Chase county ? The wind was blowing a good 20 mph, but Easter Heathman looked right at home leaning against a piece of hedge tree fencing in the middle of a Chase County pasture.

Behind him and inside the small fence was a stone memorial to college football and University of Notre Dame legend Knute Rockne.

The 11-foot stone monument stands on the spot where Transcontinental and Western Air Express Flight 599 fell to the prairie floor after the Fokker F-10 lost a wing. A crew of two and six passengers died in the crash.

It happened March 31, 1931.

Easter Heathman, named for the day he was born, was there on the scene shortly after it happened. He was one week shy of his 14th birthday.

Now he’s 87 years old.

He waved his cane in the direction of his childhood home and remembered.

“It was miserable, about 35 to 40 degrees and real foggy that morning,” Heathman said slowly. “We was shelling seed corn in the house, me, my two brothers and my mother and father.”

He said when he went to the barn to fetch a sack of corn he heard what he thought were car engines, “wound up like they was racing,” north of the farm.

“I hollered to my brothers to come out so they could see them when they passed our place.”

No cars surfaced and his brothers thought he was pulling their leg.

“‘Bout that time the phone rang, and it was our uncle saying a plane had just crashed over west.”

The Heathman boys and their dad hopped into their new 1930 Chevy pickup and, by driving across pastures, were the first vehicle on the scene.

“When we got there we could see the tail of the plane sticking up out of a big pile of rubble, oh, 15 or 17 feet in the air,” he said.

There was no fire.

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The plane’s lost wing lay nearby, nearly intact.

Some neighbors “had seen it flutter through the sky and said it took almost half a minute to hit the ground,” Heathman recalled.

He said the heavy air was filled with the smells of gasoline and hot oil.

“When I think about it, I can smell that hot oil today,” he said.

Mail carried on the plane was scattered “around 80 or 90 yards from the wreckage … everybody pitched in to put it back in the bags.”

He remembered seeing five bodies together about 25 or 30 feet from the pile of wreckage. Two ambulances arrived, and Heathman and others on the scene helped load the casualties.

The victims’ watches were stopped between 10:45 a.m. and 10:50 a.m.

“I was holding a stretcher steady while they put a man on it, trouser legs ripped open, who had a rubber wrap around the area of his knee, about 2 inches wide,” Heathman said. “It was trailing the stretcher about 4 or 5 feet, so I picked it up and laid it on the stretcher beside the body before someone stepped on it.”

On the 60th anniversary of the plane crash Heathman met Knute Rockne’s daughter, Mary Jean, and he told her about the rubber wrap.

“She said, ‘Yes, dad had phlebitis,’ and she remembered he wore it around one leg,” Heathman said.

He said he was pretty sure after he saw pictures of Rockne in the newspapers the day after the crash that the man with the wrap was the fabled coach, “but that conversation really confirmed it for me.”

Unofficial tour guide

Heathman is one of two men at the crash still alive to tell about it. Wally Evans, of Emporia, is the other. Another witness, Frank Gaddie, of Bazaar, died in March at 94.

Heathman’s interest in the crash is as high today as it was 73 years ago. His home, 10 miles south of Cottonwood Falls, is only a mile and a half from the crash site, which is on private property.

He has permission from the famous pasture’s owner, Texas resident Leonard Cornelius, to take interested visitors through locked gates to the memorial.

“People knock on my door and ask where the Rockne monument is,” Heathman said. “I get phone calls, and every five years we have a memorial service at the Bazaar School and we shuttle visitors to the memorial.”

He said he had taken well more than 1,000 people to view the Rockne shrine. Many were relatives of the Notre Dame coach or attended the South Bend, Ind., university.

“One of the passengers on that airplane was John Happer, who was on his way to California to promote Wilson Sporting Goods,” Heathman said from under his “ND” cap. “One year, not too long ago, I took six of his grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren up there.”

He doesn’t charge for his services but does accept donations for replacement wreaths. He asks visitors to sign a little green book, “when I remember.”

“I don’t think there should be any money made on a tragic accident like that,” he said.

Oft-repeated story

It’s a short trip from Kansas Highway 177 to the memorial. After the two locked gates comes a small trail leading around a pond. There’s a stream to cross with a small incline, not recommended for passenger cars.

“A little girl from a Wichita television station wanted to go up there when I already had a van full and I told her I’d come back and pick her up,” Heathman recalled with a smile.

When he pulled up to the memorial the television reporter pulled her company car in beside his old Chevy.

“I wondered how she got across that stream, but when I went back I saw both her bumpers a laying in the water,” he said with a laugh.

He has patiently shared his crash story countless times and once told it when he was invited to a meeting of Notre Dame alumni in South Bend. Former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz presented him with an autographed football, now displayed in his living room.

Heathman said he believed that most people were put on Earth for a purpose.

“During an anniversary get-together I was talking with Sally Hatcher, the wife of Knute Rockne’s first grandson, and she said, ‘We’re all here for a reason, and I think the Lord put you there that day so you could tell what happened all these years later.'”