Bronze bust the latest memorial to Knute Rockne

Inside the Matfield Green rest area on the Kansas Turnpike, the Notre Dame faithful were out in force March 29 to dedicate a bronze bust of the school’s legendary football coach, Knute Rockne.

The event was two days shy of the 88th anniversary of a plane crash 8 miles to the northwest in the Flint Hills, near the tiny town of Bazaar, which took the life of Rockne and seven other passengers. A monument marks the crash site 3 miles south of the Bazaar schoolhouse in a pasture off K-177 highway.

The Rockne bust replaces a pair of Rockne Memorials at the rest area that were removed in recent years during a renovation project. Last year, the Kansas Turnpike Authority and the University of Notre Dame stepped forward to place a permanent memorial inside the entrance adjacent to the restaurant.

Two of Rockne’s grandsons, Knute IIII and Nils, traveled from Utah and Oklahoma respectively to participate in the event and seemed very much at home commiserating with their Kansas hosts. Coincidentally, Knute III is a former football coach in Utah.

Notre Dame dispatched Reggie Brooks, a football star from the Coach Lou Holtz era during the early 1990s, to deliver dedicatory remarks. Brooks serves as director of the student athletic alumni association at Notre Dame. “Knute Rockne embodied what Notre Dame means, and he was the school’s greatest ambassador,” Brooks said. “As an immigrant, he came to America to do what is right.”

Jerry McKenna, a 1962 Notre Dame graduate and world-renowned sculptor, did his magic again for the ninth time, sculpting Rockne as he may have looked on the day of his death. McKenna’s works are displayed worldwide, including Rockne’s birthplace in Voz, Norway, and in the small town of Rockne, Texas. In his spare time, he has researched Rockne’s life from birth to death and could easily add historian to his list of accomplishments.

In remarks to the gathering, McKenna dubbed Rockne the greatest football coach and promoter of the game of all time, and that he may have been.

Rockne’s life story is one worth repeating. Arriving in America in 1893 with his parents as a 5-year-old Norwegian immigrant, the family settled in Chicago. Following high school, Rockne spent three years working for the Chicago Post Office, but at age 21, decided a college degree might result in enhanced career opportunities. He set his sights on the University of Illinois, but when told that Notre Dame offered less expensive tuition, he changed course and traveled 90 miles east of the Windy City to South Bend, Ind.

Four years later and after achieving All-American honors in football and a degree in chemistry, and excelling as a pole vaulter, the school offered him dual jobs as an instructor and assistant coach. When Coach Jesse Harper left coaching to manage his father-in-law’s ranch in southwest Kansas, he designated Rockne his successor. And, as they say, the rest is history.

Rockne, in his playing days at Notre Dame, caught the game’s first forward pass in a game against the U.S. Army team, an innovation that forever changed the game of football.

In the 13 football seasons as the Irish head coach, Notre Dame amassed a record of 105-12-5, good for a .881 winning percentage, a record that has not been equaled before or since. Twenty-seven days following his 43rd birthday, Rockne and seven others aboard TWA Flight 599 perished on a foggy Kansas morning during their cross-country flight to California.

During the peak of his coaching career, Studebaker Corporation, headquartered in South Bend, Ind., honored the famed coach by manufacturing a new automobile called the Rockne, one of which is displayed at the Chase County Historical Museum in Cottonwood Falls. A movie on Rockne filmed in 1940, featured a starring role by Ronald Reagan, who played the part of Notre Dame running back George Gipp.

Sports pundits credit Rockne for inventing big-time college football, a tradition that remains alive and well nearly nine decades after his death.

On March 31, 2021, the Chase County pasture will be a sea of people for the next gathering of Notre Dame fans to observe the 90th anniversary of the crash, which claimed Rockne’s life, an event held every five years on the plains of Kansas. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people already have the date marked on their calendar.

It was good to reconnect at the event with Steve Hewitt, CEO of the Kansas Turnpike Authority. Steve was the city administrator of Greensburg on the evening of May 4, 2007, when an EF5 tornado devastated 90 percent of the Kiowa County seat. Steve did a masterful job holding Greensburg together and will do the same for the Kansas Turnpike Authority.

Richard Shank is a retired AT&T manager, is employed in the health care industry and has farming interests in Saline County. Email him at shankr@prodigy.net.