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Easter Heathman
Hatteberg's People
Reporter: Larry Hatteberg
| February 19, 2006--Easter Heathman of Rural Matfield Green was 13 when the plane carrying Legendary Notre Dame Football Coach Knute Rocke crashed in the Kansas Flint Hills. He is now one of the only living memories of that crash. |
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“Dateline Bazaar, Kansas March 31st, 1939.”
“All we could see when we got close to it was a big pile of rubble with the tale section sticking up right out of the middle of it.”
Easter Heathman will never forget that day nearly 75 years ago. For most, the crash is a paragraph in a history book. For Heathman, it’s history he can still smell.
“Well, it didn’t catch fire, but there was an odor of gasoline and hot oil. The plane hit in a kind of an upside down condition. There were five bodies thrown right through the floor of that plane.” |
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(Newsreel) “The ‘Rock’ was gone. The man whose name stood for the finest college football teams in the history of the gridiron sport had met his death in a commercial airplane crash in the wheat fields of Kansas.” |
While the old newsreel said ‘wheat fields’, Easter Heathman knew different. It was prairie.
“It was a sight I had never seen before. It was a terrible sight. Just Horrible.” |
That crash site is a little over a mile from where Heathman now lives. Getting there isn’t easy. There are gates to open and a stream to cross, but the memorial stands as a prairie sentry to a long ago tragedy.
“I’ve got to meet people from all over the nation. Good people! I haven’t had a dud yet.” |
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(Newsreel) “The Notre Dame campus showed a heavy heart to the nation. They keenly felt a loss of the bald Norwegian whose rough by kindly manner fashioned winning football teams who were the toast of the land during his 13 year coaching reign.”
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Easter Heathman says he’s probably met most of the living relatives of Rockne. At their request he takes them to the crash site.
“This is about where Knute Rockne’s body laid as near as I can recall. It’s kind of sacred ground here.” |
| On that fateful day in 1931, Knute Rockne’s life became intertwined forever with Kansan Easter Heathman. Since the crash Heathman has been the unofficial caretaker of the site in the Flint Hills where 8 men lost their lives.
“It’s amazing, but I remember it just like it was yesterday.”
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| The monument can’t be seen from any road; only Easter Heathman and a few old timers know the way. Next month, folks around Matfield Green will hold an observance of the 75th anniversary of the eight men killed on a foggy day in the Flint Hills way back in 1931.
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