when his stepfather met him at the front door, they hugged and David wept, briefly and quietly.

  Christmas was bleak. A quiet anguish hung over the whole family. It was too early for David to appreciate the wonder of his own survival, the great good fortune of his ankle injury. Making the team, it turned out, was not the life-altering accomplishment that it had once seemed. The injury is what saved his life.

  But David didn’t want to talk about it, at least not to Elisabeth. After he was hurt, she wanted to drive down to Evansville to comfort him. It was the purest maternal instinct. She had felt the same impulse after the crash. He was her son. Just eighteen years old. Not yet a grown man. Who could blame her? But she knew he wouldn’t want her hugging him and making a fuss around all of his friends. He had always been like that, a stoic kid, holding everything inside. Byron, his little brother, was different, voluble and carefree, more comfortable opening up to their mother. Byron was smaller than David and labored in his brother’s shadow before he finally decided to give up basketball. But it didn’t faze him. Byron took up golf and mastered the public course in Olney. He’d play all day if he could, hanging around, shooting the breeze with the course pro. During the summer, his mom had to call the tiny clubhouse to remind Byron to come home for supper.

  Byron and David were polar opposites and yet, just fourteen months apart, they were especially close. Byron understood David in ways their mother never could. They liked to hang out, unless David’s friends were around. Then he’d leave Byron behind and head off with his buddies. But on December 27, when the cleaning lady arrived, they decided to get out of the house and head to Charleston, Illinois, where Olney High School would play Pana that afternoon in the holiday tournament. It would be a helpful distraction for David and, at the same time, a potent reminder of what he hadn’t lost when Air Indiana Flight 216 went down: his brother, his friends, and basketball.

  That night, Larry took Elisabeth and his sons Tim and Bob to dinner at the Elks Lodge in Olney. Not long after they were seated, a waiter approached and told Larry he had a phone call. Then Elisabeth was called from the table and she followed him. She heard the news, before Larry could get to her, when she walked into the foyer at the lodge entrance: David and Byron had been killed in a car crash.

  The boys had been about twenty miles from home at 6:30 p.m. when David’s car hit a patch of ice and skidded into the northbound lane of a state highway and collided with a pickup. They died instantly. The rescue crew didn’t even take them to the hospital, opting instead for a basement morgue at an Olney mortuary, where Larry made the official identification. Elisabeth couldn’t bear the thought of it.

  She had wanted, all her life, to be a mother, to watch her sons grow up and raise families of their own. And now they had been snatched away and left to die on a cold and desolate stretch of blacktop, two good boys who would never grow into men.

  A team of investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board flew into Evansville within hours of the crash and traveled by train to the sodden field where Air Indiana Flight 216 had gone down. The seven investigators were members of the agency’s “go team,” on call 24-7 to unravel the mysteries of plane crashes across the country. They would study the plane’s engines, examine the wreckage, search the site for microscopic clues, and review the work of the flight crew from the moment the plane landed in Evansville to the moment it crashed. Witnesses would provide crucial details about what they heard and what they saw. One crucial piece of evidence was missing: a cockpit recording device was not required for the flight, which meant that conversations between the pilot and copilot were lost to history.

  Still, investigators had plenty of evidence to consider and quickly ruled out the most obvious causes. The crash had not been caused by the wake of the Delta jet. Neither the weather nor the performance of air traffic controllers was to blame. An autopsy of pilot Ty Van Pham showed he had been in excellent health. Investigators concluded that no one could have survived the impact of the crash, even if police and fire agencies had arrived at the site immediately. An analysis of the engines and other mechanical systems found that the thirty-six-year-old DC-3 was in top shape, despite its advanced age. National Jet Service, which bought the aircraft in 1976, had a sterling safety record.

  The first crucial clue turned up just five minutes after investigators arrived at the site. After sloshing through the muck, one investigator stepped up to the right wing, which had been torn from the rest of the plane. Amid the wreckage, he spotted a small piece of equipment called a gust lock in the mud. On DC-3s, pilots had to manually insert gust locks on the right wing and the tail to hold them in place and steady the aircraft while it was on the ground. But if pilots didn’t remove the locks before takeoff, the plane would be nearly impossible to steer safely. Witnesses who saw the plane lift off provided another important clue. The jet’s unusually slow takeoff, with its nose pointed skyward, suggested a weight imbalance.

  After tests on the gust lock and an analysis of the jet’s contents, investigators pieced together a series of mistakes that doomed the flight even before it got to Evansville. Because the aircraft was three hours late, the crew hurried through the boarding process and tossed nearly all of the bags and equipment into the back of the plane, leaving the tail dangerously overloaded. First Officer Gaston Ruiz also miscalculated the weight of the passengers by two hundred pounds, which meant the plane nearly exceeded the maximum weight for takeoff. The gust locks that were placed on the right wing and rudder when the plane landed weren’t removed before it took off. This limited the flight crew’s ability to safely maneuver the plane. The roaring engines that witnesses heard shortly before the plane went down indicated that the pilots may have been trying to guide the aircraft by revving one engine and then the other. That tactic, however, would have limited the plane’s power to accelerate and remain airborne. So the pilots changed direction and headed back toward the airport, perhaps for a crash landing. But because the plane didn’t have enough power to make the turn, it stalled in midair and crashed into the rain-soaked hillside.

  The final investigation report, released in August 1978, included an analysis of similar crashes and detailed measurements to determine the plane’s speed, weight, and flight path. But one calculation served as a concise summary of the doomed flight: investigators concluded that Air Indiana Flight 216 had been airborne between 72 and 82 seconds.

  On a Sunday afternoon, Wallace Graves stood at a podium draped with ferns, surveying a crowd of four thousand at Roberts Stadium. In a dark suit, bending slightly toward the microphones, Graves slowly recited the names of the passengers who had died five days before.

  “They are now with God.”

  Amid the funerals and memorial services, the thoughtful and deliberate pace of campus life was replaced by a raw anguish. Sleepless, Graves hopscotched from one crisis to the next, huddling with alumni, students, and administrators to address questions unfathomable just a week before. How does the university prepare its budget now that its comptroller is gone? Should the holiday tournament be canceled? How do you replace Bob Hudson, the very heart of the athletic department?

  But the most daunting question of all, the one with no simple answer, enveloped the city in a bleak uncertainty: Where do we go from here?

  The future of the basketball program was the most pressing issue. There was
some discussion of creating a new team, featuring current UE students, to play out the rest of the schedule. But after discussions with the assistant coaches, Graves abandoned that idea and the season was canceled.

  “We didn’t want to do anything that would be a travesty—without dignity—an embarrassment to the university or anyone else,” Graves said later. “To think about being supported game after game after game by sympathy seemed almost too horrible to contemplate.”

  Instead, Jim Byers dusted off the résumés of coaches who had initially applied to replace McCutchan and reassembled the hiring committee. Stephenson and Simpson added their names to the list. With this, the University of Evansville took the first tentative steps toward putting all of the pieces back together.

  The solemnity at Roberts Stadium that day contrasted so sharply with the spontaneous celebrations that had erupted there over the years. Black-robed ministers sat behind Graves on the dais, alongside the mayor, the governor, and members of Congress. The scoreboard was turned off, the locker rooms were closed, and the hardwood basketball floor was gone, replaced by row after row of folding chairs.