Sadness

Sometimes the things going on around us are fairly easy to understand.

At other times, that's simply not the case.

Our prayers today are with Larry and Julie Vogt of Dubuque, whose son, Grant, has joined the Lord in Heaven less than a week after the crash of a small airplane in Cassville, Wis.

I didn't know Grant, but I know his father, Larry.

My son, Mark, became a friend of Larry when both of them were freshmen at the University of Iowa in the late-1970s.

Larry was a great young guy, and he was always telling me he thought he was good enough to be a placekicker for Hayden Fry's Hawkeyes.

For all I know, he was.

But he never got the chance to prove it.

Mark and Larry have kept in touch over the years.

Unfortunately, they had to have a couple of telephone conversations in the past week that were very difficult.

Larry called Mark shortly after the plane in which Grant and another University of Dubuque student, Clory Alsip of Glendale Heights, Ill., crashed in Cassville.

Grant [photo courtesy of KCRGTV.com] died Tuesday of his injuries, and the funeral is Saturday. Cory Alsip remains in critical condition.

Grant's funeral is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Saturday at St. Joseph The Worker Catholic Church in Dubuque.

My son, Mark, is a pilot. He was supposed to be at Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City on Saturday morning, watching four fellow pilots from the 132nd Fighter Wing of the Des Moines Air Guard do a flyover prior to the Iowa-Iowa State football game.

Instead, he'll be in Dubuque, attending Grant Vogt's funeral.

Here's part of what assistant city editor M.D. Kittle of the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald wrote about Grant:

"Grant Vogt was a driven young man, confident but not cocky, his high school coach said. He was the kind of guy who could bring people together just by his example of hard work.

"The Dubuquer went through life with a smile on his face.

"'And whenever you talked about flying, he had a bigger smile. It was one of those things he loved to do,' said Tom Witry, Vogt's baseball coach at Hempstead High School.

"It was that love that claimed the young man's life.

"On Tuesday afternoon, Vogt, a junior in the University of Dubuque's aviation school, died at University of Wisconsin Hospitals in Madison. His death, at 3:40 p.m., came six days nearly to the hour of a UD plane crash in Cassville, Wis., that critically injured Vogt and fellow UD aviation school junior Cory Alsip, of Glendale Heights, Ill.

"The students were badly burned when the Socata Trinidad TB 20 Alsip was piloting crashed into a tree and exploded in a resort cabin near the Cassville airport. No one else was in the plane, and no one else was injured in the fiery crash.

"'A piece of me has died,' Witry said of Vogt's death.

Witry saw his former high school catcher the other night for the last time. Vogt never regained consciousness.

"'To see all of his friends who came in, how they felt about him, it was one of the worst things I'd ever done, and one of the most [up]lifting,' Witry said.

"Witry said Vogt has donated his organs so that others might have life, a final act of charity from a young man who has spent his life giving, even in death...."