MU crash inspired Hicks to embrace a life of service

Les Hicks was honored by the Black Legends at MU in 2005.

Editor’s Note:   Les Hicks wasn’t around at the time of the Marshall plane crash that wiped out most of the school’s football team over forty-one years ago. Hicks, however, did play a significant role as one of the athletes who helped in the rebuilding of the football program. 
In 2005, Marshall University’s Black Legends named Hicks as one of its 125 Most Impactful Black Athletes to compete for any of the school’s sports teams in the 20th Century. A news article about Hicks was published in “InSite,” a corporate publication of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, an industry leader in aerospace, defense, and information security. 
Hicks, who earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Marshall, is a member of the environment senior safety engineer staff at Lockheed. Here's the "InSite" article in its entirety which was initially published in February of this year.

        For most people, the tragic aircraft accident that killed players, coaches and fans of Marshall University’s football team on Nov. 14, 1970, is a tragic footnote in sports history, as well as the subject of the 2006 movie, “We Are Marshall.”

       For Les Hicks, an environmental safety engineer with Environmental, Safety and Health at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics’ Marietta (Ga.) site, it is part of his life story. 

       Hicks was a member of the Marshall football program in 1972 and 1973, teams that took on the emotionally staggering task of re-establishing football at the school. A 6-feet-5 defensive end on what was dubbed the “Young Thundering Herd,” Hicks returned to the campus last October when the school held a 40th anniversary reunion of the Marshall teams of the early ‘70s that helped the school to rebuild the football program in the years immediately following the crash. Hicks and his teammates were honored during halftime of the 2011 Homecoming game against Rice University.

       The event allowed him to renew the bond he shares with his former teammates. Recently, he recalled the life-altering decision to choose Marshall over a range of more prominent suitors, such as Notre Dame, Ohio State, Iowa, Iowa State, Nebraska, California, Purdue, Illinois, West Virginia and Syracuse. 

       “Right after high school, I played at Ellsworth Community College in Iowa,” Hicks said. “When Jack Lengyel, the Marshall head coach, recruited me, he said, ‘other schools may want you, but we need you.’ It was then that I decided I needed to be at Marshall.”

       Hicks would join an eclectic group of athletes recruited from other sports, along with surviving freshmen players who didn’t make the fateful trip, and a host of walk-ons. Their task wasn’t so much to win championships, but to simply play competitively and position the program for future success.

       Along the way, the program endured its lumps, recording consecutive 2-9 seasons in 1971 and 1972 before managing a slight improvement to 4-7 in 1973. In an effort to get the program off the ground, Hicks and his teammates made their fair share of sacrifices, gaining perspective along the way.

       “I learned to sacrifice my talent for the betterment of the team by playing hurt and playing almost every position, including defensive tackle at 212 pounds, which probably cost me a potential career in the National Football League,” Hicks said. “On the football field, I worked as if I was to play for 100 years, and I prayed as if I was to die tomorrow.”

       Although the program struggled, the efforts of Hicks and his teammates eventually paid off. Marshall football would weather the lean years, grow stronger and ascend to elite status in Division I-AA, winning national championships in 1992 and 1996, along with eight conference titles. In 1997, the Thundering Herd would return to Division I-A, college football’s highest classification, as a member of the Mid-American Conference and would make eight bowl appearances from 1997 to 2009, winning six of the games.

       Marshall football would send noteworthy players to the NFL during that stretch, including wide receiver Randy Moss, quarterbacks Chad Pennington and Byron Leftwich and running back Ahmad Bradshaw, among others.

       All of that would not have happened without the dedication and perseverance that Hicks and his teammates demonstrated during the difficult years of rebuilding.

        “The program could have gone away,” Hicks said. “But we committed to the program, and later, guys like Moss, Pennington and Bradshaw would come through. It gives you a great sense of pride knowing you were part of the foundation of making that possible.”

       During his time at Marshall and in the years to follow, Hicks faced his share of adversity. He nearly died after passing out during a weight training session in college due to undetected viral hepatitis. He had a near-fatal blood clot after a knee scope in 1992. And he was almost killed in a car crash in 2005, and later that year, suffered a ruptured appendix.

       Those travails, as well as the memory of those who perished in the aircraft accident in 1971, taught him to treasure each moment and each breath.

       “I personally have learned that life is fragile. The loss of the players’ lives taught me to never take life for granted, regardless of my age. I felt privileged to be a Marshall University football player, and I felt an obligation to play through frustration, fatigue and a partially torn deltoid muscle.

       “I learned not to complain about anything because millions would love to have the good and the bad of my life. I treat each day as if it is my last day of living. As a result, I accomplish what I can by not leaving anything for tomorrow.”

       Hicks has been with Lockheed Martin for 27 years. His experience at Marshall cultivated life lessons that he brings to work each day, and, in fact, drove him to his career choice.

       “One thing about safety is that there are no trade secrets in this profession,” Hicks said. “The safety profession is a humanistic way of extending Godly love to the workforce by helping them stay safe. I am very passionate regarding the enforcement of safety rules because my father lost his eye while working on a job, and I have had a couple of childhood friends killed on the job.” 

       Hicks is actively engaged in the community, pouring the benefit of his experiences into others’ lives on multiple fronts. He serves as a mentor to troubled youth, teaches Sunday school to 4 to 7-year-old children at church and serves on the Cobb County (Ga.) Literacy Council to decrease the dropout rate and to improve literacy in the county.

       Hicks still stays in touch with Lengyel and shares something of a connection to the former coach with Tom Burbage, Aeronautics executive vice president and general manager of F-35 Program Integration at t Lockheed Martin.

       Burbage played football at the Naval Academy while attending there from 1965 to 1969; Lengyel served as athletic director at the academy from 1988 to 2001. Hicks and Burbage share occasional contact, discussing their football playing days and how their respective alma maters’ teams are performing.  

       In his wallet, Hicks keeps a lifetime pass to all Marshall University athletic events, a reward he and his teammates received for their crucial role in re-establishing the football program. It’s a fitting visual reminder for Hicks, who maintains an emotional tie to the program and university that did so much to form his character and prepare him to touch the lives of others through service and mentoring.

After 11-14-70, life was never the same at Marshall

I’ll never forget my first public talk about ’70 crash

The author as a college DB from back in the day.

Two years ago, I agreed to go to Marshall University and speak about my recollections of the 1970 plane crash. Even though I accepted the invite, I had reservations.

        Evangelist Ed Carter issued the invitation. Ed was an MU offensive lineman in the early ‘70s. But his life was spared because of an advance warning from his mother who pleaded with him to not go on the road trip to East Carolina because there would be plane crash and no one would survive.

       The Marshall plane crash claimed the lives of seventy-five people, which included most of Marshall’s varsity football team. It’s considered to be the worst aviation disaster in the history of sports in America.

       Ed and I have known each other for over forty years. I got to know Ed as a teammate and when we both worked at the H.K. Porter Steel Mill one summer. The steel mill was only a 15-minute walk from Marshall’s campus.

       Over the years, Ed has visited Marshall quite frequently. During that time, he has spoken about his time at Marshall and how the tragedy eventually led to him starting Death Unto Life Ministries, a vibrant evangelistic ministry that’s now in its 36^th year of existence.

        Ed had a speaking engagement at Marshall scheduled in November 2010, a few days after the 40^th anniversary of the crash. He asked me to come because he felt it would be beneficial for another former Marshall player to share a different perspective about the night of November 14, 1970.

        It’s somewhat ironic that at the time, I was still working on finishing my first book November Ever After, which is a memoir about the plane crash, its aftermath, and how it affected the people who were left behind (book released in late August 2011).

       Looking back, I was somewhat nervous and apprehensive about this speaking engagement, mainly because I had no idea of what to expect. So many questions kept bouncing back and forth in my head.

• What aspects of the tragedy should I talk about?
• Would people really be interested in what I had to say about an event that happened such a long time ago?
• How many people would come out to hear what Ed and I had to say?
• Would they be receptive, and to what degree?

       We didn’t pack the house that night at the Don Morris Room which is housed inside Memorial Student Center on the MU campus. I’m guessing there were around 100 people who showed up.

       When my time came to speak, it was a moment in which all my questions about how I would do as a speaker and how the audience would react were answered in resounding fashion. I kept telling myself --- just tell the story, and let the story captivate and inspire.

        That’s when it became even more apparent that there’s so much more to the Marshall plane crash story than most folks realize. The audience was comprised of people of all age groups – some were college students, some were not. And what I enjoyed most was that afterwards, they didn’t mind asking questions.

        That was just another early confirmation of what I had felt since I started writing my memoir. The story about the Marshall plane crash, as told by those in my book November Ever After, is a story is whose time has finally come.

Photo courtesy of Huntington Advertiser archives

       

Corn Nation explores myth, reality of ’70 air crash

       Author's note: Here’s an item for your review. It’s an article entitled  "We Are Marshall” and “The Marshall Story” – Hollywood vs. Reality. You’ll find it in the archives of the Corn Nation website.

       Corn Nation editor Jon Johnston conducts a Q&A interview with Rick Nolte, one of the co-authors of The Marshall Story, a book  which takes a chronological look at Marshall University football from the late ‘60s through the program’s heydays of the 1990s and early 2000s. Nolte is one of four former staff writers who covered MU football for the Herald-Dispatch newspaper in Huntington, West Virginia where MU is located.

       In the interview, Nolte addresses the contents of The Marshall Story and the Warner Bros. film We Are Marshall, released in 2006. I’ve included excerpts from that interview (read below). 

       Nolte covered Marshall football for the Huntington newspaper as a sports writer (1978-85) and later as assistant sports editor and sports editor (1986-93). 
      He also served as writer/editor for two previously-written books about MU football Rolling Thunder and Won For All.

       CN: Anything in the movie that you personally didn't like or would have changed?
       Nolte: The first time I watched the movie, I was somewhat disappointed. The second and third times I saw it, I understood why. Because I had lived it all, I spent the first showing finding all the inaccuracies. I found out later, that was pretty typical of anyone who had a history with the story.
       When Ruffin and his teammate come out of the movie theater upon hearing the news of the crash, the fire trucks are heading east on the street. The airport was west of Huntington. The Ohio River doesn't run through Huntington, it forms the city's northern border with Ohio.
       None of the cheerleaders dated a star player. And when the star player's dad was alone in the deserted downtown, you wouldn't have been able to hear cheers from the stadium. It was almost four miles away and the crowd wasn't much over 10,000.
       The successive times I watched it, though, I was able to look at it differently. From those times I felt like it was a good movie.

       CN: Did funeral processions actually meet at intersections?
       Nolte: Yes. After all the bodies were identified and arrangements were finalized, mortuaries met to try to schedule funerals so times wouldn't conflict. They did the best they could, but they couldn't keep some from overlapping. I attended 13 funerals in a five-day period after the crash. Three of those came in one day.

       CN: In We Are Marshall, Red Dawson is painted as a very tragic figure. The movie mentions that he resigned after the 1971 season. Why was it that Dawson never returned to football?
       Nolte: The movie's portrayal of Red Dawson was rivaled only by that of its treatment of Ruffin. Outside of those who lost family members in the crash, nobody suffered more from the crash than Red. He left after one season because he honestly just couldn't be around the game any more.
       Just on the team, he'd lost young men who were like sons and colleagues who were like brothers, not to mention his connection to the team doctors and other local community leaders. When you look at it that way, nobody lost more than Red.
       We tried to talk with him for our first book, but he just couldn't do it. That book came out in the late fall of 1988 after Marshall had played Northeast Louisiana for the I-AA championship in 1987, but he still was hurting. He was glad we were doing the book, but he just couldn't talk about it.
       When they finally won the title in 1992, he was able to talk about it for the book that came out in ’93. It was the first time he'd talked at length about the crash and the following 20-some years. His grieving process seemed to end with that championship. The movie, I think, completed his healing.

 You can access the complete article by clicking here

Memoir offers unique look at Marshall football

Compared to other media projects, the memoir November Ever After takes a far different approach in its treatment of the November 14, 1970 plane crash that killed most of Marshall University’s varsity football team. The well-known story gained some national attention several years ago with the release of the movie We Are Marshall.

• November Ever After delves into areas that the movie didn’t deal with. Defensive back Felix Jordan (ankle injury) and offensive lineman Ed Carter (death in the family) missed the trip and their lives were spared as a result. The memoir reveals the details of the hows and the whys for them not being on the ill-fated flight.
• The true story about the tragedy and its aftermath is amazing in and of itself. But viewers would never know that by what they see in the movie. The memoir is chock-full of real-life recollections from those who were left behind. Readers are taken back in time to the night of the disaster when girlfriends shrieked in anguish after learning that their football-playing boyfriends had died. For those who have little or no familiarity with the story, it sounds too much like fiction – but it isn’t.
• Football is the anchor for this story, but there’s so much more to it than football. The story line is provocative with all the requisite elements that make for compelling reading – romance, premonition, prophecy, denial, depression, relief and ecstasy.

       I give a tip of the hat to the movie and the previously-produced books and documentaries. But those projects are really appetizers. 
       By comparison, November Ever After is the full-course meal. It tells an old story with a twist that’s new and true.

Book offers new insights about Marshall plane crash

"Most people are amazed by what they discover from the movie and the documentaries about the Marshall tragedy.  As amazed as they are, they don't realize that what they've learned is only the tip of the iceberg."

Author Craig T. Greenlee discusses his memoir with The Chronicle newspaper in Winston-Salem, NC. Click on the "Media" tab at the top of this page to read the whole article.

Author featured in article about NSSA book signing

For Greenlee, telling the Marshall story never gets old.

       Editor’s Note: The recent book signing sponsored by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association attracted a lively crowd of inquisitive sports fans and avid readers. Noted writers such as Bob Ryan (Boston Globe and ESPN) and Leigh Montville (Sports Illustrated) were on hand to mix and mingle with other media and visitors during the association’s annual awards weekend held in Salisbury, NC.

       But there were others in that journalistic mix who had recollections of their own to share. Craig T. Greenlee was one of eight writers who accepted an invitation to participate in the event. The Salisbury Post newspaper ran an article about the book signing which included Greenlee, who is the author of November Ever After, a memoir about the Marshall plane crash and its aftermath (read below).

       Craig Greenlee played for the Marshall football team for two years before the plane crash that killed the majority of the 1970 team after a road game at East Carolina. It was one of the worst tragedies in sports history and Greenlee had been teammates with most of the players on board. Scottie Reese, a linebacker from Waco, Texas, was slated to be the best man at Greenlee’s wedding.
       Greenlee, a freelance writer who lives in Winston-Salem, wanted to give a first-hand account of the story. He said he was inspired to write his book after watching the movie We Are Marshall.
       “It’s not in the sense of being a movie hater,” Greenlee said. “It’s in the sense of there’s a lot of aspects of this story that have never really been addressed.”
       Greenlee recollects stories such as teammate Ed Carter’s. Carter’s mother called him 10 days before the crash and predicted the plane would go down and he didn’t need to be on it. Carter now has a global ministry that he’s led for decades.
       Greenlee claims a hostile racial conflict occurred after an intramural football game at the school the night before the plane went down. The crash obviously gave the students a newfound perspective.
       “I felt like we were on the verge of a race riot,” Greenlee said. “The plane went down and it’s almost like none of that happened. The hurt and shock was so deep it cut across all lines.”

- Ryan Bisesi

Salisbury Post (NC)