STEVENS POINT, Wis. — After Harry Bangsberg, the then-president of Bemidji State College and namesake for the school’s Bangsberg Hall, was killed in a plane crash in Vietnam 50 years ago, the Bangsberg family rarely talked about it.

“It was always way on the back burner,” said Andy Bangsberg, the youngest Bangsberg child, who was three when his father’s plane went down.

“In two weeks, he would have been home,” Raasch estimated. In a tape the family sent to Harry, Andy Bangsberg tells his father how much he misses him. A memorial last month at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, then, gave the Bangsbergs an opportunity to talk about their dad and mingle with people who knew him or whose fathers had also died in the crash.

Bangsberg and a selection of other higher education leaders were part of a little-known State Department trip to advise and reform the Republic of Vietnam’s higher education system. Their plane was on its way from Saigon to Hue when it crashed into a mountainside on March 23, 1967.

The group’s leader was James Albertson, the Stevens Point president at the time who also died in the crash. The anniversary of his death prompted UW staff there to host the memorial and invite others who lost loved ones.

Some of the victims’ children reached out to one another on Facebook months ago. C.L. Fornari and Lynne Conroy had known each other for years — they are both master gardeners in Cape Cod — but didn’t realize their fathers had died in the same crash. Fornari is one of Albertson’s children and Conroy is the daughter of Vincent Conroy, who directed Harvard’s center of field studies.

“I was the third person they found,” said Sara Raasch, formerly Sara Bangsberg, Harry’s third child and only daughter. As the group grew, Raasch said, they used public records to find more children. “And then we pretty much found everybody.”

Raasch said she visited Fornari and Conroy last summer after messaging back and forth on Facebook, and plans to return this summer with Wendy Wall, who’s father was Melvin Wall, an agriculture professor at University of Wisconsin – River Falls.

“It was just this incredible bond to meet these two women whose fathers were with my father,” Raasch said. “It was just wonderful, and we just discussed how horrible it was growing up and we never talked about it. We just buried this really really deeply painful event, and we just — as families, we just didn’t talk about it.”

The bittersweet reunion last month also prompted the Bangsberg children to open one of their father’s briefcases, which had sat virtually untouched in a garage since his death.

In it, they found Vietnamese hats; letters from Lyndon Johnson, Walter Mondale, Bemidji State College staff, and Bangsberg’s wife; and tapes Bangsberg and his family had sent back and forth from Bemidji to Vietnam.

In the tapes, Raasch said, Bangsberg says he’s glad that he was billeted in the fifth floor of a hotel because he might be safer if the Viet Cong attack it. He puts the recorder to the window so his family can hear bombs exploding in the distance, and jokes that Sara should send some snow from Bemidji.

Bemidji State University staff said they had no plans for a similar 50th anniversary memorial, but said Bangsberg’s dedication and service to students are enshrined in the building that bears his name. BSU President Faith Hensrud also sent her regards to Stevens Point staff and thanked them for including Bangsberg in their memorial.

“As we look ahead to BSU’s 100th anniversary in 2019, presidents who served throughout our history will undoubtedly be remembered and honored as part of that observance,” Scott Faust, the school’s director of communications and marketing, wrote.

Others on the team that went to Vietnam were: A. Donald Beattie, School of Business and Economics dean, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; Howard Johnshoy, dean, Academic Affairs, Gustavus Adolphus College; Arthur Pickett, Honors Programs director, University of Illinois at Chicago; and Robert LaFollette, Higher Education Adviser, U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Operations Mission to Vietnam.