Print edition: 
NEAR BAZAAR — People came from across the country Saturday to honor former Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne and seven others killed on this site 80 years ago.
But they also came to honor Easter Heathman, who died in January 2008 at the age of 90 after spending most of his life maintaining the Rockne memorial site and welcoming visitors.
Heathman’s dog, Daisy, a woolly Australian shepherd mix, acted as ambassador, greeting the more than 200 people but wagging her tail and sniffing Rockne’s grandson, Nils, as he read Rockne’s “Prayer to Play Fair in the Game of Life”:
“Dear Lord, in the battle that goes on through life, I ask for a field that is fair, a chance that is equal with all in strife, the courage to do and to dare,” Nils Rockne read, his voice breaking with emotion, “and if I should win, let it be by the code, my faith and my honor held high; and if I should lose, let me stand by the road and cheer as the winner rides by.”
Some came as fans of Notre Dame.
“My husband is a major Notre Dame fan; he’s been one all his life,” said Jean Ann Petz of El Dorado. “We have never been out to the site. When my husband turned 50 several years ago, I gave him and his brothers a trip to South Bend for a game. But this is like the Holy Grail — you can’t beat coming out here.”
Others came for tradition.
The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of John Happer came.
Happer, also killed in the crash, was taking Rockne to Wichita and on to California. Happer was a comptroller for Great Western Sports Goods, which became Wilson’s Sporting Goods.
“It is bittersweet,” said Terry Happer Scheier, of the Kansas City area. “We’ve been coming out here since we were little kids. It is good to pay our respects and to show the next generations — we have four generations out here — how important this is and to honor our past.”
Fred Pechin of Wichita came out of curiosity.
“I always wanted to find out where this was, and I’m surprised how many people came,” he said.
Some brought souvenirs.
Norman Mosier of Towanda brought a plane part. Eighty years ago, his father, Harry Mosier, then 24, arrived on the scene and found the part.
“It’s all I know,” Norman Mosier said.
For some, it was fitting that the observation was in the heart of the Flint Hills.
Rockne had a fondness for Wichita and Kansas. His good friend and mentor, Jess Harper — a former Notre Dame athletic director who hired Rockne — lived in Wichita and ranched in Sitka. Rockne also had taught a coaching clinic at the University of Wichita in 1929.
He was also friends with Forrest “Phog” Allen of the University of Kansas and Kansas State University’s Charles Bachman.
But it was also in Kansas where Easter Heathman, then a 13-year-old farm boy, heard the growl of a red and silver plane moments before it crashed on the prairie.
When he and his family arrived at the site, most of the bodies had been flung from the plane. Heathman noticed a bandage dragging from the leg of one of the bodies being carried on stretcher. He reached down and placed it on the stretcher. It was Knute Rockne.
For years, he would tell visitors that story.
And on Saturday, small wooden crosses Heathman had made from black walnut trees in the Flint Hills stood in front of the Rockne memorial. Each was engraved with the name of one passenger on the TWA Fokker F-10A.
At the approximate time of the crash, a plane flown by Doug Wilson growled in the distance, then flew low over the site and climbed high before leveling off.
As it flew toward the horizon, a lone bagpipe played “Amazing Grace.”
“On behalf of the Rockne family, I’d like to express our sincerest gratitude and appreciation for all that has been done to honor the memory of Knute Rockne and all the unfortunate souls who lost their lives on that unpreventable day,” Nils Rockne told the crowd. “Although Mr. Heathman is no longer with us, he was so instrumental in keeping grandfather’s memory alive. . . . You will always have a very special place in our heart for what you did.”
