CENTERBURG – Fifty years later, Richard Dardinger is still remembered for his smile and enthusiasm. He was a solid man and lived up to the “Rock” nickname he earned at Centerburg High School.
Dardinger was one of 75 killed in a plane crash that carried the Marshall football team, coaches, administrators and fans as it approached Huntington Airport on the night of Nov. 4, 1970. The team was returning from a game at East Carolina.
“He had an enthusiasm for everything,” Richard’s twin brother Bob Dardinger said. “He was a lot more of an extrovert than I was. I was more of the introvert. He was one of those people that made friends easy and was enthusiastic about everything that he did.”
Richard Dardinger was a senior starting center for the Thundering Herd in 1970. He was recruited to Marshall with Bob by former Mount Vernon High School football coach Chuck Stobart, who was an assistant coach at Marshall in 1965. Stobart moved on by the time the Dardinger’s graduated from Centerburg in 1966.
Richard was a solidly built lineman, listed at 5-foot-11, 215 pounds in the 1970 media guide. He was aptly nicknamed Rock in high school after Rock Hudson.
“I guess he was destined to be an offensive lineman because he had this intensity about him, but he wasn’t mean,” John Lambert, who attended Centerburg with the Dardingers, said. “If he had been mean, we would have all stayed home.”
Richard had worked his way up to starting center by the fall of 1970, taking a redshirt year as a sophomore. An injured leg almost kept him home.
Bob, who was a running back and a linebacker during his career, decided not to play in 1970. He was trying to start up his career as a teacher.
The two Dardingers were living with their wives in the same student housing.
“You get a little bit of survivor’s remorse,” Bob said. “Why was he on the plane and I wasn’t? For a while, it’s pretty much foremost in your mind all the time. Over time, that starts to recede. You think back on what could have been different.
“He was supposed to be taking the national teacher’s exam at that time. But it conflicted with the ballgame, so he decided he would wait a year to teach. You wonder, 'What if he had made a different decision?'”
Bob was working at a Sears store when he heard the news.
“Somebody had heard it on the radio and came and told me about it,” he recalled. “Then I called home and my wife confirmed it. So, I left and went home.”
Lambert was playing basketball at Defiance College and was driving home from a scrimmage at Ohio Wesleyan when his brother broke the news. He thought the two had graduated by that point
“I just about wrecked the car,” Lambert said. “As soon as I got home, I found out that that was true— they had redshirted him.”
Bob brought Richard’s body back to Centerburg for the funeral and didn’t return to Marshall until after Christmas.
“The campus really wasn’t the same and it wasn’t for the rest of that year,” Bob said.
He ended up sticking around to get his master’s degree before returning to central Ohio as a teacher. He taught and coached several sports, including football, at Johnstown for 29 years.
“Over time, when you’re doing what you’re doing, you think we would have been doing pretty much the same thing,” Bob said. “I wonder how that would have worked, where he would have been, whether we would have been coaching rivals like the Harbaughs or something.
“By now, 50 years later, a lot of that stuff is distant memory. You still think about it from time to time.”
