Gilbert Collins

Gilbert W. Collins is a native of Huntington West Virginia; he attended Huntington High School where he bowled in the high school bowing league. In 1969 Gilbert won the West Virginia State bowling Championship. While attending Marshall University in 1970 he lived through the Marshall Plane crash tragedy.

GOD SPARED ME

It’s a Saturday night November 14, 1970. The CBS news just broke programing, “The Marshall Plane has crashed, Yes I repeat the Marshall plane has crashed. It is confirmed Southern Airway Flight carrying The Thundering Hurd Marshall Football team has crashed just outside the Huntington West Virginia airport. It is believed that everyone on board including 38 football players plus coaches and fans have died.” A numbness fills me and spreads through the town of Huntington.

I was a student at Marshall at the time decades ago, but the tragic event is still fresh in my mind. I had classes with a lot of football players. Classes resumed a few days later but the professors could not control their emotions looking at all the empty seats. It was several weeks before school resumed.

Back then there were not any large football stadiums especially in the small town of Huntington. The bodies were so badly burned their remains are taken to a basketball stadium called the Fieldhouse to be identified. Of course, this was 1970 so a lot of new technology did not exist.

The ironic part of this story happened weeks before. My father Gilbert Collins, God rest his soul worked two jobs as I did. He main job was night shift at International Nickel steel mill, but he parked cars at the First Huntington National Bank part-time. Gilbert was very well liked, one of the bank executives could not make the trip so he gave his tickets for the flight and the game to my dad.

I was on top of the world excited to finally see a college football game. That Friday night my dad got the call he had to work; we could not go to the game. I was heartbroken.

Slowly the numbness of the tragedy wore off but the pain of the loses was still there. I was sitting in class one day and it hit me, “My father and I were supposed to be on that plane.

GOD SPARED US…it was his plan.

Gilbert now resides in Moody Alabama where he is retired after spending over twenty years in retail. He has been writing for twelve years, and has completed twenty-two novels, many not yet published. God has blessed Gilbert to write in several different genres from Romance, Christian and Science Fiction to name a few.