For about 20 years, a man stood behind a sycamore tree in Spring Hill Cemetery in Huntington, West Virginia on every November 14th. He chose that specific tree deliberately. It was wide enough to conceal an adult. From there, he could hear the speeches and see the families—the widows and children orphaned in a single night.
He never stepped out where any of them could see him. When asked why he chose that spot, his words were: “Where no one can see me. ”
His name is Red Dawson. He was supposed to be on that plane.
To understand what he was hiding from—not the crash, but something else—you have to travel 700 miles south to a segregated Alabama high school two years before any of it happened. Druid High School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, went undefeated in 1968. Ten wins, zero losses. They scored 271 points and allowed 52.
Their head coach was a man named Lou Mims in his fifth season. They won the state championship for Class 2A. Now look at who they faced: U. S.
Jones, Carver from Montgomery, Hill County Training School, Mobile County Training School, Cobb Avenue, Carver from Gadsden, Riverside. Every opponent on that 10-game schedule was another Black school. Not a single white school. This was Alabama in 1968, four years after the Civil Rights Act, and football still ran on two completely separate tracks.
Two boys from that undefeated team were named to the all-state team that season: quarterback Freddie Wilson and running back Joe Hood. Druid High School sat minutes from the University of Alabama campus. They did not go there. Alabama did not field a Black football player until 1971.
Auburn was the same. Every major program in the state was closed to them, and most of the South as well. These were kids who would become the first people in their families ever to attend university. A coach at Druid named Kenneth O’Rourke, a Tuscaloosa native, served as an assistant there and knew exactly what talent he was seeing.
In 1968, he helped one of his players, defensive back Larry Sanders, secure a scholarship to Marshall University, a small athletics program in a steel town in West Virginia, 700 miles north, that most people in Alabama had never heard of. Sanders arrived and immediately led the freshman team in interceptions and kickoff returns and finished second on the team in tackles. Marshall’s head coach was so impressed that in early 1969 he called O’Rourke with a simple question: are there more like him where he came from? There were more.
And a second phone call—one Red Dawson has spoken about publicly—changes how you view this entire story. According to Dawson, Bear Bryant himself called him. Dawson was a young assistant at Marshall. Bryant reportedly told him about the players at Druid High School—kids Bryant could see from his own stadium but could not recruit because the SEC had not yet integrated.
People in Tuscaloosa dispute this. Their view: regardless of what Bryant did or did not do, Kenneth O’Rourke is the one who recruited these boys, sat in their living rooms, and secured their signatures. Both things can be true. A 1969 photo in the Tuscaloosa News shows four teenagers around a table signing Marshall scholarship papers: Robert Van Horn, Joe Hood, Freddie Wilson, and a fourth boy named Flozell Horton Jr.
Behind them stand two men: Lou Mims, their high school coach, and Red Dawson—the man who would spend 20 years hiding behind a sycamore tree, watching these boys sign. By the time it was over, O’Rourke had sent half a dozen Druid players north. Larry Sanders went first in 1968. Hood, Van Horn, and Wilson signed in 1969.
There was one more, a quarterback a year younger named Reggie Oliver. O’Rourke went with them, taking a freshman coaching job at Marshall. Years later he said something that clarifies the nature of those relationships: “Our relationship, the six of us, was much more than a coach-athlete relationship. They trusted me and confided in me.
If they had a personal problem, academic or emotional, they would come and talk to me. ”
Marshall in 1970 was not a destination for fame. The stadium had been condemned in 1962. From the last game in 1966 until mid-1969, the football team had not won a single game.
The NCAA had placed the university on probation for more than 100 recruiting violations. But by fall 1970, there was a sense that things were beginning to change—new coaches, a new stadium, and games they were actually winning. November 14, 1970 was the ninth game of that season, against East Carolina in Greenville, North Carolina. Marshall lost 17–14.
Marshall rarely flew. Most road games were close enough to drive. This was one of the rare trips for which they chartered a plane. Southern Airways Flight 932, a DC-9, departed from Kinston, North Carolina.
At 7:23 PM, the crew contacted the Huntington tower for weather: rain, fog, smoke, and an unstable low cloud cover. At 7:36, about a mile from the runway at Tri-State Airport, the plane struck a hillside and burned. All 75 people on board were killed—37 players, the head coach and his staff, the athletic director, and about 25 supporters, doctors, and businessmen who bought tickets on that charter to follow their team. It remains the deadliest tragedy in American sports history.
The NTSB found the plane descended below the minimum safe altitude without visual contact with the runway, and could not determine why. The two most likely explanations were improper use of cockpit instruments or an error in the altimeter system itself—meaning the pilots likely believed they were higher than they actually were. Red Dawson was not on the flight. That November weekend was the only time in his coaching career he did not travel with the team.
He drove to watch a promising junior college player and had always planned to drive. To be clear: Dawson did not give up his seat to anyone. He was never supposed to be on that plane. He and a graduate assistant were somewhere in North Carolina when a radio report announced that Marshall’s team plane had gone down.
No word on casualties. They found the first pay phone and called their wives. Dawson described that moment: they stopped the car, looked at each other, and neither could speak. Huntington, a city of about 75,000, went dark.
Stores and government offices closed. Businesses on Main Street covered their windows in black. Classes were canceled. People in that city still describe hearing the news the way Americans describe the Kennedy assassination—everyone knows exactly where they were standing.
There were so many funerals they had to spread them over weeks. Then there was one ceremony no one who witnessed it skipped. Six players could not be identified. Six.
They were buried together in a single plot at Spring Hill Cemetery on a hill overlooking the university they played for. Some of what was lost cannot be measured in numbers. Frank Loria, the defensive backs coach, was 23 years old. At Virginia Tech, he was a two-time All-American, and his number 10 is one of only four retired numbers at that school.
He is in the College Football Hall of Fame. His teammate and close friend Frank Beamer, who coached Virginia Tech for 29 years, was once asked what would have happened if that plane had landed. Beamer said he believed Loria would have ended up as head coach at Virginia Tech, and that he himself would have been Loria’s assistant. Frank Loria had two young daughters at home, Julie and Vicki.
His wife, Phyllis, was pregnant. Their son was born in December 1970, about six weeks after his father died. He never met him. Then there were the players who remained.
Nate Ruffin was a co-captain. He was injured, so he did not make the trip. In the days that followed, the task assigned to him—a college student—was calling the families of his teammates. His words years later: “Why them?
Why wasn’t it me? It doesn’t make sense, but you tell yourself, I should have been on that plane. ”
Kenneth O’Rourke, 700 miles from Tuscaloosa, lost four of his six boys in that wreck: Joe Hood, Larry Sanders, Robert Van Horn, Freddie Wilson. He publicly blamed himself for the rest of his life—he was the one who convinced them to go.
Aside from Huntington itself, no city in America lost more of its sons on that hill than Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The football program should have died that winter. A losing team on NCAA probation, a condemned stadium, no players. They kept it.
Jack Lengyel, who came later, described that decision in three words: “On faith. ” But keeping the program and hiring a staff proved to be two different things. Marshall hired a new athletic director in February 1971, and the search for a head coach began. A Penn State assistant turned the job down.
Then a Georgia Tech assistant named Dick Bestwick accepted on February 24. He moved to Huntington, spoke to the team, and signed the insurance papers on his personal car. He was introduced at a basketball game and received a warm ovation from a city desperate for something to applaud. A week later, he resigned.
What he told the athletic director was: “I’m going back to Deary. ” What he told the papers was: “My family doesn’t want to come. ” Reporters asked whether Marshall would pursue Sam Huff, the Hall of Fame linebacker and a West Virginia native. The athletic director said no comment, then added he supposed he would hear for a long time that he should have hired Sam Huff.
Two men had said no. This is the moment everything changed. Jack Lengyel was the head coach at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Division III.
On the afternoon of November 14, 1970, his team beat Oberlin 9–6. That evening, he was at home with his wife when a news ticker ran across the television screen reporting that the Marshall football team had been killed in a crash. Months later, he heard Marshall still could not find anyone. No one called Jack Lengyel.
Lengyel called them. His own account: “I think I called them. They’ve got to find somebody. I was never bothered by Dick leaving.
They needed leadership. ” When people asked him why—why take the worst job in American football—he gave an answer that had nothing to do with winning: “I had an opportunity to repay the game of football for what it gave me. ” Lengyel had been a walk-on at Akron before earning a scholarship. He knew exactly what it meant to be given a chance by someone who was not obligated to give it.
He was hired on March 12, 1971. The NCAA at that time did not allow freshmen to play varsity football. Marshall requested an exception. The NCAA granted it—a rule changed for one school, for one time, because there was no other way to put 11 players on the field.
Lengyel built his roster from what was available: about 33 walk-ons, former soldiers, basketball players, a soccer player, transfer students, and freshmen who had never played college football, plus nine returning lettermen who had not been on the plane. He called them the “Young Thunder Herd. ”
Here is what no one expected. September 25, 1971.
First home game since the crash. Xavier University. Marshall trails 13–9 with time running out. They run a play that had been added to the playbook that week and never used in a game: a fake sweep to the left, the quarterback rolls right, drawing the defense with him, then stops and throws back across the field to a freshman running back cutting left, number 26—Terry Gardner.
Gardner scores. Marshall 15, Xavier 13. Lengyel in the locker room after the game: “It was a fairy tale ending. Nobody thought we had a chance to win except the team itself.
” And now look at who threw that pass: Reggie Oliver, from Tuscaloosa, Alabama—Druid High School—the fifth boy, a year younger than Sanders, Hood, Van Horn, and Wilson. There is a rule at the heart of this, with two sides. In November 1970, Reggie Oliver was a freshman, and freshmen were not allowed to play varsity. That rule is the only reason he was not on that plane with his friends.
Ten months later, the NCAA had to suspend that same rule so Marshall could field enough players to find a team for him to throw to. Marshall finished that season with two wins and eight losses. Nobody in Huntington cared then, and they still do not care today. That was never the point.
Six weeks before the Marshall crash, on October 2, 1970, a plane carrying the Wichita State football team went down in Colorado, killing 31 people. Two college football teams in six weeks, the same fall. Hardly anyone remembers the first. In November 1972, Marshall dedicated a memorial fountain on campus.
Every year, on the anniversary of the crash, the fountain is shut off during a private ceremony and does not run again until spring. Every year, Jack Lengyel took his teams to the obelisk in Spring Hill Cemetery that bears all 75 names and told them: “These are the names of your teammates, the people you will represent. I cannot promise you victory. I can only promise you blood, sweat, and tears.
But I promise you this: on other days, on other fields, there will be victories. ”
Reggie Oliver died in 2018. In November 2025, 55 years after the crash on that hill, the city of Tuscaloosa unveiled four bronze statues outside the YMCA building on Martin Luther King Boulevard, a few buildings from where Druid High School once stood: Joe Hood, Larry Sanders, Robert Van Horn, and Freddie Wilson. They call them the “Marshall Four.
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And Red Dawson. He left coaching in 1972 at age 29 and never returned. He started a construction company in Huntington and stayed there. He attended 27 funerals.
The nightmares began right after the crash and lasted four or five years. Always the same nightmare. He told no one, because in 1970 people did not do that. For decades, he assumed what he was carrying was guilt.
Then, years later, someone gave it a different name. Here is how Dawson describes it: “I had this terrible feeling of guilt. Then someone said years later: ‘Hell, that was shame. ‘ And it was.
Shame is what I was feeling. I was almost ashamed that I wasn’t with the other coaches. Not guilt. Shame.
” It took 30 years to learn the name of what he had been feeling since he was 27. That is what he was hiding from behind the sycamore tree—not the crash, but the fact that he was standing there at all. And one keeps returning to that 1969 photograph: four boys sitting around a table, signing their names, the first in their families to leave. Two men standing behind them.
A high school coach who could not place them at a university in their own state, and a young assistant from West Virginia who could. Everyone in that picture did the right thing, individually. And it cost them everything.