FINNEYTOWN, Ohio (AP) — The concrete bench in a small northern Cincinnati suburb depicts a guitar, with the message “My Generation” just below it.
In the background are plaques with the faces of three teenagers, Jackie Eckerle, Karen Morrison and Stephan Preston, frozen in time 40 years ago. Bricks in the plaza around the bench carry eight other names.
All 11 were killed in a frantic stampede of people trying to get into the British rock band The Who’s concert on Dec. 3, 1979, at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum. The city of Finneytown suffered disproportionately, and its three losses included the two youngest victims, 15-year-olds Eckerle and Morrison. Their schoolmates say well over 100 other people from Finneytown were there.
“Everyone’s connected to it, everywhere you go around here,” said Fred Wittenbaum, who was a freshman at Finneytown High School then but did not attend the concert. “Either they went to the concert, or they had a friend or a family member who was there.”
Since then, the community of around 12,000 people, many living in ranch-style homes built years before the concert, has been inextricably linked with The Who, which was already well on the way to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with such hits as “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Can’t Explain,” and “My Generation,” an anthem of rebellious youth.
Most of the blame afterward focused on the first-come, first-served arrangement for seating that saw thousands of fans line up for hours ready to charge toward the coveted floor spots, and on confusion over and lack of preparation for when the doors were opening. Besides those trampled in the stampede, some two dozen other fans were injured.
Frontman Roger Daltrey and guitarist Pete Townshend, the last survivors of the original band, say they have struggled emotionally over the years with the concert carnage, which they didn’t know about until their show was ending.
“Because there’s always a certain amount, ‘If I hadn’t been doing this, it wouldn’t have happened,’ you know,” Daltrey said during an unpublicized visit last year to the Finneytown memorial site. “That’s just human nature. That’s what we carry with us.”
“It took a long time for us to get a sense that this was not just about the 11 kids, it was about the community,” Townshend told The Associated Press in a recent interview in New York.
The sad stories and traumatic memories among Finneytown alums evolved three decades later into a plan to memorialize their friends.
John Hutchins was playing an acoustic set at a nearby venue in December 2009 and dedicated songs such as The Who’s “Love Ain’t For Keeping” to those who died at the concert. Hutchins was at The Who concert; he skipped school that day, got to the coliseum nearly seven hours early to be among the first in line, and got close enough to the stage to see The Who’s song list.
Fellow Finneytown High alum Steve Bentz, who wasn’t at the concert, approached Hutchins after his performance with a thought, that “we should do something.” The thought soon grew into the memorial bench.
They joined with Wittenbaum and Walt Medlock — who remembers being pressed tightly against Preston before making the possibly life-saving decision to work his way out of the crowd — to create the P.E.M. scholarship fund, using the last-name initials of their three schoolmates.
“We wanted to take what was a terrible tragedy and try and turn it into something that could be looked at as good,” Wittenbaum explained. “We wanted to pay it forward.”
Launched in 2010, the scholarships reward three Finneytown students with $5,000 each for the study of music or any other arts. There have awarded 27 so far.
Auctions and raffles at an annual December show featuring music by alumni at the school’s performing arts center help pay for the scholarships. The Who became involved in the third year, making an exclusive DVD for showing at that year’s benefit with comments from the band about the tragedy and new concert footage.
More aid from the band followed. Last year, Wittenbaum drove Daltrey from a private airstrip near Dayton to view the Finneytown memorials that include artwork, personal items and photos of the three in a Who-donated display case. Daltrey also met with relatives of those killed and with fans who attended the concert.
“It’s been a really cathartic process for everybody,” Wittenbaum said.
Daltrey-autographed books, albums, guitars and other items have been sold online, including on the band’s official site, to add to the fund. The P.E.M. leaders’ next goal is to see Daltrey and Townshend perform in Cincinnati for the first time since the deadly concert. In the AP interview, Townshend said the band plans to return to Cincinnati.
An announcement is expected Tuesday night, after a 40th anniversary documentary featuring interviews with Daltrey and Townshend airs on WCPO-TV in Cincinnati.
Alleson Arnold, 18, among the latest scholarship winners, moved to Finneytown several years ago and soon learned about the pain the community has felt. She said she is “very grateful” for the fund that will help her study fashion and design.
“It’s heartbreaking to know that I’m the same age as many of them,” she said. “I get to do the things that I want to be doing, but all that was taken away from them.”
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Associated Press writer John Carucci contributed from New York.
AP Was There: Coverage of The Who concert where 11 died
CINCINNATI (AP) — EDITOR’S NOTE — On Dec. 3, 1979, an eagerly awaited concert by the British rock band The Who was transformed by tragedy, as 11 people were killed in a mad scramble by thousands of fans trying to get into Cincinnati’s riverfront coliseum. Three of those killed had attended the same high school in a small suburban city that became forever tied to the group that’s now in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the deadly concert, The AP is republishing its report from Cincinnati on that night.
Dec. 3, 1979
Stampede at concert kills 11
By BILL VALE
Panicked fans stampeded their way into a rock concert by The Who on Monday night, and Fire Chief Burt Lugananni said at least 11 people were killed in the crush.
At least eight persons suffered serious injuries, officials said, and many other sustained minor injuries. The injured were taken to five hospitals.
Ray Schwertman, a 49-year-old usher, said the crowed surged through the door to the 17,000-seat Riverfront Coliseum just before the gates were to open at 7 p.m.
“First, they threw a bottle through a window in the door. Then they pushed through the hole, making it bigger. Three of four of us tried to hold them back, but it was no use …
“We couldn’t hold them back … They carried in one boy and laid him on a table and he died. Others were laying out on the plaza,” said Schwertman.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Lugananni said. “I can’t even tell you what killed them.”
Officials listed the dead — most of them said to be of high school or college age — as seven males and four females. Their identities were not released Monday night.
Dr. Alex Trott, emergency room supervisor at Cincinnati General Hospital, said the victims suffered multiple bruises, and “there was some evidence of footprint-like injuries.”
The concert, which was sold out, went on as scheduled after the victims were taken away. Many concertgoers were apparently unaware of the deaths and injuries, and they were not mentioned from the stage.
Concertgoer Michael Jordan, 17, said: “I was in the middle. It was crazy. You had to fight to save your life.”
Fifteen-year-old Suzanne Sudrack said: “You could see people getting hurt. People were flailing elbows and smashing noses. You could see people going down”
A paramedic, who asked not to be identified, said: “We have all sorts of life saving devices. We have drugs. We have highly trained people, and none of it did a bit of good. They just died. We couldn’t save a one of them.”
Jeff Chaney, an Army veteran and a student at Miami (Ohio) University, said he did mouth-to-mouth, resuscitation and tried to save three of the victims, failing “because people just didn’t seem to care.”
He said one woman was alive and clutching his leg as he tried to unsort the pile of people but died before she could be freed. The concertgoers, he said, “could see the people all piled up and they still tried to climb over them just to get up front.”
Cincinnati Public Safety director Richard Castellini said the victims were apparently trampled or suffocated. He said the rush on the door occurred because some seats for the concert were reserved while others were available on a first-come, first-served basis. He said he would seek an ordinance to require that only reserved seats be sold to such concerts in the future.
Mayor J. Kenneth Blackwell, who was sworn into his first term Saturday, said many concertgoers stood in line for up to seven hours, and “when they saw the doors open, everybody made a mad rush — they lost all sense of rationality.”
He added: ”There were thousands of youngsters here, some drinking beer, some smoking marijuana and others just wanting to get in out of the cold.”
Blackwell said the concert went on as scheduled because officials feared a riot might break out if it were called off.
The coliseum where the incident occurred is the site of most rock concerts in Cincinnati.
The Who, among the most enduring of the British rock groups, performed the soundtrack for the recently released film, Quadrophenia. The group wrote the rock opera Tommy, which also became a movie.