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Niles native was assistant coach at Marshall when tragedy struck
By Ryan Buck
YOUNGSTOWN
Niles native Carl Kokor will never forget the night of Nov. 14, 1970. He won’t let himself.
Kokor was the first-year defensive line coach at Marshall University, driving back from a scouting trip in State College, Pa., to the Huntington, W.Va., campus with offensive backs coach Mickey Jackson.
The Marshall football team was flying home from a game against East Carolina in Greenville, N.C. The Thundering Herd fell to East Carolina that day on a controversial call, he joked.
Kokor is a youthful 81 years of age now. He spoke before a gathering at the Park Vista Retirement Community of Youngstown recently and can vividly recount the events of that night.
The plane crashed into a hillside a short distance from the runway at Tri-State Airport in Huntington, killing everyone aboard.
“Seventy-five people died,” Kokor said. “There were 37 players, five coaches, school administrators, families, friends and fans. The crash left 29 orphans.”
Kokor and Jackson heard a news report over their car radio and immediately stopped at the next rest stop to call home to confirm what they’d heard.
“I called [wife] Rose Mary, and when I called I said, ‘What’s happening?’ She kept saying over and over, ‘They’re all dead, they’re all dead!’
“About an hour after I was home, all of the neighbors came over to watch our kids so we could leave for a few hours to console the wives of the other coaches.
“All the parents and families were brought back to Huntington and there, they were put up in local hotels and motels and myself and the other two coaches would go around from table to table and room to room, answering any questions they had because, you have to understand, when you lose your son, maybe you’re talking to the last man who ever talked to your son after you. A lot of them would ask me some very difficult questions. I can understand because I would be doing the same thing if I was them.
“Some people lost their only son. Some people lost their only child. Parents don’t send their kids to college to die. They send their kids to college to fulfill their dreams.”
Kokor stayed on as an assistant coach through the 1971 season as the program was rebuilt under new head coach Jack Lengyel and assistant Red Dawson, whose life was spared because he refused to fly that evening. Grief took its toll. For a time, some even thought Kokor, one of 22 coaches or players not on the plane, had perished.
Kokor, who graduated from Niles in 1950, returned home to coach and teach at Brookfield and Leetonia. During that time, he helped coach the Youngstown Hardhats, a semipro team. He spent the last 24 years of his career on the Westminster College coaching staff, retiring in 2000.
Even while building his career and growing a family of three children with Rose Mary, to whom he’s been married 56 years, he made it a mission in his life to support the families of the Marshall players.
“My wife and I want to be the voice of the people who don’t have a voice to speak with and that’s what we’re doing,” Kokor said. “I’m speaking for them, the families, everybody.”
Kokor has traveled the country to meet with families and to speak at events commemorating the plane crash. The university and the Huntington community hold a ceremony every November at the memorial on the Marshall campus and the Kokors do everything in their power to be there. They’ll do the same this year.
“My wife and I go back to these events as often as we can,” Kokor said. “This is part of my life forever. The people on the plane are truly sons of Marshall. If you attend a Marshall football game, you will see that no one has forgotten this. It’s a close-knit thing.”
After a thorough vetting process of worthy scripts, Kokor was an adviser to filmmakers for the 2006 film “We are Marshall” and also contributed to a Warner Brothers documentary. If a recounting of the story would do it justice, Kokor was all for it.
“The movie ‘We are Marshall’ is not really a football movie,” Kokor said. “It’s really about families, people and communities. How do they recover and handle a tragedy such as this? It’s not easy. Even now when we go back for this ceremony, the people grab me and hug me because I’m one of their links to the past and their sons.”
Kokor’s own upbringing in a football-loving community was motivating in his drive to tell the Marshall story.
“Football in this area is more than just a sport,” he said. “It’s a way of life, it’s an activity for the family and it’s a place to go and things to do if there’s a sporting event around here.”
Kokor often finds himself reminiscing about the friends, pupils and colleagues he lost that day. Just as often, however, are thoughts of the families they left behind and the ways he can enhance their legacies.
“He lives with it every day,” Rose Mary said.