Fifty years ago, a fiery plane crash destroyed an entire generation of U. It was early on the morning of Feb. George, a lawyer and former vice president of the U. Olympic Committee, remembers it as if it were yesterday. He was a year-old Harvard student and a junior pairs skater.
So were five skaters from George's training rink, the Skating Club of Boston, four of whom had just been crowned U. The new titlists included two other skaters coached by Owen: her daughters, Maribel and Laurence. Maribel, 20, a pretty, shy Boston University senior who aspired to be a teacher, was a pairs titlist. Laurence, 16, a high school senior who had been admitted to Radcliffe, was the new ladies' champion.
Heiss had told her then that she was retiring to marry and start a family. No less was expected of Laurence. George had taught her how to drive. He'd taken her to dances at the tony Longwood Cricket Club at the behest of her mother, so they might both get a taste of society. The last time he'd seen her he'd asked her to sign the SI cover for him. Now Laurence, her sister and mother and the other skaters were all gone, burned beyond recognition in a field outside Brussels, where their Boeing jet had been circling the airport in a crystalline morning, waiting for a runway to clear.
It was the day the music stopped. George was a pallbearer at the funeral of Bradley Lord, 21, the newly crowned U. But by then he and his skating partnerβhis sister, Elizabethβwere "a good bit more determined," he says. You always looked forward. Big Maribel would have wanted you to look forward.
The morning of the crash, Hollis Albright, Tenley's father and the Owens' family physician, went to their house in Winchester, Mass. Grammy Vinson, as she was known to everyone at the Skating Club of Boston, drove Laurence to practice every day after school in her dented Ford convertible with no rear suspension. When she came to the door, Albright told her that Maribel had asked him to give her a flu shot. He gave her a sedative instead.
