While driving through Parkersburg a couple of times within the last year, I felt knee-jerk jealousy.

As a Cedar Rapids citizen, it struck me how much easier and sooner you can rebuild from a savage tornado than a vicious flood. Maybe we’d have been better off with a tornado instead of the flood last June, I would think.


Then reason would seep in and I’d remember six people died in that EF5 twister. A town of 1,900 couldn’t be blamed for getting jittery every time the sky clouds up or the wind starts to whip.

Sunday night, I was watching severe-weather coverage on television when Parkersburg was included in one of the warning areas.

No, not there. Don’t go there again ...

When Casey Wiegmann and then Jared DeVries and then Aaron Kampman played football with the technique, purpose and passion they did at the University of Iowa, you knew it was more than coincidence they came from the same small high school.

Maybe it wasn’t some extreme defiance of odds that those three and Northern Iowa graduate Brad Meester gave A-P four players in the NFL at the same time. They got the kind of nurturing and coaching and teaching you’d wish every young person could get. They were tutored by Ed Thomas.

“To me, coaching is teaching,” Thomas said.

“I decided to teach leadership because I think it’s something that isn’t present in kids as often as it used to be. We have to show kids how to be leaders today.”

“He taught me as much about being a gentleman as he did about football,” DeVries said a few years ago.

Those A-P products who wore the Hawkeye colors have always been gentlemen. They haven’t lived for themselves.

Kampman has traveled to India and Kenya within the last two years on humanitarian-aid trips. Having values like that originates from the way he was raised, of course. But his sense of being part of something much bigger than himself surely was pushed along by Thomas.

When that tornado smashed their town and high school, all those NFLers from A-P got back there to help as soon as they could. So did so many others who once played at the school. They were Falcons before they were anything else, Falcons forever ...

After the horror of that tornado, the focal point of the town was the football field.

Ed Thomas Field. “The Sacred Acre.” As much as anywhere in town over the years, it’s the place that has given Parkersburg its sense of community.

Falcon football has been about winning, absolutely. But it’s been about how the things that make people true winners. Wow, was that ever evidenced after the tornado, when the team and its town fought back like state champions.

“You get beat up, battered,” Thomas told the New York Times last fall, “but you get back off the ground.”

Thomas, who lost his home in that tornado, spent the last year of his life helping kids and an entire town get back off the ground. He succeeded marvelously.

Then a madman with a gun shot Ed Thomas dead Wednesday morning in a weight room, in front of several A-P students.

It was a coldblooded reminder there are much worse things than tornadoes in this world.

How Parkersburg gets back off the ground from this isn’t imaginable right now. Maybe the best way is if the town keeps listening to these 2005 words from its football coach:

“I talk about leaders setting an example, the responsibility of being a leader, and the idea of being a servant and a giver. I talk about standing up to do what is right when nobody else will, and letting other players know when they’re doing something wrong. I also explain the importance of being a role model — that leaders have to set the tone for other players to follow.”

The last thing Thomas did in his life was help kids get stronger. It was poetic justice. That was the only kind of justice on this stomach-turning day.


source : http://www.gazetteonline.com