SLO LIFE Feb/Mar 2018

| LEGACY
NORTH
STAR
This academic school year marks the end of an era at
Cuesta College as GIL STORK, an institution within the
institution, after 51 years, calls it a career.
BY TOM FRANCISKOVICH
When Gil Stork woke up on the runway
he rubbed his tongue across his teeth to
discover some of them were broken. His
first thought was, “My mom is going to
kill me!” She had always warned him
that he would get his teeth knocked out
playing football. Turned out she was
right, in a way. With his legs and back
throbbing in pain, consciousness slowly returning, he could begin to see
what appeared to be flames flickering through the dense fog. The next thing
he remembers was someone running up, standing over him and shouting,
“There’s another one over here!”
Forever tied to San Luis Obispo’s most tragic event, the Cal Poly Football
team airplane crash of October 29, 1960, it took Stork many years to reconcile
the events of that night, just outside of Toledo, Ohio, which claimed the lives
of 22 of the 48 aboard. Why did they over-pack the plane? Why did they
attempt a takeoff in that soupy fog? What caused the left engine to fail? Why
did I switch seats? Why did I survive? It should have been me.
Guilt, confusion, and anger followed—years of processing. Constantly
replaying the events of that night, bargaining in prayer with a higher power
for a somehow different result. The question, “Why am I here, but he’s not?”
played in an endless loop, over and over again in the mind of the young
offensive lineman.
Rising out of mourning is a gradual process, and sometimes it never
happens. Once in a while a good day comes along, sometimes followed by
another. When a string of them link up into a long chain, it can be said
that someone has finally “turned the corner.” For Stork, the up and down
struggle to return to normal took hold six years later when his first child
was born. Going through that experience—“witnessing the miracle of
life”—shifted his perspective in an instant and changed his thinking from
questioning why the crash had happened to pondering the significance
of it. As he settled in with his wife and their baby, a new question arose: >>
44 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | FEB/MAR 2018