As word spread that Daniel Ruzich was among the passengers on USAir Flight 427, the football coaches at Brother Rice High School, where Ruzich had played more than a decade before, gathered together the new crop of young players.
The coaches spoke of Ruzich in the warmest terms, describing him as a caring friend and a gifted athlete, a man who led a storybook life of sorts: A standout football player in college, he earned a tryout with the Bears, married his high school sweetheart and became a father.
Then the coaches found a cautionary lesson in Ruzich’s death.
“We told them that anything can happen and that’s why we all have to live life to the fullest,” said Mike Ryan, a former teammate and now athletic director of the Southwest Side school.
Just as coaches and players remembered Ruzich, and observed a moment of silence before Saturday’s football game, the memories of the other 131 passengers on USAir Flight 427 drew together family members and friends, co-workers and neighbors.
They gathered in their homes, in offices and lunch rooms, across the back-yard fence and through corporate electronic mail systems, all to reminisce about the people who died Thursday evening in a wooded area outside Pittsburgh.
Some, like the football coaches and players at Brother Rice, drew lessons from the unexpected deaths. Others simply found solace in the memories-most quite ordinary but all of them fond-that defined the lives of the passengers who died on Flight 427.
Janine Katonah of Oak Park remembered that her husband, Rev. Joel Thompson, missed his family every time he traveled for business and longed to end that part of his life. Bernie Carr, whose wife, Mary Havlin, worked for the University of Chicago in a New York office, recalled her love of the neighborhood in the Bronx where she grew up.
Co-workers chuckled over Joseph Duffy’s wardrobe of jerseys from his favorite New York teams-a breach of Chicago etiquette. Volleyball teammates of Susan Schwenkler said the Lisle woman had a passion for the sport. Family and friends said Michael C. Williams, a graduate student at Northern Illinois University, was excited about a job interview, while Marla Renee Dickerson, also an NIU graduate student, wanted to be a lawyer.
Many of the victims of Flight 427 boarded the aircraft as a part of their business. Others were bound for reunions with their families. Either way, what is remembered seemed to have little to do with why they were traveling.
A steel salesman, Ruzich was on a quick business trip to Pittsburgh and planned to return home to Orland Park on Friday for a weekend of family, friends and football.
All were passions for Ruzich, 33, who grew up in Hometown, where he lived in a tight orbit around his parents and nine brothers and sisters. In the small southwest suburb, everyone knew the family.
More Top Picks Best Meditation Apps For Stress
“All you had to do was mention their name,” Ryan said. “Their parents were really looked up to because of their kids.”
Daniel X. Kafcas of Buffalo Grove was well-liked too. When his friends gathered for lunch Friday, they found themselves swapping stories of a man who was warmhearted and willing to take a stand.
As a board member of Arlington Heights-based Township High School District 214, Kafcas spearheaded a move to add Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as school holidays, even though Kafcas and most students in the district were not Jewish, said Supt. Jack Ashenfelter.
“Danny was one of the most fully human beings I have ever known,” Ashenfelter said. “He truly, truly understood people and tried to get us to understand each other.”
Kafcas, 62, spent years volunteering as a board member for various local school districts. In addition, as a retired United Airlines executive who ran his own consulting firm, he was in demand across the country as a business consultant.
Joan Van Bortel, 30, loved many things: skiing, hiking and biking, and sharing tomatoes from her garden with her Lisle neighbors or memories of growing up with five older brothers on an Iowa farm.
“She was my best friend,” said her husband, Brett Van Bortel. “I’m going to miss her so much.”
Joan Van Bortel, a marketing manager for Akzo Nobel Chemicals Inc. in Chicago had planned to take a Friday morning flight to Pittsburgh for a one-day business trip. But that changed when she had to get there for a last-minute dinner Thursday, her husband said.
Ani Ardhaldjian was flying to Corning, N.Y., apparently to meet her husband, Raffy, a consultant for Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc. in Chicago. His business took him to New York every week or so. Their daughter, Narod, was on Ani Ardhaldjian’s lap.
Robert M. Marciniak was a rabid sports fan-the kind of guy who would rather fly across the country than miss a home game of his beloved Penn State football team. A coordinator for Bulkmatic Transport Co. of Griffith, Ind., Marciniak, 23, had graduated from Penn State with a business degree in January.
This weekend, Penn State was playing Southern Cal. When he boarded Flight 427 on Thursday, Marciniak did so with the hope of rooting with his friends, as well as visiting with his family, said his father, Robert D. Marciniak.
“He’d never expressed any fear of flying, but then again he didn’t fly very often,” said the elder Marciniak.
The word of the younger Marciniak’s death disturbed many people at Bulkmatic.
“Some people took it really hard,” said David Dawes, 33, a central dispatch manager. “My partner wanted to go home.”