Thriving on Love, Trust : With Help of Fund, Coaches’ Families Flourish 20 Years After Plane Crash

After the arrival of the final trust-fund check, in the amount of 87 cents, Lenore O’Hara laughed with a kind of joy.

Twenty years ago today--Nov. 13, 1971--her husband, Joe O’Hara, was one of three Cal State Fullerton assistant football coaches who died when their small chartered plane crashed in mountainous country near Santa Barbara. They had left San Diego in jubilation that day, after Fullerton had rallied from 24 points down to take a 40-30 victory over U.S. International, and were on their way to San Luis Obispo to scout their next opponent.

The three coaches--Bill Hannah, 37, Dallas Moon, 30, and O’Hara, 39--left 11 children. O’Hara, who had been a teacher, coach and assistant principal at Mater Dei High School, was the father of eight. His oldest, Kevin, was 13, and his youngest, Carol, was 2. The pilot, Ernie Mariette, a father of two, also died in the crash.

The coaches’ plane is believed to have gone down in heavy turbulence. The widows of Hannah and Moon filed a lawsuit against Piper Aircraft Corp. and an El Monte flight service operator charging negligence, but the parties were found innocent of wrongdoing in a 1977 trial. Dorothy Moon Farrell now calls the suit a mistake based on poor legal advice.

With the help of a trust fund built on the kindness and compassion of thousands, the three coaches’ families are grown and thriving 20 years later. The children have taken their places in the world, with a police officer, a paramedic, a lawyer, a football coach, a nurse and several teachers among them.

Last spring, Carol, now 22, became the eighth of eight O’Haras to graduate from college, earning a degree in international relations from the University of San Diego just as the trust fund ran dry.

“Every last penny got spent,” said Teresa O’Hara Meggs, the fourth child of Joe and Lenore who is now a nurse living in Long Beach. “My mother always said, ‘I don’t know if we’ll make it through, but I don’t care if there’s not a cent left if you can all get through college.’ ”

The deaths of the three coaches triggered an extraordinary outpouring, nowhere more visible than at the Mercy Bowl, a benefit game played on a December night in 1971 at Anaheim Stadium. Two weeks after the game, as Christmas drew near, people were still buying tickets.

It was a struggle just to get the game approved. Will Kern, now head of The Times’ special events department, acted as director of the game. Kern received help from others in the community, including the brother of Fullerton coach Dick Coury, and some of the reporters who covered the Fullerton team. The only obstacle was the NCAA, which balked at allowing the Mercy Bowl teams, Fullerton and Fresno State, to play a game beyond their season limit. Ronald Reagan, then governor, heard of the plight and sent telegrams to the NCAA. Shortly after an aide in the Nixon Administration heard of the difficulty, the game was approved.

A crowd of 16,854 attended the game, which, Kern said, helped raise $110,000. David Moon, one of the two sons of Dallas Moon, remembers working as a ballboy that night.

“Even as a 13-year-old, I realized the public was trying to support these kids without fathers,” said David, now a Newport Beach police officer.

In Los Angeles, the Lakers held a benefit practice. In San Diego, the U.S. International football team canceled its banquet and sent a $500 check to the families. Contributions arrived from across Orange County and from as far as Alabama, where Bill Hannah had been an all-conference football player at Alabama under Paul (Bear) Bryant.

John Caine, Cal State Fullerton athletic director at the time, remembers the accident as the most painful experience of his career, but he is warmed by what has come after.

“The heroines are those three ladies,” Caine said. “They raised those children and they’ve all turned out beautifully.”

Coury, who had hired the three men, his friends, to be his assistants at Fullerton when he started the program in 1970, left the school after that season, too shattered by the loss to continue. Now offensive coordinator for the New England Patriots and formerly a Ram assistant, Coury smiles at news of his coaches’ families.

“A credit to their mamas,” Coury said. “It’s a great story.”

Dorothy Moon Farrell, who later remarried and is now an instructional aide in the travel and tourism department at Coastline College, remembers a flag football game her boys played in barely two weeks after their father’s death. David and Darren decided it was what their father would have wanted.

“They were not the best players on the team,” Dorothy remembered. “But that particular game, they played their hearts out and they were good.”

David, who will be 33 on Nov. 25, and his wife, Alena, live in Santa Margarita with their 2-month-old son, Jake.

A month ago, it might have seemed that David had not turned out so well. He had a heavy beard and had let his reddish hair grow long and ragged. It was all part of his undercover work in narcotics, his assignment the past five of his 11 1/2 years on the police force.

“Look at my wife,” he said, pointing to Alena, also a Newport Beach police officer. “She looks like a nice, sweet girl--she is--and we go in a restaurant with me looking like that.”

David credits his stepfather, Gene Farrell, an assistant football coach at Golden West for many years, with helping his family through difficult years. Farrell is now vice chancellor for business administration with the Coast Community College District.

“Gene was a family friend,” David said. “He knew my dad, and coached him at Long Beach State. We always knew Gene, and he kind of took up for dad after he died. He kept us in line. We couldn’t ask for a better stepdad.”

Together, Dorothy and Gene have a daughter, Darcy Farrell, 15, who attends Huntington Beach High School.

The Moon boys carried on their father’s love of football. Dallas, whose parents, Dallas and Bernice, still live in Downey, was a football standout at Downey High School, Cerritos College and Cal State Long Beach.

“He wanted to be a professional coach,” Dorothy said, “and he was on his way up the ladder.”

David ran track and cross-country in high school and he has competed in triathlons as an adult. His football career ended in 1976, when as a junior at Huntington Beach High School he broke his neck during a practice.

“I was paralyzed for half an hour,” said David, who underwent cervical fusion to repair the injury, which has had no lasting effect.

He went on to Golden West College, and attended Cal State Long Beach before enrolling in the L.A.P.D. Police Academy, where he finished first in his class. Because he didn’t need the money in the trust fund for college, he used it to help with a down payment on his first house, as did his brother.

“I loved football even though it was rough on my family,” David said. “It more or less killed my dad, it broke my neck, and my brother got his knees blown out because of it. But it’s a game that teaches you a lot about life. I’d want my son to play it.”

Darren, 32, lives with his wife and their three children in Temecula, and works as a paramedic in Downey.

He grew up wanting to coach football as his father had, and by 1978, his senior year at Huntington Beach, Darren was already working with the freshman team at Ocean View High. He was able to manage playing and coaching because knee injuries already had practically ended his playing career.

“I was only a kicker. Knee surgeries had gotten the best of me, and besides that, I wasn’t very good before,” Darren said.

He coached at Ocean View and later Marina while attending college, first at Golden West and then finishing his degree at Cal State Long Beach.

John Robinson hired him as a graduate assistant at USC, and Darren stayed on as a graduate assistant and part-time coach four years, leaving the year before Ted Tollner after becoming embroiled in the tensions surrounding the program.

“I got in between Ted and (Athletic Director) Mike McGee,” Moon said. “I took Ted’s side and Ted lost.

“Coaching was definitely a goal,” said Darren, whose father-in-law, Jim Wagstaff, was an assistant with the San Diego Chargers from 1981-85 before retiring.

After his experience at USC, Darren left the profession in disappointment.

“It worked out for the best,” Darren said. “I went on to get a job I absolutely love.”

He and his wife, Geniel, have two daughters, Nicole, 6, and Ashlee, 5. Eight months ago, they had a son, the first grandson in the family, and named him Dallas.

“It was a given,” Darren said. “I was glad I had a son before my brother did (six months later). It still feels funny calling him Dallas. There is a lot of sentimental value to the name in our family. It kind of allows my Dad to live on.”

Lenore O’Hara, alone with eight young children, leaned on the support of Joe’s family, their church, St. Cecilia in Tustin, and those at Mater Dei who had known her husband.

“I had so many wonderful people who helped,” said Lenore, who worked as athletic department secretary at Mater Dei 10 years and has been a receptionist in the UC Irvine athletic department the past four. “The Mater Dei family, the principal, the teachers, the coaches, a lot of the parents of the students my husband coached and taught. My husband’s family, his brothers, Mike and Jim, and his sister, Cathy. Up to this day we’re still very close.”

Even the oldest of the O’Haras, Kevin, 33, a Newport Beach tax attorney, couldn’t fathom as a youngster the difficulties his mother had faced.

“Growing up, the older I get, the more I appreciate what she went through,” Kevin said. “Back then, it all happened so quick. She was the glue that held us together.”

Now the hard part is getting the growing O’Hara family together in one place at one time. There already are nine O’Hara grandchildren, with two more on the way.

“Anybody who knew my husband knew how much Joe loved kids,” Lenore said.

Kevin and his wife, Marta, daughter of longtime Mater Dei team physician Pablo Prietto, have four children--Martin, 6, Joaquin, 5, Marcela, 3, and Pilar, 1.

As have all the O’Hara children, Kevin graduated from Mater Dei. After the accident, Mater Dei established a scholarship fund that paid the high school tuition of all eight children.

Kevin went on to Rancho Santiago College and UC Santa Barbara before earning his law degree at Loyola Law School. He ran track and cross-country in high school and college, and still competes in marathons and local 5-kilometer and 10K races.

Mary, 32, a former bank manager, is married to Mark Drazba, a former Mater Dei quarterback. The couple began dating in high school and attended St. Mary’s College in Moraga, where Mark played sports and Mary, on a partial academic scholarship, took photos of the teams for the school’s sports publicity office. The couple, living in Pinole, Calif., have four children: Katy, 7, Matt 6, Monica, 4, and Sara, 2.

When Matt was only a day or two old, Lenore looked at him and smiled.

“You have your grandfather’s eyes,” she told the infant. “Something in his eyes reminded me of my husband’s eyes.”

Tim, 31, and his wife, Alyssa, are expecting their first child in January. An English teacher, journalism adviser and assistant football coach at Santa Margarita High School, Tim has followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a teacher and coach.

Tim was the starting quarterback at Mater Dei his senior year, and led Saddleback College to two league titles and a Mission Bowl berth in 1980, when the team finished second in the state. He graduated from Cal State Fullerton, but did not play football for the Titans.

Old enough now to appreciate the compassion people showed for his family, Tim has in a way returned it. When a friend died in a construction accident, Tim and other friends organized a golf tournament to help his friend’s widow and two small children.

“People come up to us and say, ‘It’s so neat what you’re doing,’ ” he said. “But it’s so small compared to what people did for us.”

Teresa, 30, lives in Long Beach with her husband, Long Beach City College baseball Coach Lindsay Meggs, and their 1 1/2-year-old son, Joey, who is named for his grandfather. They are expecting their second child in March.

Teresa works as a nurse in Hawaiian Gardens and as an emergency medical technician instructor in Long Beach.

A mother, she looks at her mother with even more admiration.

“When I tell people everything that happened, and what everyone in my family is doing now, they can’t believe it,” Teresa said. “Everybody says, ‘You must have a great mom’ and I say, ‘I do.’

“I was 10 and in the fourth grade when my dad died. I probably should have been the banker in the family, because I was always worried about money. We didn’t have dad anymore, and mom wasn’t working at first. I worried about how we would get money, but we always had enough. We didn’t have everything everybody else had, but we always made it.”

Barbara, 28, a cheerleader in high school like her sister Mary, is a preschool teacher in Costa Mesa, and lives at home with her mother in Tustin. Like many of her brothers and sisters, she chose to go to a Catholic college, graduating from Loyola Marymount.

Katy, 26, has been living in England the past 2 1/2 years with her husband, Air Force Capt. Alan Metzler. A UCLA political science graduate, Katy met Alan in Washington, D.C., where both were doing internships on Capitol Hill.

As a high school student, she was a member of Mater Dei’s first girls’ soccer team, and she and her husband play on town teams in the village of Woodstock. This coming Thanksgiving, Lenore and Teresa will travel to England to visit.

The O’Hara home in Tustin still isn’t empty, with Joe, 24, and Carol living with Barbara and their mother.

Last summer, Joe and Carol visited Katy and Alan in England before backpacking around Europe. The O’Hara house was about as quiet as it has been in more than 30 years.

Joe, who graduated from the University of San Diego with a degree in accounting and is working for a branch of the Ford Motor Co. in the City of Commerce, played football and baseball at Mater Dei. He was a quarterback for a time, but was later switched to linebacker, where he thrived.

“When they used to go out to flip the coin, Joe would always say he wanted to cheat and say he had lost the toss because he wanted to play defense first,” Lenore said. “He said after the first time you hit someone, all the nervousness was gone.”

Carol, too young to remember her father, is working as a temporary and living at home while looking for a job. Her trip last year sharpened her yearning to travel, and she is considering a career as a a flight attendant.

Like the other families, the O’Haras are touched by friends and strangers who have remembered their father as the anniversary of his death approached.

“It’s nice that people remember,” Teresa said. “Of course, we remember every day of every year.”

Molly Hannah, who grew up in San Luis Obispo, returned home with her 3 1/2-year-old son, Mark, after the accident to be close to her family.

She later remarried, but has since divorced.

Mark, now 23, graduated from Pacific Beach High School and is living in San Luis Obispo, working in the family dry-cleaning business.

He is an avid Raider fan, and the proud cousin of John Hannah, the former New England Patriot All-Pro guard who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame last summer. Another cousin, Charley Hannah, was an offensive lineman with the Raiders from 1983-88.

Mark’s father, Bill Hannah, like so many of the Hannahs, played football at Alabama and was an All-Southeastern Conference guard in 1959. After the plane crash, a $200 check from Bryant was among the first contributions to the trust fund.

Mark never became a football player. At 14, a malignant tumor was discovered in his right kidney. He underwent 1 1/2 years of treatments, including chemotherapy and radiation.

What insurance didn’t cover, the trust fund did.

The cancer did not spread, and he is healthy now.

“I almost lost Mark nine years ago, with cancer,” Molly said. “I really feel that at different times in my life, I’ve had to rise to the occasion, as my husband liked to say. But people who care, and my faith in God and my son’s faith have given me strength.”

She still remembers the Mercy Bowl, but with a touch of fondness, not grief.

“I guess you might say I think of all the people I met through it, and all the people whose lives my husband touched,” Molly said. “Life goes on. We’ll always be grateful for what people did. I told you about the cancer; there are always people who care.

“There will always be a part of my heart that remembers these fine people. You go on with your life. Dorothy and I were talking. It happened to us, but sometimes it seems like another world, another life.”

Molly lives in Los Osos, not far from San Luis Obispo, and like her son, she works in the family dry-cleaning business. A couple of blocks from the business is where Bill Hannah is buried.

“They were headed for San Luis Obispo,” Molly said, recalling the coaches’ scouting mission. “The irony is that Bill is buried here. They were headed for here, and this is where he ended up.

“I remember, the next day after they found the coaches, a priest asked me if I knew where the crash took place, that the area was called El Camino Cielo. He asked me, ‘Do you know what that means? That means Highway to Heaven.’ ”