The Wichita Lineman is Still on the Line

I hear you singing in the wire

I can hear you thru the whine

And the Wichita lineman 

Is still on the line.

Fifty years ago this month, multiple members of an American university's football team died in an airplane crash.  The university was Wichita State.  On October 2, 1970 a plane carrying the team's coaches, administrators, and its twenty-two starting players to Logan, Utah for the Shockers' October 3rd game against Utah State University crashed into the mountains west of Denver. Thirty-one of the forty people on board died.  Included among the casualties was Malory W. Kimmel.  Kimmel was the team's long snapper and was riding on this plane only because his coaches had put him into the starting lineup - at center - for the first time.  On all other road trips, Kimmel had flown on the Shockers' other plane with the rest of the reserves. 

Mal Kimmel - Wichita State University

Photo Credit: Ste. Genevieve Herald

Mal Kimmel was twenty-one.  He was married.  His wife, Diane, a twenty-year-old college junior, was five months pregnant with the couple's first child, which information neither had yet shared with their parents.  Mal Kimmel died on October 2, 1970. He never had the chance to tell his parents they were going to be grandparents. He never got to meet and to hold his baby. 

Chris Connelly's piece, and the video that accompanies it, are available on the ESPN web site.  I commend both to your attention.  The events of that fateful early October day, a half-century ago, continue to ripple through time up to and including the present, profoundly impacting the daughter Mal Kimmel never got to meet and her daughter (his granddaughter)...

 

...and the Wichita lineman is still on the line.  

-AK