Larry Kramer was a football coach for 32 years of his life.
He helped shape and mold the athletic skills of thousands of young football players at schools like McCook Junior College in Nebraska, Southern Oregon and Emporia State, where he was the head coach for 12 seasons from 1983-94.
Now 64 and no longer roaming the sidelines, many of his players’ names and faces have been lost to time. But one former player nearly four decades ago stands out in his mind just as vividly as the day the two first met.
“It’s been so long ago, I’m even missing names,” Kramer said, “but Kevin Gilmore was outstanding. He was just a great kid. It was a sad deal what happened to him.”
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Thirty-eight years ago, in 1968, Kevin Gilmore joined the football program at McCook Junior College in McCook, Neb. A native of Harrison, N.J., Gilmore was recruited by several Division I schools out of high school, but his grades weren’t quite good enough, so he made the more-than 1,500-mile trek from New Jersey to Nebraska to play football and improve his academic standing at McCook.
Kramer, then in his second season as head coach at McCook after spending one season there as an assistant in 1967, was excited about this talented dual-purpose athlete from the Garden State.
“He was a heck of a player,” Kramer said. “He played defensive back and running back, and we knew of him as being a really good player. He came to us with several schools that were interested in him.”
For two years, Gilmore was a star for McCook at both running back and cornerback. He earned consensus All-Conference honors at both positions his sophomore year in 1969. As part of the ’69 squad, Gilmore helped McCook capture a victory over the University of Nebraska’s freshman squad in Lincoln — a feat that was unheard of at that time.
Gilmore also was a beloved figure off the field in the tiny town of McCook (pop. 8,000). McCook Junior College — now McCook Community College — did not have a men’s dorm back then, so many of the football players lived with families in the community. Some even stayed with the assistant coaches. As such, the townspeople got to know the young college athletes as people — without their helmets and pads.
Gilmore was no exception.
“He was a gentleman and a really good guy,” Kramer said. “He was the kind of kid that would go out in the back yard and play catch with the kids in town. All the kids loved him; the community loved him. He was just a very good young man.”
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Gilmore left McCook Junior College after the 1969 season with a scholarship offer to play football at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. It was then, also, that Kramer was hired away to become the head coach at Southern Oregon. It would not be long before thoughts of Gilmore would again flood into Kramer’s mind, though the circumstances would be dramatically altered.
On Nov. 14, 1970, the Marshall football team boarded a Southern Airways DC-9 jet after a road game against East Carolina. On the way back to Huntington, the plane crashed, killing all 75 people on board.
Kevin Gilmore was one of the 75.
“I heard about it when I was in Oregon,” Kramer said. “I immediately called Kevin’s mother. It was tough. I got her on the phone, and I remember talking to her, and I just expressed my condolences. The conversation was pretty short, but I related to her how much I respected Kevin.”
Another former McCook football player, Greg Finn, also was a member of the Marshall football team that season as an All-Conference noseguard. But he was not on the flight. Finn had been injured that weekend and did not make the trip with the team.
Kramer tried to reach Finn after the crash, but never had any luck. To this day, Kramer has not spoken with Finn.
News of the crash and Gilmore’s death hit the town of McCook hard, Kramer said.
“It was a just a bad deal,” Kramer said. “There were some really strong ties as far as kids being with families and spending time with families back in McCook. It was really tough for those people to lose someone they had come to know.”
VVV
A movie has been made, called “We Are Marshall,” about the Marshall University plane crash and how the school went forward with its football program and continued to play the following season.
It begins showing today, and there is no doubting that Kramer will be at a theater to watch it.
“I told my wife we’re going to go see it as soon as it comes out,” he said. “We’ll probably go see it (tonight).”
Because of the relationship he had with Finn and especially Gilmore, Kramer has strong ties to the events that are now documented in “We Are Marshall.” But, Kramer said, people around the Emporia area and in Kansas can relate to the movie too, since the Marshall plane crash occurred one month after 31 people, including 14 Wichita State football players, were killed in a plane crash on a flight back from Denver. Some have said the crash ultimately led to Wichita State cutting its football program in 1986.
“I imagine a lot of the people around here that experienced the Wichita State plane crash can relate to what happened at Marshall,” Kramer said. “It affected a lot of people.”
Kramer will probably often think of Gilmore as he watches Hollywood’s version of what happened on Nov. 14, 1970, and the aftermath — and triumph — that followed. But Kramer’s thoughts won’t be on Gilmore simply because Gilmore lost his life in the accident.
“He was one of those kids that you remember, and not just because he died in a plane crash,” Kramer said. “He’ll always be a memory to me, because he was such a good player, because I never had an ounce of problems with him and because he was just a quality kid. Sometimes you wonder about a kid coming from back East to little McCook, Neb. You really wonder. But it worked out perfectly for him. It’s just too bad that he couldn’t live a long life.
“I’m 64. I coached for 32 years. I was a head coach for 29 of those years. I’ve seen a lot of stuff, but he (Gilmore) was one I won’t forget.”