It was a scheduled trip with her father that Melanie Critchfield, a couple weeks shy of her 7th birthday in November 1965, had been excited about for weeks and weeks.
Her father, Dr. Jared Bernard Critchfield, had gotten together with some other high-profile BYU football boosters in 1964 to form the Cougar Club, and had chartered a flight on Salt Lake City-based Edde Airlines to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to watch BYU play for its first-ever conference championship against the Lobos on Nov. 27, 1965.
“My dad took a child with him every time he flew, and I was finally old enough to go with him. It was going to be my first time flying. I was so, so excited,” she said.
However, the day after Thanksgiving, Melanie woke up to her father’s hand on her forehead. She had a high fever, tonsillitis and strep throat, and wouldn’t be able to go on the trip, Dr. Critchfield said.
In all likelihood, that diagnosis saved her life, the 66-year-old woman now known as Melanie Mumford told the Deseret News earlier this week. Not a Thanksgiving goes by that she doesn’t remember that fateful weekend in 1965, and give thanks for the last 60 years of her life.
Tragically, her father, seven other prominent BYU sports boosters — highly successful doctors, lawyers and businessmen in the community — and five crew members on the Douglas DC-3 aircraft that left Salt Lake City on that gray, stormy morning two days after Thanksgiving never made it to Albuquerque.
En route to the Provo airport to pick up 20 more BYU football fans and boosters, including then-BYU president Ernest L. Wilkinson, before winging off to New Mexico, the airplane flew below the clouds as snow began to fall along the Wasatch Front.
About 10 minutes after takeoff, and flying without radar, the pilot misjudged the altitude and the terrain and the plane crashed in the rolling hills above Camp Williams in the southwest part of the Salt Lake Valley. All 13 people aboard the aircraft perished upon impact, as the plane lost its left wing after hitting a small hill 11 feet below its crown, then plummeted some 1,200 feet across a gully and into another hill before bursting into flames.
“Thirty-five kids were left without their dads that day,” Mumford said. “About half of them were under the age of 11. … The airplane was just disintegrated. It was just gone. Now I look at it like a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Our puzzle fell apart right then. Everybody had to figure out how to put it back together for themselves.”
It was the second major air disaster in Utah that month, following the deaths of 43 passengers in a landing mishap at Salt Lake International Airport on Nov. 11, 1965.
“You can’t (overstate) the impact the (boosters) crash had on the communities in Salt Lake and Provo,” Mumford said. “For years, we have heard about how it impacted all kinds of people. … I know it has not been forgotten. It is not front and center now like it was back then, but it is still an important story in BYU’s history, in their boosters’ history. It was a big, big loss.”
Having flown to New Mexico the previous day, the BYU football team was informed of the tragic crash during its pregame breakfast in Albuquerque.
“We were in shock,” defensive end Bob Roberts of West Jordan told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2015. “That was a little more than an 18-year-old mind could comprehend.”
Rather than forfeit, the Cougars elected to play the game, after having received a telegram from the wife of 32-year-old Marion Probert, one of the deceased boosters, urging them to finish the season with a victory.
“My husband, Dr. Marion Probert, has been waiting with great anticipation for this game for many years,” wrote Beverley Probert. “He was pulling for your victory. Please do your best to see his wish fulfilled.”
That they did.
Coached by 34-year-old Tommy Hudspeth and led by star quarterback Virgil Carter, receiver Phil Odle and brothers John and Steve Ogden, running backs, the Cougars walloped New Mexico 42-8 to claim the first football conference championship in school history. LaVell Edwards, who would go on to replace Hudspeth in 1972, was a 35-year-old defensive line coach on that 1965 team.
At that time, it was the biggest football game in program history, as BYU had recorded only four winning seasons since 1940 and was behind Utah State and Utah — winner of the 1964 Liberty Bowl — on the state’s pecking order of top college football teams. The Cougars did beat the Utes in 1965, 25-20, at Cougar Stadium in Provo.
Events of that fateful day are commemorated in duplicate plaques, one at LaVell Edwards Stadium and the other at the Smith Fieldhouse, but at least one of the descendants is still “surprised” at how few BYU fans are aware of that plane crash in 1965 that altered so many lives.
Marion and Beverley Probert’s son, Stephen Probert, who now lives in St. George, is grateful that BYUtv recently produced a 10-minute documentary on the crash for its “Deep Blue” series, and for recent media interest in the Oct. 25 gathering. Stephen was 10 when his father died.
“It is neat to see people understand who these guys were, and the great fans of BYU that they were, and what had happened to them,” he said. “It was supposed to be an exciting day for them, as well as the team. I can only imagine what was going through those players’ minds (when they learned of the tragedy). That they were able to play at all, let alone play so well, is so inspirational.”
Last month, as the current BYU football team was preparing to face Iowa State in Ames, approximately 100 descendants of those 13 crash victims gathered at Camp Williams in Bluffdale and were escorted to the exact crash site by members of the Utah National Guard. The site is near the military base’s shooting range, about 1.25 miles northwest of the facility on Redwood Road, and on federal property, so very few people have set foot on that hillside since the crash.
Mumford and others shared stories and memories about their family members who died 60 years ago, found small pieces of the aircraft still scattered along the hillside and even sang the BYU fight song together. BYU had put together a memorial dinner and service for the families of the deceased on Jan. 19, 1966, a couple months after the crash, but this was the first time since then that this large of a group of descendants had gotten together.
“It was phenomenal for everybody in that group to get to tour the actual site (of the crash),” Mumford said. “It was a really wonderful thing to do for all the people. … I would probably have (perished) on that hill if I hadn’t gotten sick. It was so surreal.”
In early October 2015, before the Cougars hosted East Carolina in Provo, BYU put on a series of events honoring members of the 1965 WAC championship team, and also invited the descendants of the deceased boosters to a dinner in the Blue Zone at LES.
Hudspeth’s wife, Ruth Ann, was recognized and she said it was a shame that her husband, who had passed away only months prior, couldn’t be there because he would have loved every minute of it.
Saturday, about 20 descendants are expected to attend the BYU-UCF game (11 a.m. MST, ESPN2) and will participate in a meet and greet with BYU president Shane Reese, athletic director Brian Santiago, associate athletic director Chad Lewis, and other dignitaries.
“We are so happy that they are acknowledging the people who lost their lives that day, and the people who were left behind, that loved them so much,” Mumford said. “This is not just about football this weekend for us, either. It is just a special weekend for us. Thanksgivings are always that way. But it is not a sad weekend. It just gives us a chance to pause and reflect on a very impactful day for (Utah) 60 years ago.”
Mumford’s son, former Salt Lake City sports radio personality Ryan Hatch, who now lives in Phoenix and runs Bonneville International radio stations there, has also been responsible for organizing the reunions.
Perhaps the most well-known victim of the fateful crash was Marion Probert, who starred for the Cougars on the gridiron from 1951-55 and had his No. 81 retired in 1977. He was also inducted into the BYU Sports Hall of Fame that year.
Probert turned down NFL offers to attend medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, and became a surgeon, interning at LDS Hospital in SLC before joining the staff at Cottonwood Hospital in Murray.
BYU football has always been in the family’s blood, as Leo Marion Probert played for the Cougars in the 1930s, followed by Marion Earl Probert in the 1950s, Stephen Marion Probert in the 1970s, and Stephen’s son, linebacker Seth Probert, from 2010-12.
“We kind of have a long history playing for and supporting BYU,” Stephen Probert said.
In 1990, Stephen Probert took his own sons to the crash site, which proved to be rewarding because he was not able to go last month due to his health.
“I remember him well, for sure,” said Stephen Probert, 70. “My dad coached my Little League football team. He would make me work. He bought me a push lawnmower so I learned how to work. … Later on, I started to realize what a great man he was. He became my monument and I tried to be like him in everything I did.”
Stephen Probert said recent publicity about the event has been an answer to prayer. His mother, Beverley Robinson Probert, passed away in 2003 after a brief struggle with pancreatic cancer.
See the chart below for the names, ages and hometowns for all 13 victims of the crash.
“The thing is, these were really special people. They were boosters who were ahead of their time,” former BYU sports information director Dave Schulthess told the Cougar Illustrated Game Program in 1985. “They were among the first people to be in the stands for home games. They were all charter members of the Cougar Club. They were really dedicated to BYU. They were just great people.”
Another of the victims was Dr. Roger Parkinson, a 37-year-old Salt Lake City physician who grew up outside of Washington, D.C., and watched his favored Cougars fall 23-6 to George Washington University in 1963.
Parkinson cringed when he read a Washington Post headline screaming about GWU’s “drubbing of the Mormons” and vowed to launch an organization to improve his alma mater’s sports programs.
To the descendants who have remained BYU football fans, Saturday’s game will have extra meaning because the Cougars are back in the hunt for a conference championship, something the program hasn’t attained since the 2000s when it was in the Mountain West.
BYU has won 22 more WAC and Mountain West titles since 1965, but can now do something that a Cougars football team has never done before: win a title in a power conference. If they can get past 5-6 UCF on Saturday, they will punch their ticket to Arlington, Texas, and the Big 12 championship game.
UCF (5-6, 2-6) at No. 11 BYU (10-1, 7-1)
And the descendants of the 13 souls lost on Nov. 27, 1965, will glance to the skies, and give thanks for them helping pave the way.
“I learned so much from my dad that carries on; I am sure all the (descendants) do as well,” Mumford said. “We have 90-plus people in our family having dinner on Friday at a place in Orem to celebrate their lives.
“They were highly impactful. That day was very shocking to the valley, to the state,” she continued. “Salt Lake was still small enough that almost everybody knew somebody on that flight and was impacted by it in some way.”
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