Today is the 50th anniversary of one of the saddest days of my life.

It was the summer before my senior year of college, and I was living in Jefferson City, Missouri, with my parents while doing an internship in the Public Information Office of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. In my bedroom on the lower level of the house, the old clock-radio (remember those?) was set to WDAF-AM 610, the clear-channel station in Kansas City with a signal easily heard in mid-Missouri.

When the radio clicked on that Wednesday, August 4, the first thing I heard was the voice of David Lawrence, WDAF’s early-morning host. His unfortunate duty was to share the terrible news that Congressman Jerry Litton - who had just won the Democratic Primary for the U.S. Senate - had been killed in the crash of the plane carrying him, his wife and their two children from their hometown of Chillicothe to Kansas City for a planned victory celebration. The pilot and his son also perished.

At some point during the mental and emotional fog of that day, my mind went back four summers to August 1972 and the aftermath of the terrorist attack during the Summer Olympics in Munich, when 11 Israeli Olympians were killed.

A memorial service for the athletes was broadcast on ABC-TV, and at its conclusion, Jim MacKay of ABC Sports recited this poem:

From “To An Athlete Young” by A.E. Houseman

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,

Shoulder-high we bring you home,

And set you at your threshold down,

Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay,

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut

Cannot see the record cut,

And silence sounds no worse than cheers

After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honours out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

I typed up the words of the poem and posted them on a bulletin board near my workspace in the state office building the next day.

Missouri remains a “stiller town” 50 years later.