‘You’ve got to go on’: Children of Wichita State crash victims share a 50-year bond
He doesn’t need to look at a calendar anymore.
Dread seeps into Dave Lewis when he walks outside and the summer heat has faded and the autumn wind has picked up.
It’s almost October, which means it’s almost Oct. 2, which means it’s almost another anniversary of the most painful day of his life.
It’s hard for Lewis to believe 50 years will have passed, as of next Friday, since the “Gold” plane carrying Wichita State University football players, coaches, administrators and fans crashed about 40 miles west of Denver on Colorado’s Mount Trelease. Thirty-one died. Eight players, including Lewis, and the co-pilot survived.
“October is not a friendly time for me,” Lewis said from his Overland Park home.
Lewis lost a lot that day: his childhood best friend, as well as every other teammate in his grade, as well as any chance of playing professional football due to a severe left leg injury that has resulted in seven knee surgeries and three knee replacements since.
But what he lost doesn’t hurt Lewis the most. That’s when he thinks about the 22 children from nine different families who lost a parent — or both parents — in the crash.
“People always talk about us. Well, we lived. We were hurt, but now we’re better,” Lewis said. “What no one ever talks about is what it was like for those children to grow up without parents.
“I lost a lot, but nothing nearly compared to losing a parent. So I don’t even think about myself, I just think about them.”
Many of those children are raising their own families — all while grappling with grief every year when the calendar flips over to October. Here are their stories.
‘This is the life of the living and you’ve got to go on’
Nancy and Eric Grooms encapsulate the differences in the healing processes and paths taken by the survivors.
Their parents, John and Etta Mae, were on the WSU plane because John, the vice president of Boulevard State Bank, had sold the most Shocker booster club memberships.
“I woke up on Friday morning and I had parents, and when I went to bed that night, I didn’t have parents,” said Nancy, who was 11 at the time. “It was like, ‘Poof!’ and they were gone. It was very surreal.”
To Eric, who was 7, a conversation with his uncle Harold changed his perspective.
“He pulled me aside and said, ‘Er, this is the life of the living and you’ve got to go on,’” Eric said. “I don’t know why, but that just always resonated with me. Maybe I was just meant to hear that and it was meant to sink in the way it did. I just knew after hearing that, I had to put one foot forward and just keep going and don’t live my life in the past.”
After the crash, the siblings moved in with their family in Augusta.
“I can’t say enough about the people in the community,” Eric said. “Whether it was at school or at church, everybody made it a point to make sure we were OK. That’s just small-town living. In Wichita, that probably wouldn’t happen as much. But in Augusta, everybody looked out for everybody. Augusta had a big impact in my life.”
Nancy didn’t find closure for years, until she made the trek to Silver Plume after graduating high school.
On her way to the site, she stopped by a local store to ask for directions. By chance she talked to the manager, who witnessed the plane crash.
She knew seeing the site and talking to someone who saw it happen wouldn’t bring her parents back, but she says the trip was “the most important thing that ever happened to me.”
“The man was very hesitant to say much because it was such a traumatic experience, but it helped me so much to hear what he did have to say,” Nancy said. “I felt like I was able to finally connect with it. That gave me some sense of closure.”
Eric followed in the footsteps of his father. He remembers being convinced his dad had the coolest job when he would have WSU basketball players, like Greg Carney, over for dinner. His father would bring home bank forms and deposit slips, so Eric could pretend he was a banker too.
Today, Eric is the president of Community National Bank and Trust in Augusta.
“I like to think he would be proud that I chose banking as my career and I attained a position of president,” Eric said. “That means a lot to me. Because I think it would mean a lot to him.”
Nancy met her husband soon after visiting the crash site and they raised three children. Because of the accident, she prioritized raising a family.
“I rather would put the time into my family because I know how quickly it can be gone,” said Nancy, now Nancy Grooms-Rawls.
“It’s always been really encouraging to see how strong the other families have been. I think everybody just kind of drew off what their parents had left them and honored their parents by the lives they tried to lead going forward. It’s been beautiful to see.”
‘I knew that life could still be great’
Perhaps the most heart-wrenching story is the King family from Hesston. Seven children ages 4 through 18 became orphans when WSU boosters Raymond and Yvonne King were killed in the wreck.
Gary King, who was 16 at the time and second-oldest among the siblings, learned quickly he had be strong for his six sisters.
“It’s painful event in my life, but it doesn’t necessarily formulate who I am an an individual,” King said. “Was I going to play victim my whole life and be bitter about a bad decision made by the pilots? I’ve chosen to be a very positive person and it was tough knowing my parents were never going to see my children and my grandchildren, but I still have so much to be thankful for.”
The seven King children, all spread out through the country, now have 21 children of their own, a thriving family that Gary credits to the strong Christian faith that his parents instilled in them as children.
There used to be a nightly ritual of “family council,” where the Kings would talk about their days and discuss family matters. That is where they learned Raymond King, a state representative, was being considered to run for governor. The meeting would end the same way every night — with every head bowed in prayer.
But the memories that Gary still cherishes the most to this day are the ones of his parents never missing one of his baseball games.
“There were some kids whose parents never came to games and here I have my parents trying to raise seven kids and busy with their own work always at my games,” Gary said. “There was one game in Wichita I’ll never forget because the wind was howling. My parents had a dinner that evening they had to go to, so my dad had a suit on and my mom had a nice dress on in the stands with dust blowing everywhere watching me play baseball. That’s the kind of stuff I’ll never forget: how they were avid fans of whatever I was doing.”
But like all of the children who lost parents that day, Gary went through his own bout of depression. He recently had someone who lost a child tell him that they thought they would never be happy again. While Gary never felt quite that way, he could certainly relate to the helpless feeling.
“It may be 50 years later, but there’s still that scar, that deep hurt,” Gary said. “But what got me to come out of that funk was to focus on my sisters and caring for them. I realized it wasn’t just about me and that’s when I changed my focus and I realized that life was still in front of me. As tragic as what had happened was, I knew that life could still be great.”
Gary now works as a lead in sales for technology company Nvidia from his home in Cary, North Carolina. He is married with four children and six grandchildren.
“I’ve taken the same attitude that I learned from my parents and applied it in business,” Gary said. “I regard my leadership style as servant leadership. I like to say that if I can help the people I manage be successful, then I’m successful. I learned that attitude from my parents.”
‘I knew they grew up with that same feeling and I felt at home’
Being the daughter of the Wichita State head football coach had its perks.
Elizabeth Wilson was only 9 when her father, Ben, was hired by WSU, but she remembers the excitement of moving to Wichita, of watching the Shockers at Cessna Stadium and cheering on her father.
“I remember seeing my dad come out of the locker room and feeling so proud that my dad was the head coach of the football team,” said Wilson, now Elizabeth Wilson Winterbone.
She lost both of her parents in the crash, an event that sent her and her brother to live with distant relatives they barely knew in Maryland. After three years, their guardianship was changed to another uncle, this one in California, that required a cross-country move.
“My teenage years were a lot of upheaval and not a lot of steadiness in my life,” Wilson Winterbone said. “Lots of moving. Lots of unsettled situations. Lots of people doing the best they could for me, but it was not an easy time at all. I never really felt like I was ever at home.”
It wasn’t until 2005, when Wilson Winterbone moved back to Wichita, that she says the healing process began.
She could attend the annual memorial service hosted by WSU. She could meet with the surviving players, who regaled her with stories about her father. But most importantly, she could connect with the other children who had lost their parents that day.
“I needed to know who those people were because those are the people who went through the same thing,” Wilson Winterbone said. “We share this bond from this traumatic day when all of our lives went in all of these different directions, but we all share this incredible grief because we are the only ones who know what it’s like to lose you parents like that.
“Growing up, I always felt like I was different and I couldn’t relate to the other kids in my class. But when I was talking to them, I knew they grew up with that same feeling and I felt at home.”
Wilson Winterbone, who has two sons, remains in Wichita and runs her own custom watercolor shop.
‘You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to move forward’
Dave Fahrbach spent a lot of time as a youth roaming Wichita State’s campus on Saturdays in the fall.
His father, dean of admissions Carl Fahrbach, would let his son tag along and help out with office work. After Dave was done alphabetizing correspondence, he would walk to the activities center, buy some candy, and swing by the WSU Field House to see if Dave Stallworth and the Shocker basketball team was practicing.
When his father died in the plane crash, Dave Fahrbach had just started his first semester at WSU. In the weeks following the crash, he couldn’t bring himself to return to a campus filled with memories of his father and his childhood.
But Fahrbach summoned courage from the WSU football team returning to the field to play in a game three weeks after the crash, a 62-0 loss at Arkansas.
“Even though they lost 62-0, it was obvious in my mind that they had been successful by just continuing to move forward,” Fahrbach said. “I felt like you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to move forward and get back to life and get started again. Honestly, that’s what really got me back on track.”
Fahrbach likes to think of it as destiny because when he returned to WSU to finish his biology degree, he met his wife, Jean, whom he has been married to for 46 years, when they were lab partners in an anatomy class.
“I like to tell people we met over a dead cat,” Fahrbach jokes.
Fahrbach, who graduated from WSU and attended dental school, has been an orthodontist in Wichita for the past 33 years.
“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about (the crash) anymore,” Fahrbach said. “I’m sure it has been a challenge, but to be honest I haven’t known anything different. I just know when it happened, you just do your best to keep moving forward.”
‘I feel like I’ve lost enough family’
Growing up in the Katzenmeyer household, golf was the most important sport.
Bert Katzenmeyer was the longtime golf coach at the University of Michigan and designed the golf course at Georgetown Country Club in Ann Arbor. One of Kay Katzenmeyer’s favorite childhood memories was when her father let her pick out where to put the sand traps.
“And then he let me play the course and I was very upset at where I put the sand traps, because I found them all right,” said Katzenmeyer, now Kay Hinnenkamp.
When Bert Katzenmeyer accepted the athletic director job at Wichita State, his daughter soon enrolled for her first semester of college in the fall of 1970. She can still remember the shock on the Friday afternoon learning her parents, Bert and Marian, had died in the plane crash.
“Nobody informed me before it came on the television that they had been killed, which was probably the hardest thing,” Hinnenkamp said. “They just flashed up a picture of my mom and my dad and said they didn’t make it. That was tough.”
Family is especially precious to Hinnenkamp, who lost her only sibling, a sister, at a young age in another tragic accident in 1988. With her family gone, Hinnenkamp poured herself into raising a family, which she accomplished with a son and daughter who in turn have given her four grandchildren ranging in age from 13 to 24.
“I told them they’re not allowed to move from Wichita,” Hinnenkamp said. “I feel like I’ve lost enough family. I lost my core, so the family that I made is now my core. So I just told them don’t even think about moving.”
When her son developed into a good golfer, Hinnenkamp was proud and heartbroken at the same time. She knew her father would be so proud to see his grandson play the game he so dearly loved.
“I always felt that if my dad had been around, that would have been a really good bond between the two of them,” Hinnenkamp said. “I really wish my kids could have known their grandparents, but there’s nothing I can do about that.”
This story was originally published September 27, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
.jpg)