FINNEYTOWN, Ohio — 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 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 a 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 and fellow Finneytown High alum Steve Bentz 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.
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.
