From the Kansas Star

Original Web Article located at:
http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/aolsports.pat%2Csports/37752d1c.303%2C.html


SUNDAY PROJECT: FROZEN IN TIME
Forty years after plane crash, figure skaters are remembered

By MECHELLE VOEPEL - The Kansas City Star
Date: 03/03/01 22:15


When the little girl, just 4, first went out on the ice, she knew why she wanted to be there. Years later, after so many of her dawns and dusks had passed with that frozen familiarity beneath her feet, she still remembered why.

The ice had become hers; she was one of the best in the world on it. But it had belonged to someone else first.

"I always wanted," she said, "to follow in my sister's footsteps."

Sharon and Stephanie Westerfeld -- Sherri and Steffi to everybody who knew them -- were born in Kansas City but eventually moved with their mother to Colorado Springs, Colo., so they could skate year-round. Their father remained here to run his insurance business.

Steffi, the younger by eight years, rose steadily in the ranks of U.S. figure skating. In 1961, she finished second in the national meet, which earned her a trip to the World Championships in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

The little sister was headed for the most prestigious competition yet in her career. Of course, she wanted her big sister to go along.

Diane Yeomans Robins, who now lives in Leawood, awoke to the clock-radio on Feb. 15, 1961. Her cousins, Sherri and Steffi, had left for Europe the night before and had promised that when they returned, they'd visit Kansas City to see Diane's baby daughter, Laurie.

The news came on the radio: A plane carrying the U.S. figure skating team had crashed that morning in Belgium.

"All I can remember saying is, `Oh, no,' " Diane said.

III

Steffi was 17, Sherri was two weeks from turning 26. They died when the Sabena Airlines jet went down in a field near the Brussels airport, killing all 72 on board and a farmer on the ground.

The entire 18-member U.S. team was gone. So were 13 others who were coaches, relatives or friends of the skaters, plus the team manager and two skating officials.

Flight 548 had departed New York City for Prague around 7 p.m. on Valentine's Day, and had a scheduled stopover in Brussels. The Boeing 707 crashed and exploded under clear skies after twice attempting to land. Although some type of mechanical failure was suspected, investigators never attributed the accident to a definitive cause.

The World Championships were canceled. Sports organizations -- including Cold War stalwarts the Soviet Union and East Germany -- sent messages of condolence to the United States Figure Skating Association. So did recently inaugurated President John F. Kennedy.

The top U.S. skaters at the 1960 Olympics had retired, so the group going to the '61 World Championships was expected to largely make up the '64 U.S. Olympic team.

It was the first overseas competition for some of them. Several, including the three women's singles entrants -- Laurence Owen, Steffi Westerfeld and Rhode Lee Michelson -- were teen-agers.

As one memorial note read, "All those youngsters in the full bloom of their youthful vigor and approaching the peaks of their careers -- one can hardly bear to think about it."

Yet they have never been very far from the thoughts of those involved in U.S. figure skating the last 40 years. They were remembered in January at nationals in Boston, which was home to many of them, and they will be again at the World Championships in Vancouver later this month.

A memorial fund honoring the '61 team was established by the USFSA shortly after the crash and has succeeded far beyond expectations. It continues to help competitors today.

The fallen skaters, none of whom won an Olympic medal, ended up having the most lasting impact on U.S. figure skating of any team the nation has put together.

III

Decades can disappear while you're laughing and remembering. It happens when Diane and her brother Sim Yeomans, also of Johnson County, think of their cousins.

Diane, Sim and his twin, Al, grew up in Kansas City with the Westerfeld girls until Sherri and Steffi moved to Colorado Springs, around 1949. The Yeomans kids visited frequently.

"Every summer, we couldn't wait to go out and see them," Sim recalled. "They were just so much fun to be around."

Everyone who knew the Westerfeld sisters recalls them in the same way: outgoing and friendly, first off. Strikingly pretty. Smart. Very close to each other, despite the age gap.

Sherri, born in 1935, had first tried skating as a little girl when her parents, Otto and Myra Westerfeld, visited the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs in the early 1940s. Back home in Kansas City, her parents took her to the Pla-Mor rink, which used to be on the 3100 block of Wyandotte.

Jane Bucher Jones, a longtime area skating judge, skated as a teen-ager at the Pla-Mor. She would watch the younger kids for signs of talent and noticed Sherri right away. Soon, Sherri was competing.

"And then she encouraged her little sister," said Bucher Jones, 72, of Overland Park. "You know how that happens sometimes, the first one sets the pace and the second one goes on to excel."

Steffi, born in 1943, was indeed even more of a skating prodigy, taking to the ice at age 4 and competing shortly after.

Diane has a framed color portrait of Steffi, around age 6. With curly brown hair, wearing a vivid yellow dress and white skates, she looks like another born performer, Shirley Temple.

But the Pla-Mor rink was not available year-round; Myra moved to Colorado Springs so the girls could train at the Broadmoor, home to one of the country's most prestigious skating clubs. Otto visited when he could.

By age 9, Steffi already showed the potential to be champion at the highest level.

"She was an outstanding free skater," said Eileen Seigh Honnen, a 1948 Olympian who coached the Westerfeld girls in their early years at the Broadmoor and remained a family friend. "She was so tiny and darling and ran on her toes across the ice; she could do all these things the other kids couldn't do."

Which put her on a path to reach the top -- a costly, years-long journey. That remains the case, even though now competitive skaters can pursue support systems to help them afford training and are allowed to make money off their sport.

But in those days, the most strict interpretation of amateurism was followed. A family's financial and emotional burdens accompanying the climb of a successful skater were tremendous.

Those who knew them speculate it was that, the distance and other factors that led to Myra and Otto's divorce in the late 1950s.

"That was a great blow -- it fractured that family, as divorces usually do," Honnen said. "They kept it within the family, and didn't talk about it much. But it was obvious there was tremendous hurt there."

Otto soon married a woman who was just a couple of years older than Sherri. Friends said a rift developed between Sherri and her father, one they wouldn't get a chance to heal.

The divorce bound Myra and her daughters tighter to each other, with Steffi's skating being all the more the focal point of their lives.

III

Competitions no longer include school figures, the esoteric craft of creating exact patterns on the ice, which gave figure skating its name. It did not translate at all to television, hence its demise.

Skaters used to spend many painstaking hours per week practicing figures, and Steffi was quite good at it.

She passed what's known as the "gold test," the final exam for amateur skaters, in 1957 -- seven years after Sherri had done it. One had to execute 14 complicated figures and give a free skating demonstration.

Beginning in '57, Steffi won four consecutive women's senior titles at the Midwestern sectionals, a qualifier for the National Championships. She was written about often enough that Colorado newspapers sometimes just referred to her as "Steffi" in headlines, no last name needed.

And even though she lived much of her life in Colorado Springs, Steffi didn't forget where her family -- cousins, aunts, an uncle and a grandmother -- and her roots were.

"My sister, Sherri, skated a lot in our hometown of Kansas City, Mo.," she told a reporter doing a story about her burgeoning success in the mid-1950s. "And that's how I got started."

Steffi was one of those "super teens" some magazines of the day touted, the girl who could do anything. Except relax.

It wasn't enough to excel at just one discipline requiring constant practice. Steffi had two: skating and playing the piano. She'd started piano at age 7 and had won several competitions at that, too.

Her schedule: up at 5 a.m., skating practice from 6-8, school from 8:30-3:25, piano practice at lunchtime, skating practice from 3:30-5, dinner, schoolwork, bed.

Skating was at the forefront, but music may have been her greater love. She hoped to become a concert pianist.

"I found Steffi to be a very sweet girl, but I wouldn't say light-hearted," Honnen said. "She was very goal-oriented, a perfectionist in everything she did. Her mother intensified this."

While that might have created someone completely self-absorbed, fellow Broadmoor skater Christy Haigler Krall remembered the opposite.

Krall was one of the youngsters who had to fill the U.S. void after the crash; she competed at the 1964 Olympics and then coached for three decades at the Broadmoor. Now the USFSA's senior director of athlete programs, she said younger skaters would swarm to Steffi.

"I was much lower in the talent pool, and she was the one you always looked up to," said Krall, who was 13 in 1961. "She would give you pointers and tips. And finally, her coach, Edi Scholdan, said, `OK, it's wonderful that she's able to help you guys, but Stephanie needs to work on her skating, too.' So we were asked not to bother her so much.

"But that's the kind of person she was, very kind and very approachable. She made that a wonderful atmosphere to train in."

After her fourth Midwestern title, in 1960, Steffi originally planned to compete at the junior level at nationals. Then deciding that was "skating scared," as she said at the time, she opted to compete at the senior level for a berth on the Olympic team.

She was fourth at nationals, missing a trip to the 1960 Games in Squaw Valley, Calif., by one spot.

Americans Carol Heiss and Barbara Ann Roles, the gold and bronze medalists, retired after those Games. The third American competitor, Owen, was sixth at Squaw Valley. She and Steffi, both high school seniors in the fall of 1960, were considered the top two skaters in the country.

In August of that year, Steffi told the Denver Post, "I'd love to win the Olympic medal. And, if nothing unforeseen happens, I'll skate toward the 1964 Olympics."

III

The legacy of U.S. figure skating success has been defined mostly by those who have competed in the sport's marquee event, women's singles. It's their faces and names Americans remember after every Winter Olympics.

The "ice queens" we call them, and it's appropriate on more than one level. They always seem to be regal and smiling -- which perhaps belies the struggle every one of them must go through.

The American women's string of success began with Tenley Albright's gold in 1956 and could continue with Michelle Kwan next year in Salt Lake City. In between are "golden girls" Heiss, Peggy Fleming ('68), Dorothy Hamill ('76), Kristi Yamaguchi ('92) and Tara Lipinski ('98).

Figure skating aficionados can rattle off that list, but their hearts always stop a bit when they think of 1964. Many deemed that Laurence Owen's year. Or might it have been Steffi Westerfeld's?

Owen was a 16-year-old with a heart-melting smile she displayed on the cover of Sports Illustrated dated Feb. 13, 1961, two days before she died. The magazine called her: "America's most exciting girl skater."

She also happened to be the daughter of one of skating's most influential people: Maribel Vinson Owen, an Olympic medalist, nine-time U.S. singles champion and coaching legend who'd guided Albright to her gold.

"Laurence was very athletic; she had a lot of energy," Krall said. "Stephanie was very graceful, she skated such beautiful lines. So they were different, but they really competed well against each other."

Whether they realized it, they had much in common. Both had parents who divorced and an older sister who skated, helping pave the way for their success. Maribel Owen, her mother's namesake and Laurence's sister, was 20 and the U.S. pairs champion with partner Dudley Richards.

Both were honor students used to having everything they did dissected and critiqued; each was her family's center of attention. Accustomed to the spotlight, they had an aura about them.

Perhaps it's the poetic grace of women skaters, the triumphantly powerful spin they put on femininity, that can make them seem almost hypnotically lovely. Certainly, Steffi and Laurence had that effect on viewers. In Steffi's case, one admirer was so ardent that it worried the Westerfelds.

"If I remember right, Myra called the florists there in town and told them to stop delivering flowers from him," Diane said. "And then, even after the crash, he still kept sending stuff."

It's impossible to ascertain -- yet irresistible to speculate about -- whether Steffi was at a disadvantage even before taking the ice in any competition with Laurence and, by extension, her famous mother. Back then, the upper echelon of skating was even more exclusive and the hierarchy more rigid.

For sure, Steffi was battling geography going into the 1961 national meet in late January, even though it was held on her home ice at the Broadmoor. Since the event had begun in 1914, every women's winner (some had multiple titles) had been from the East Coast. Six were out of Boston (Laurence's club), five from New York and one from Philadelphia.

Steffi was in first after the school figures. Then her free program had no significant bobbles, but she didn't fully execute on a couple of the jumps. As the television camera followed her off the ice, she appeared irritated with herself.

"In general, she skated very well," commentator Dick Button told the TV audience. "She did make a few mistakes, though, and now we can only sit and wait to see how Laurence Owen skates."

Owen ended up first, with Steffi second and Michelson, who was from California, third. But even if Steffi was disappointed, she'd still made the team for the World Championships.

III

The Yeomans siblings -- Al lives in Houston now -- lost their father to a heart attack when they were children. Their mother, Sue, drew even closer to her sister, Myra, and thus the cousins spent much time together.

The Yeomans wish the seven children they have among them could have known Sherri and Steffi.

Sim, 62, and Diane, 64, laughed remembering one visit to Colorado with their mother and grandma when they all went for a picnic in the mountains.

"It was us in one car -- Sherri driving, Steffi, Al, Di, me and one of their friends, Ronnie," Sim said. "And Mom, Aunt Myra and 'Ma were in the other car. We tried to ditch the old people on the way back that night and turned off the lights while driving down the mountain.

"We thought it was funny, but when we got back, Myra just had a fit. She chewed out Sherri up one side and down the other. She said she wasn't going to let her drive for a year. Then when she got done yelling, she said to her, `OK, now go take Ronnie home.' "

Sherri always had been given a lot of responsibility for taking care of her little sister, and Myra depended on her all the more after the divorce. Sherri, who graduated with a degree in psychology from Colorado College, worked at a jewelry store and taught skating to help support the family. While she was looking out for Steffi, her own life seemed somewhat on hold.

"I don't think Sherri enjoyed the intensity of competing like Steffi did," Honnen said. "But Sherri was a very good skater herself, so she knew all the intricacies. For Steffi, she could be a coach, confidant, mentor, sister -- a little bit of everything rolled into one.

"Myra was a good person, but she was a perfectionist, too, and she could upset Steffi. Sherri was very soothing and could help her calm down. That's partly why they decided Sherri should go with her on that trip."

They flew first to Philadelphia for the North American Championships, in which Canadians also participated. Steffi's school figures weren't as sharp as usual and she finished fourth. However, her free skating was better than it had been at nationals, where she'd been first in figures.

If she put both those elements together in Prague, she had every chance to win.

III

The crash happened at 3:05 a.m. Kansas City time. Howard Deardorff also heard about it on the radio. He and Jane Bucher Jones had both been involved in the Kansas City skating scene since the 1930s.

There were two other crash victims with skating connections to Kansas City. Walter Powell of St. Louis, secretary of the U.S. Olympic Figure Skating Committee, was well known to all skaters in the Midwest and was going to the World Championships as an official.

Bill Swallender, a coach based in Detroit and accompanying one of his skaters to the meet, had taught at the Pla-Mor for two years in the 1930s, giving Bucher Jones her first lessons.

"I was really sick that day, because there were so many people on that plane that I knew," recalled Deardorff, who's 78 and lives in Grandview.

Including the Westerfeld sisters. Deardorff said he called media outlets here to remind them the Westerfelds were from Kansas City.

The Star reached Joan Westerfeld, Otto's second wife, for a story that appeared in the Feb. 15, 1961, evening paper.

"She was a very vivacious girl," Joan was quoted about Steffi, who had visited her father and his new family the previous summer. "She was an honor student, accomplished on the piano and was looking forward to that trip so much."

Otto Westerfeld Jr., the only child of his father's second marriage, was 11 months old when his half-sisters died. Now 41 and a real-estate agent in Johnson County, he has never met the Yeomans. His only connection to Sherri and Steffi is about 15 reels of film he got from his father, who died in 1979.

"I don't know what's on it, but I think some of it may be of them," he said. "I keep meaning to take it and convert it to videotape."

He first heard about Sherri and Steffi when he was around 5.

"It means very little to you when you're young," said Otto Jr., who has four children. "As you get older, and your value system changes and you begin to really realize how much family means... then there's more regret."

III

U.S. figure skating had to continue, and it did. U.S. officials asked Roles to come out of retirement for the '62 World Championships, to which it sent a mostly inexperienced team.

At the '64 Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, the U.S. team managed to win bronze medals in men's singles and pairs. Fleming was sixth in women's singles that year and then put the United States back on top with her gold in '68.

Skating in America changed, as more rinks were built. There was even a shift in geographical advantage. Since 1962, the majority of women's national champions -- including Fleming and Kwan -- have come from the West Coast.

In October at Madison Square Garden, Fleming and Kwan will headline a skating show in tribute to the 1961 team, with a portion of the proceeds going to the USFSA Memorial Fund.

"From a horrible tragedy," Krall said, "the miracle that happened was the memorial fund."

But, of course, the intimate grief of those closest to the crash victims never ended. Nine families associated with skating lost at least two members.

The Westerfelds were one of five sets of siblings who were killed. The Owen sisters died with their mother, as did brother-and-sister pairs skaters Ila and Ray Hadley Jr.

Scholdan, Steffi's coach, and Edward LeMaire, a skating judge who was attending the world meet as a spectator, both died with their adolescent sons. Husband-and-wife skaters Robert and Patricia Dineen left behind an 8-month-old son.

Myra Westerfeld had had a son who died in infancy. Then her daughters came somewhat late in life: Sherri when she was almost 31 and Steffi when she was 39.

They weren't just the joy in her world. They were her world. Family and friends say she went into a state of shock that she never really seemed to come out of.

"It's difficult to try to analyze how someone handles grief," Honnen said. "Of all the people you would have thought would have a nervous breakdown, it was Myra, because she was an emotional person. But she was stoic when it happened. It was like she never did believe it."

Sherri and Steffi had a black poodle, whose formal name was "Sir Eric of Broadmoor." They called him Seric. One of their neighbors at that time, Dorothy Aitken, said her main memory of the crash was, "That night, the dog just howled and howled."

Seric was all Myra had left at home, and she doted on him.

"I never saw Myra break down -- until the dog died," Honnen said. "That's when it all fell apart. It was the most amazing thing, the way she attached herself to him; it's almost as if he became the children. When he died, she said, `That was my last connection to the girls.' "

The Yeomans said a caretaker at Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs, where Sherri and Steffi were laid to rest, befriended Myra and broke the rules when Seric died. He buried the dog there with them.

Myra took Sherri's job at the jewelry store and worked there many years. She remained in Colorado Springs until her death in 1984, when she also was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, next to her daughters.

Still, the Yeomans do have some happy memories of Myra after the crash. Around their children, she put on a jolly mask.

"They loved to see her, they thought she was very funny," Diane said. "She always had a million stories to tell them."

III

When her mother died in 1995, Diane got all the boxes of memories. Some were spread across her table recently.

There's a postcard from Sherri from the Colorado Springs zoo with... Sherri herself as the picture. The printed caption reads: "An attractive girl and a lion cub are one of many interesting sights that may be seen at America's favorite zoo."

Sherri wrote on the back: "I walked into the store and found this postcard -- and was I ever surprised."

Diane laughed, "I guess she didn't know the picture was taken to make it into a card."

There's a box filled with Steffi's medals won in piano competition. Most of her skating medals -- along with her bronzed skates -- were sent to the World Figure Skating Museum in Colorado Springs.

There's the Feb. 9, 1959, issue of Sports Illustrated, in which Steffi is pictured as one of America's most promising young skaters.

There's the Fountain Valley School newspaper from March 1961 with a tribute to her. The all-boys school had picked Steffi, who went to Cheyenne Mountain High, as its homecoming queen the previous November. There's her senior yearbook with a page memorializing her.

And there's a letter to Myra from a U.S. figure skating official assuring her that the FBI team dispatched to the crash scene had taken great care to positively identify the bodies.

Both the National and North American championships in 1961 were filmed for television. After the crash, copies were made of the various performances and sent to the victims' families.

Diane had the film converted to videotape. It runs about 10 minutes, showing Steffi at both meets. The latter performance, in Philadelphia a few days before Steffi died, clearly displays the elegance and skill that marked her skating. It's eerie, poignant, beautiful.

Myra never saw the film. When she died, it was found with her belongings. She had kept the package for nearly 24 years but didn't open it.

"To have watched that probably would have been more than she could bear," Honnen said. "I think she just isolated it all in her mind somewhere.

"Myra had said to me many times, `It's as if the girls have gone on a long trip, and they just haven't come back yet.' "

To reach Mechelle Voepel, assistant sports editor for The Star, call (816) 234-4351 or send e-mail to mvoepel@kcstar.com
All content © 2005 The Kansas City Star