Thirty years is a long time to live in the shadow of a tragedy.
Those who survived the collapse of the Hyatt skywalks or who treated victims or lost a loved one have managed in their own ways to move on from that night.
But for many, it has not been easy.
Some escaped death, only to live a life of physical or emotional pain that challenged their spirits and altered the course of their lives.
Some who were heroes wished deeply that they had never had the chance to be one.
Others chose not to talk about the event for years or to this day flinch at loud noises or glance warily upward when entering some buildings.
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Lloyd Henson and his sister Dorey DePuy lost their father and stepmother in the skywalkscollapse at the Hyatt Regency on July 17, 1981 in Kansas City, Missouri.(Jim Barcus/Kansas City Star/MCT) |
In fact, a whole community has not been quite the same since that summer night in 1981.
“It’s taken a toll,” said Charley Fisher, former Kansas City fire chief who was deputy chief on the night of the Hyatt disaster. “Thousands of peoples’ lives were changed forever.”
Every one of those people has a different story to tell about that night and the long aftermath.
Ed Bailey is a Hyatt survivor whose brush with death forever taught him that life is fleeting. Bailey and his date, Shelley McQueeny, were watching the dancers that night when the skywalks came crashing down on top of them.
Had they been standing a foot away they might have been killed instantly. Bailey has always felt he got a new lease on life that night. Ever since, he has not taken it for granted.
“You are here one minute and gone the next,” Bailey said. “You are not promised tomorrow.”
He has never dwelled on that night but hasn’t hidden his feelings, either.
“I’ve always been able to talk about it,” he said.
Some people, however, dealt with emotional scars of that evening by not talking about it at all. For years, even with others who were there that night.
John and Marie Driscoll were at the Hyatt with three other couples. None of them was injured, but they witnessed the skywalks fall to the floor, crushing dozens of people.
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Cover of “The Last Dance: The Skywalks Disaster and a City Changed.” |
Over the years, the couples would socialize frequently, but John Driscoll said the topic of the Hyatt never came up in conversation. Maybe it was just too painful.
“I could not talk about it myself for a long time,” said Driscoll, retired from General Motors. “Sometimes I would think about it at work, and tears would come to my eyes. I thought about all those people, dressed up, happy and having a good time. It’s something I will never forget, and it’s like it was yesterday.”
Firefighters, police, emergency medical workers, construction crews and others who helped rescue victims that night were widely commended ― none more so, perhaps, than Joseph Waeckerle.
An emergency medical doctor, Waeckerle worked all night at the Hyatt and supervised the triage. He treated and consoled patients and made tough choices on who should be treated and who was beyond help.
Waeckerle got a lot of recognition, appeared in national newsmagazines and on programs such as the “Today” show.
But while finding himself portrayed as a hero, Waeckerle wished he had never been put into that position.
“That was probably harder for me to deal with than the event itself,” Waeckerle said. “All those people had to die for me to be recognized.”
Of all the survivors of the Hyatt collapse, Mark Williams had perhaps the most harrowing experience.
Williams, 34 at the time, was trapped under the bottom skywalk, his legs spread in the splits and pulled out of their hip sockets. First he was almost crushed to death. Then, water from a broken pipe edged up just beneath his mouth before receding. Finally, rescuers almost pierced him with a jackhammer.
Williams was the last person pulled alive from under the skywalks, 9.5 hours after the collapse.
He said he always thought he would live through the experience. He has kept the same sturdy outlook over the past 30 years, despite his injuries, which left him without the use of his left foot and only partial use of his right foot.
“It changed me for the better,” Williams said. “I found out more of what I was made of and maybe became not so self-centered. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Most people are never tested, so they never find out what they can be.”
Among victims of the Hyatt tragedy are relatives of those who died. Thousands of people lost mothers, fathers, siblings, children and other loved ones in the skywalks collapse.
The Hyatt tragedy dealt some families a blow from which they never fully recovered.
“Quite honestly, it destroyed my life,” said Peggy Olson, who was an adult when she lost her father, Gerald Coffey, and 11-year-old sister, Pamela Coffey, in the skywalks collapse. “It actually messed up our whole family.”
Olson said that until a couple of years ago she could not even talk about their deaths without getting very emotional. Her mother still can’t bear talking about it, Olson said.
“What I tell people all the time is that I think it’s harder when you have someone die suddenly than if they were sick for a while,” Olson said. “If they were sick, you at least had time to make amends, to talk about issues and resolve things.”
Olson struggled not only with grief but anger, which built to a point that on the 25th anniversary of the collapse she wrote emails to architects and engineers responsible for the skywalk design. She asked how they could live with themselves all these years. She never heard back.
If there was one person thrilled that the Hyatt started tea dances featuring big band music, Tom Henson was the guy.
“His only passion in life was big band music,” said his daughter, Dorey DePuy. “He had 300 or 400 albums ― Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, the Ink Spots.”
Saturday morning was always Tommy Dorsey and pancakes at the Henson household, DePuy said. Henson was a very quiet man and had only one real friend, but the big band tunes brought him to life, she said.
DePuy grew up in a family of five children, which her father raised by himself after a divorce. He married again. Henson and his second wife, Romelia Henson, were at the tea dance when the skywalks fell. They were both killed. Every bone in Tom Henson’s body was broken, the family learned. The Independence couple had one child of their own, a son, Joshua, 2.5 years old. DePuy was 21 at the time.
DePuy thought her dad’s death was both tragic and ironic in that he died while enjoying big band music ― “doing what I only knew him to do.” He was 46 when he died; his wife, 29.
When DePuy was asked to identify his body that night from a Polaroid photograph, she was stunned to see that his face was swollen but not bloody.
“He was very peaceful-looking,” DePuy recalled. “I’ve never seen him look so peaceful.”
In the 30 years since his death, DePuy has been unable to escape the memory of how her dad and stepmother died. She works as a surgical instrument technician at Children’s Mercy Hospital just up the street from the Hyatt and previously worked for 15 years at Waddell & Reed down the street in the other direction.
Today, DePuy passes the Hyatt every day in a shuttle bus to work at Children’s Mercy. Somehow, time has made the presence of the building less disconcerting. She thinks less about her dad’s and stepmother’s deaths and more about their lives.
“After these 30 years, I remember fondly the way they were,” DePuy said. “It’s bittersweet.”
By Kevin Murphy, McClatchy Newspapers
(McClatchy-Tribune Information Services)
