that killed 31, bicycled from WSU’s campus to Silver Plume, Colo., and then
climbed to the crash site with a group of some 40 other Shockers who also had
been affected by the tragedy.
Never before, or since, had Richard “Rick” Stephens ’71/86/96 gotten a response like the one he heard from a colleague’s wife when he was introduced as a survivor of the 1970 plane crash that killed so many of his friends and football teammates.
“Oh, I get so tired of hearing about that,” said the woman he’d just met.
“I just looked at her and said, ‘Well, a lot of good people lost their lives that day,’” Stephens recalls.
The day Stephens is referring to was Oct. 2, 1970, when a plane carrying the starters of Wichita State’s football team, administrators and supporters deviated from its course and slammed into the side of a Colorado mountain.
It had been a clear day that brought darkness to survivors and loved ones of the crash victims. Thirty-one people died as a result of the crash: 14 teammates, 14 WSU staff and supporters, and three crew members. Eight players and one of the pilots survived. It would be 40 years before Stephens would go back to the crash site on the steep, east slope of Mount Trelease.
In the years since then — and as he has come to “fully appreciate the depth of grief and loss those families felt” — he has visited the site three more times. Twice he has made the journey by bicycle — with the solitude of riding allowing him to reflect on the lives lost.
During both trips, he’s added another element of remembrance by raising contributions for the WSU Foundation-administered ’70 Football Memorial Scholarship Fund. The fund was established to help the children and family members of the crash victims and survivors attend Wichita State.
Stephens’ football connection to WSU started in 1964, when Ray Fulton, a former Shocker who had played for the Denver Broncos, started coaching Stephens in his junior year at Andover, Kan., High School. When Fulton left for a coaching job at then-Pratt Junior College in Pratt, Kan., Stephens followed him.
He almost followed Fulton to his next coaching job at the University of Texas at El Paso. “But that was a long way to go,” says Stephens, who’s lived almost his entire life in Kansas. He took a football scholarship to the University of Oklahoma instead.
“But I found out they were just very, very serious about football and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t that committed to it,” says Stephens, who called himself “a good athlete, but not a great one.” He opted to finish his playing days at his hometown university.
For Stephens, a right tackle who wore number 72, his first game as a Shocker was memorable. It was the first time the Shockers played in the newly renovated and renamed Cessna Stadium. They ended up defeating Utah State in that game, one of only two wins he and his new teammates would experience in the 1969 season.
Utah State was on the schedule again for the 1970 season, and it was while en route to that game in Utah that one of two planes chartered to carry the team, staff and supporters crashed. Stephens would never play football again.
It’s not so much his story about surviving the crash that the 66-year-old Stephens wants to tell, although he will when asked about it. It’s more about remembering the people who died and what others had to do to survive, he says.
Every one of his teammates who survived had to climb out of the airplane’s mangled mesh of metal. Many of the passengers survived the initial impact, but perished when the plane caught fire and exploded. Some of the surviving teammates faced the horrific realization that they couldn’t save others who were pinned among the jumble of broken seats and debris.
“Each of them had to deal with that in some respect,” Stephens says, “and I was spared that.”
Stephens’ curiosity is what saved him. After many of his teammates had fallen asleep, Stephens left his seat over one of the wings to go to the cockpit. He was concerned about what he was seeing outside the window.
As he approached the cockpit, he overheard the pilots’ conversation as they realized they wouldn’t be able to clear the 14,000-foot-high mountain in front of them. Stephens was headed back into the cabin area when a drastic turn by the pilots tumbled him to the floor.
“I could feel the plane hitting the trees,” he says, “and that was the last I remember until I woke up outside the airplane. It’s difficult to describe the mental processes at that time. It was so surreal.” He spat out dirt and several broken teeth, and passed out again.
Workers from the nearby Eisenhower Tunnel construction site carried him down the mountain on a pair of coveralls one of the three workers had had on.
Stephens had a double compound fracture on his lower right leg, torn ligaments in his shoulder, a dislocated hip and a cracked sternum. He spent six weeks in hospitals in Denver and Wichita. He’d later endure extensive dental work and had his hip replaced.
The same right ankle that had dangled from his leg that day would bother him this past fall during his trek to the crash site to help place flags of remembrance for the WSU victims.
In the years after the crash, as opportunities arose, Stephens would visit and pay his respects to family members of crash victims or stop by a grave site. He would occasionally attend the annual memorial service held each Oct. 2 at 9 a.m. at the Memorial ’70 site on campus, where he would see other survivors and family members. It’s helped give him closure, he says.
Stephens went on to have a 33-year career in education, retiring as associate principal at Wichita North High School in 2005. He has two children: a son, Michael, with his first wife, Diane, the widow of crash victim Malory Kimmel, and a daughter, Sarah, with his second wife, Terry, to whom he’s been married for 37 years. Sarah and Kimmel’s daughter, Valerie, attended Wichita State with assistance from the ’70 Football Memorial Scholarship Fund.
In 1999, while visiting a childhood friend in Vancouver, British Columbia, he was introduced to bicycling. He discovered cycling was a great way to stay fit as his joints could no longer handle the stress of running. He’s logged thousands of miles since then, biking to various parts of Kansas and making three successful trips to Winnipeg, Manitoba.
In 2011, he made his first attempt to ride to the crash-site memorial in Colorado, but fatigue and altitude caused him to cut short his trip by about 25 miles. He continued the rest of the way by car. In 2014, with a sendoff from Cessna Stadium, he completed the 550-mile bike trip to the Interstate 70 roadside memorial and made the half-mile climb to the site Oct. 2.
His Colorado bike trips have garnered media interest, but his reason for bringing attention to the crash goes much deeper — motivated by that harsh remark from a colleague’s wife:
“I’ve not done this to say, ‘Hey, I survived the crash,’” he says. “I want it to be about the people whose lives were lost. We hear about (death) all the time — about terrible things that happen and the different conditions under which people die — and we’ve kind of become insensitive to those losses.
“I just don’t want that to happen.”
