I'm a little early with my Marshall Memorial thread.

Saturday is the 50th Anniversary of the crash.

If you don't know,a number of the players were from N.J.

Two were from Lyndhurst, including the Q.B.

Starting today, www.northjersey.com ,is doing a 3 part series on North Jersey's ties to the crash.

Today's article was very good.

This will be a difficult weekend for me emotionally. We are going to the game. Due to Covid19 we will only be able to see the memorial service via remote in a nearby field. Only immediate family of those who died in the crash are being allowed at site of service, understandably.

My senior year of high school I had been accepted to O.U.

One of my wrestling teammates (Bart Tarulli) had been accepted to Marshall.

We joked about going from teammates to rivals.

Then came the crash.

He decided to honor his commitment and go to Marshall.

He went on to play for the Young Thundering Herd.

You can actually see "him" (#53) make a play in We Are Marshall.

After seeing We Are Marshall ,I was determined to see the Silencing Ceremony and visit Spring Hill Cemetery.
Finally got to see it a few years ago.
It was the year the QB's brother was the Keynote Speaker.

My wife and I planned on going to the 50th.
But Covid killed that.

At least they are streaming it.

John Feinstein in today's Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/11/11/marshall... /

This afternoon Don Nathan, the younger brother of Jeff Nathan, The Parthenon sports editor who was killed in the crash, asked that my wife and I in their stead attend the ceremony on Friday afternoon that will bestow posthumous degrees on the students who were killed in the crash. I was honored to accept that offer. You see Don and his wife are under a two-week quarantine because he was exposed to Covid19 at the high school in Columbus at which he is the band director.

To give some context to this, I'm going to cut and paste here something that I wrote earlier this week to a former student of mine who is now on the Marshall faculty:

"At that point in my life I was not much older than many students and Jeff and I developed a real bond. He and I played pick-up basketball games at Gullickson Hall and had lunch together a number times. Jeff was not in any of my classes, but as you recall, I was co-adviser with Tom McCoy of The Parthenon. In that capacity I counseled Jeff a lot about his sports reporting and his duties as sports editor. You might remember that Jeff let Tom and I do a football prediction column on fall Fridays which we called, 'Thundering Thumb Thumpers.' It was a fun time -- until it all ended so suddenly and tragically. I still to this day have some feelings of guilt as it was at my suggestion that Jeff decided to travel with the team to the East Carolina game, after he had driven by himself to some of the earlier away games."

So, it will be with a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye that I will accept on behalf of his family, the diploma that Marshall University is bestowing on my friend, Jeff Nathan. Go Marshall!

I've hunted for that picture for years.

Never been able to find much of anything on O.U.'s Memorial Service,at least as far as photographs.

I could only find 1 black and white still photograph of the service.

Its of someone in a "letter " jacket standing at a podium.

There are people facing him,with their heads bowed.

If you PM me with an email address and I'll scan it and send it to you.

Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate your kind words. My emotions are really getting the best of me this evening, as we prepare to leave for Huntington tomorrow. I just watched WSAZ's 90 minute special on the 50th anniversary of the crash. It was very moving. At one point they had about 10 minutes or so of actual game highlights of that last contest with ECU. They used Gene Morehouse's radio broadcast and synced it with the game film. It was amazingly good from a technical standpoint. They must have worked many midnight hours to pull that off. The whole show was narrated by Keith Morehouse, Gene's son. When Keith introduced that play-by-play of his father calling his last game, you could see the held back emotion all over his face as he professionally did his job as the host of the special. There were also a number of interviews with members of the cast of "We are Marshall," and to a person they said that doing this movie was a very unique experience and that they felt that it played a part in the healing of the town, and that further they were very conscious of this healing role they were playing as the movie was being made. That's a stange statement, but a true one. Well, I could go on, but I must get to bed so I can get on the road tomorrow.