By Jimmy Robertson
For a small group of people with connections to Virginia Tech, this time of year often brings forth painful memories, ones that time never seems to dull – and probably never will.
Mary Jane Tolley finds herself occasionally slipping into a sense of melancholy around mid-November every year, but this woman, with her spitfire personality, refuses to reside in this particular emotional state very long. She, like others, stubbornly clings to positive thoughts, and in her case, those of her departed husband, Rick, who tragically died 50 years ago on Saturday. Today, nearly 50 years later, she can re-live details of his life with the clarity of a 20-year-old.
She remembers a specific time when the former Virginia Tech football player coached at Marshall. He won a recruiting battle for a talented high school player, who signed with the Thundering Herd. In August, Tolley picked up the young man at the local airport for the start of practices, but unhappy with the young player’s hairstyle, first took him to the barbershop before dropping him off at his dormitory.
“Of course, these days, you just don’t do that,” Tolley said, chuckling. “He [the young player] went along, but today, I don’t think guys would put up with that.
“I do often wonder how he [Tolley] would have changed with the times. I do think about that sometimes.”
The story almost provides her with a sense of peace, or at the least, a moment of normalcy during what annually represents a difficult time of the year. She and other friends and family relatives of those killed in the 1970 Marshall University plane crash grasp for that, and do so more this year, as Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of one of the nation’s worst sports-related tragedies.
Most sports fans know the story. Returning from a game against East Carolina in Greenville, North Carolina, the plane carrying Marshall football players, coaches, school administrators, and boosters crashed into a hill just short of Tri-State Airport in Huntington, West Virginia on a rainy, foggy night. The accident killed all 75 on board.
Marshall University has several events lined up this weekend to commemorate and honor the lives of those who passed. Each year, university officials hold a memorial fountain ceremony on Nov. 14 – the tragedy’s anniversary – turning off the fountain for the winter (and then restarting it on the first day of spring football practice). Saturday, they plan to rededicate a restored statue and move it to more prominent campus location, and they also plan to honor each student-athlete who died with a posthumous degree in their program of study.
Outside of Marshall, perhaps no other school was affected more by the tragedy than Virginia Tech. The accident – and the story of numerous documentaries and the focal point of the movie “We Are Marshall” – robbed Virginia Tech of the lives of Tolley and Frank Loria, both of whom left behind wives, parents, brothers, sisters, friends, teammates, and in the case of Loria, three children.
Frank Loria Jr. is one of those children. He never knew his father. His mother was eight months pregnant at the time of the crash, and he and sisters Vickie and Julie were three of 70 children left without one of their parents. Eighteen children were left without both parents.
Loria Jr., who graduated from West Point and works in New Jersey today, regularly finds himself reflecting on his dad, one of the greatest players in Virginia Tech history. That reflection goes a little deeper this year.
“Honestly, there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about things,” Loria Jr. said. “I’m sure my mom and my sisters as well. We don’t talk about it a lot. It’s just something that’s always there. But yeah, especially this year, we always thought 2020 was going to be a celebration of 50 years, [and] life going on. So we’re trying to spend it the best way we could and everybody getting together and all that, so it’s definitely a more significant year.”
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November 11, 2020 at 03:00PM
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Fifty years later, Tech Athletics remembering two who died in Marshall plane crash - VT hokiesports.com
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