RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) - It wasn’t easy for Sharon Blanton Tool to speak of her lost sister Terry. Even with tears flowing, she saw the conversation as a means of keeping a legacy of six Rapid City High School cheerleaders alive, 50 years after their tragic deaths.
The pain of the March 17, 1968, air crash which took their lives certainly lingers for friends and family. But talking about the dark days and the cherished good times offers catharsis, they say, of grieving those lost so young: Jan Glaze, Shirley Landstrom, Laureen “Kay” McNutt, Terry Blanton, Diana McCluskey and Gail Flohr, along with Ivan Landstrom, his wife, Mary, and high school teacher and adviser Dorothy Lloyd.
“Just imagine what they might have accomplished if they’d lived. They accomplished a lot for everyone who has been a part of keeping the spirit alive,” said Sharon, 70, of Sacramento, California.
“It’s helped transcend the loss.”
Sharon described her sister Terry as an honest and down-to-earth girl who took ballet and had a lovely singing voice.
Growing up in Rapid City, Sharon and Terry dressed in fancy western wear and rode horses in a parade for Range Days, the forerunner of the Central States Fair. Terry wasn’t afraid of any challenge and could keep her friends from taking the wrong path, Sharon said.
After Terry’s death, her father, Bill, would cut a small Christmas tree to place at her grave during the holidays. Sharon helped him decorate the tiny tree with ornaments.
Sharon said community support in the immediate aftermath and through the years has helped families deal with the crushing loss of a child and sibling. “It’s been amazing and a source of solace that each individual family loss wasn’t in a vacuum. It was a loss to the community,” she said.
It was a loss that may have been presaged by at least one of the victims.
Rudy Flohr wonders to this day if his daughter Gail didn’t have a premonition of her mortality months prior to her death. Riding with her dad to Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the summer of 1967, she suddenly said: “I don’t think I’ll ever see or enjoy the fruits of life.”
After talking with her about the surprising statement, Gail went to say she was a Christian and if she did die, she’d be with Christ, Rudy recalled. “After she got killed I thought about that so many times. Did she have a premonition? I just don’t know,” he said.
“I was shocked about what she said and still am, but it gives me a lot of comfort to know that she was a Christian and a strong believer, and heaven isn’t just some ambiguous place. She really believed that’s where she would go if she did die.”
After Gail died, Rudy and his wife, Mary, hosted foster children in their home, along with Bible studies for many friends of Gail and their sons Bill and Sam.
About a year after Gail’s death, Rudy took a job with the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, which maintained an aircraft used for cloud studies at the Rapid City airport.
One day at the airport, Rudy learned some of the wreckage from the plane was still visible in a ravine just west of the runway. Poking around in the debris, incredibly, he found Gail’s winter coat, and in a pocket, her car keys and a small purse containing her driver’s license, the Rapid City Journal reported .
“I still have that license,” he said.
Another surviving parent, Vyonne Glaze, also wondered if her oldest daughter Jan’s star would burn too brightly to last.
In a 2015 interview with the Journal for a story on dealing with sudden death, Vyonne said Jan was an exceptional student. She had also been voted homecoming queen the previous fall.
“Everything she tried for, she won,” Vyonne said. “It sometimes seemed all too perfect. I remember thinking, ’Maybe she is going to die young.’”
All of the girls were leaders in their respective classes. The “cream of the crop,” a school official said. Glaze, Landstrom and McNutt were seniors. Flohr, McCluskey and Blanton were juniors.
“They were the ones everybody looked up to,” said senior classmate Jim Lintz, a Hermosa rancher, former state legislator and current Custer County commissioner.
A star athlete on Cobbler basketball and football teams, Lintz joined other classmates in a wrenching duty, serving as pallbearer for many of the funerals. Many people still don’t know how hard the deaths were on students and families, he said.
“It made a lot of us grow up a lot faster than we wanted to,” Lintz said.
He remembers Shirley Landstrom as a gifted athlete who had little chance, aside from an annual powder-puff football game for girls, to show off her athleticism. “I’ve always thought it’s too bad they didn’t have girls basketball at the time,” Lintz said. “She would have really excelled. She was quite a competitor.”
Lintz and Landstrom dated off-and-on for several years going back to eighth grade at Rapid City South Junior High School. They had planned to get back together following the state basketball tournament, he said.
Don McNutt said his younger sister, Laureen “Kay” McNutt, tenaciously pursued becoming a cheerleader her senior year. Making the varsity squad when you hadn’t been chosen as a junior was unusual, he said.
“She did (make it). She wanted that badly and called us when she achieved it,” he said.
McNutt, of West Des Moines, Iowa, was 8 years old when Kay was born. Growing up in a home in the West Boulevard area of Rapid City, he said his younger sister could be a pain at times, but they grew closer as the age gap shrank. “I was pleased that she always got so excited when I came home for the holidays,” he said.
Classmate Mary Beth (Howe) Johnson called McNutt one of her closest friends in more ways than one. They also wore the same size clothes.
They would trade clothes back and forth, Johnson recalled. After Kay’s death, Johnson went to her house to return the borrowed clothing and retrieve hers.
“So hard,” she said.
Diana McCluskey’s sister, Candis McCluskey French, offered a vignette of teenage life in Rapid City. Their older sister Peggy worked in Washington, D.C., and came home with friends to visit.
“Diana and I wanted to take them out one evening to show them the fun things we did as teenagers,” Candis said. That meant cruising 8th Street (now Mount Rushmore Road) and loops through both the A&W Drive In (then located near the south end of 8th Street) and McDonald’s.
Peggy, at the wheel of an Edsel from their father’s car dealership, mistakenly turned into the exit driveway for the A&W, going the wrong way through the parking lot. “Both Diana and I jumped on the floor of the car, mortified that our friends might see us doing this so uncool thing,” Candis said.
Candis also remembers Diana’s habit of “parking” her chewing gum on her bedroom door jamb as a way of saving it for later. “Not sure how happy our mother was about this,” she said.
Dottie Crawford Olson was head cheerleader her senior year in 1967. Jan Glaze and Shirley Landstrom had made the squad as juniors.
Adviser Dorothy Lloyd was a strict disciplinarian in the English and Literature classes she taught. She also set rigid standards for her cheerleaders, Olson said.
“She was such a kind person, she laid out the standards she wanted us to develop in our cheering technique, everything from the cheers to the way we dressed, not chewing gum and not wearing dangly earrings,” Olson said.
If the student cheering section began to boo or jeer the other team, the cheerleaders were tasked to stop it. “It was our job to inspire the kids and lead them in cheers,” Olson said. “She (Lloyd) ensured that we did that. That was the standard she wanted us to achieve.”
That standard was the impetus for the Spirit of Six award, a trophy sponsored by the South Dakota Peace Officers Association since 1969 and given to a squad of cheerleaders at all state basketball tournaments.
The award is based on cheerleader decorum, appearance and sportsmanship, qualities the six Cobbler cheerleaders exemplified through Lloyd’s guidance.
Lloyd was widowed three years before the crash that took her life. She is buried at Black Hills National Cemetery with her husband, Clarence.
Ivan and Mary Landstrom were pillars in the community. Ivan founded Landstrom’s Jewelry in 1943, soon after moving to Rapid City from Minneapolis where his family settled from Sweden.
He also owned several other businesses, among them Landstrom’s Black Hills Gold Jewelry and Black Hills Glass & Mirror. He also co-owned B & L Aviation and had logged more than 10,000 hours as a pilot, often donating flight time to help others in times of medical or family emergencies.
His wife, Mary, was secretary of the Rapid City Girls Club. Surviving family members feared Ivan Landstrom would be blamed for the tragedy.
“Everybody realized it was an accident,” Lintz said. “We never blamed anybody.”
More attention at the time was placed on the lack of substantial firefighting capability at the airport. The crash eventually led to the building of a fire department substation at what is now Rapid City Regional Airport.
Other surviving classmates have also picked up the mantle of keeping the legacy alive.
Gary Overby, a friend and neighbor of the Flohr family now living in Tracy, California, was instrumental in efforts to fund and create a replica memorial to the cheerleaders in front of Rapid City High School on Columbus Street.
An original memorial had been moved from the old high school building to the new Central High School in 1980. After the recent remodeling of Central, the memorial containing the names of the cheerleaders is in a part of the building no longer readily accessible to the public.
The replica memorial was erected last fall and on March 16, a wreath remembering the cheerleaders was placed there in spite of a heavy snowstorm.
Classmate Gary Larson said the Rapid City High School class of 1968 was comprised of more than 700 graduates, the second to last class of RCHS before the change to Central High School and the opening of the new Stevens High School for the 1969-70 school year.
The adversity those final classes endured brought them closer together, Larson said.
“We’re a big class, but a cohesive one, and we’ve grown more cohesive,” he said.
Johnson said plans for the 50-year reunion of the Class of ’68 in September include visits to the cheerleaders’ graves and a visit from Vyonne Glaze, who celebrated her 90th birthday on March 4.
Sharon Blanton Tool said the spirit exemplified by the six cheerleaders remains present and relevant today.
“They’re still guiding what it means to be good sports and to stand up for what’s right,” she said. “Those of us who remember are not going to be around for much longer, but their spirit can still be.”
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Information from: Rapid City Journal, http://www.rapidcityjournal.com
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